Racism died before I was born.
I learned this one afternoon in 1988, clustered with 13 other fourth-graders around a wobbly card table in the dank classroom of St. Mark’s School. Our teacher had set out a series of fuzzy black-and-white photographs from Very Long Ago, which she tapped one at a time with her dagger-like fingernail, offering the briefest possible explanation for each.
First was a photo of black men on stools at a lunch counter. This, she stressed, was important. Then there were drinking fountains labeled COLOREDS ONLY, and restrooms labeled exclusively for WHITES; these things were obviously unfair.
I remember shivering quietly in my hand-me-down dress, trying to work out what a jim crow was (if it wasn’t a bird), and thinking fountains and toilets were rather stupid things to be dividing people about. Surely there was something more to it; something bigger? My 9-year-old mind lurched brazenly down the path of WHY… .
But it’s over now, the teacher announced. And just like that, history class was done, too; we were sent back to our desks, and got out our Weekly Reader to discuss current events.
Racism stayed in history class.
Racism, I would learn, meant buckled scars crisscrossing the back of a former slave. It was a newspaper ad, circa 1840: LIKELY NEGROES FOR SALE. It was the wretchedly detailed plan of a cargo hold, illustrating just how many Africans could be shipped to the New World at once. It was a pool, a restroom, an entrance FOR WHITES ONLY. It was a drawing of a woman pleading for her child not to be sold away. It was grown men shouting at another little girl, this one just trying to go to school.
Now, we in the fourth-grade class of 1988 had never seen any of these things. They were only pictures and stories, facts to memorize for a test; as a reality, they felt foreign and impossibly long ago. When our teacher told us racism was dead, we believed her.
Because history class never allowed that racism could still—did still—happen.
It never hinted that racism lived in our playground jokes.
It never explained why that one cousin couldn’t ever bring her husband by on holidays, or why, since her marriage, her name was mentioned only in whispers, seldom with affection and never with pride.
It never advised what to do when an elder described a biracial gymnast as an ape, lookin’ like she gone back to Africa.
As we progressed through school, history class became a growing collection of things obviously unfair, but also done and over. We never learned to see ourselves as a piece of a continuing story. We never considered the something more to racism, the something bigger, the frightening WHY; we never pondered racism’s knack for sticking to people in a way that they can’t see it, nor the fact that we ourselves might be carrying it unwittingly, passing it on.
Racism died before I was born.
So I learned; so I have been unlearning, steadily, stumblingly, ever since.
