Top Five Most Racist Experiences

So a friend challenged me to write about racist stuff that has happened to me. I'll spare you the usual tales of schoolyard taunts and beatings, job interviews over before they started and privileged wealthy kids and their parents hinting to me that I only got into Yale because of affirmative action (despite a 1470 on my first and only SAT). No I'd like to select some choice, extra-special episodes to share with you, the discriminating Pink Reader. There's more of course. But here are a few top five highlights for you to enjoy. I'll keep them concise.

5. In my Brownie troop when I was 7, we had to pick a country and give a presentation to the other Brownies on the history and geography to get our geography badges. I picked Egypt and gave a detailed presentation with some dazzling show-and-tell. One of the Brownie leader mommies said afterwards "That was very good, dear. Except that...Egypt isn't in Africa." My mommy was there too. She let me handle it in order to make sure that the other mommy was thoroughly corrected and humiliated by a 7 year old. In her words "I didn't really need to get involved. You clearly had the situation under control."

I held my ground. Brownie white mommy stood by her guns. I demanded that a map be found. All my girl friends were in Brownies too so this was a critical moment in terms of maintaining my mystique and leadership position. Plus even then I knew it was racist and ignorant. I think you can imagine the ending here after we found a map...

4. I started reading when I was 2 1/2. When I was entering kindergarten, my parents wanted to make sure I learned reading too. At the school, almost completely white, the principal did not believe that I could read already and refused to make any accommodations for me despite the fact that no reading instruction did not begin until 1st grade.

My parents insisted on testing. So I remember sitting in the principal's office. Reading. Over and over. I took a diagnostic test. Twice. The principal gave me a book and would pick a random paragraph. And I would read it. She thought I'd memorized that book so she picked one off her shelf. I read that too.

So finally it was apparent that I could read. Well. The principal offered to skip me a grade. My parents, wisely, thought there were other important things about kindergarten to learn in terms of social skills and remaining with one's age group. (I'm glad they didn't skip me. I loved kindergarten, plus my friends from nursery school and I would have been separated.) So the compromise was that I would go each day down to the first grade room for part of the day to learn reading. That was fun, although sometimes it was lonely walking down the big empty hallway by myself. Plus some of the kids in first grade were kids that would try to beat me up during recess so sometimes it was a little tense.

3. I went with the Episcopal Arch-Diocese of Washington when I was 13 as a young ambassador or something like that to the Soviet Union. I was the youngest kid on the trip and one of 2 or 3 black kids. How clearly do I remember standing in front of a Renoir by a big picture window overlooking the square and listening to a girl who liked me but had struggled through the whole trip with the fact that I didn't fit what her parents had told her about "niggers". In front of that beautiful boat scene in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (then still Leningrad), she asked me why the palm of my hand was a different color from the top of my hand. I told her I didn't know.

I stood there stunned. She moved away. I waited in the gallery as the rest of the group meandered behind the guide. Alone, cooled by the whitewashed walls, I paused unjudged by the broad blond parquet floor and the impressionist paintings. The paintings didn't care what color the eyes that gazed upon them were, only that the mind behind those eyes appreciated their beauty.

2. Despite meeting me in the spring, talking to me at length, spending days with me, understanding my background, my interests, my travels, my accomplishments, my visible  affection for his son, my sincere attempt to get to know him, and his initiating a hug with me at the airport, my ex-boyfriend of two years explained to me just before Christmas 2005 that his father had told him afterwards, blustering in a car: "Just don't marry a nigger!"

1. And the number one most racist, de-humanizing, humiliating experience I have ever had was his acquiescence in that request from his parents. Of course there were a couple of other reasons why we broke up.

There always are in break-ups. But I understand with a little distance now how he let them poison our relationship. I can only imagine the types of things that they said about me. That he accepted as true. Ultimately I place the responsibility squarely on him. Disappointing from a man who said he loved me. I admit it made me sick and angry, but what is there to say or do except to feel sorry for such narrowness, darkness and cowardice of heart? What a sour, withered existence those poor people must lead within...I am glad I can't fully comprehend what it's like to see my fellow human beings that way.

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