First times I remember encountering racism

Obviously, the U.S. is dealing with some stuff openly right now for better and more chaotic related to police brutality and racism, not to mention the response of state and federal government to a world pandemic. If you don’t learn from history, you repeat it. It’s trite. It’s also true.

Racism isn’t something I thought about often–outside of a couple bits of family context that I won’t share in the blog (no offense, gentle readers, but there is a level of privacy that must be maintained in life). I think about it more now. I feel bad for making assumptions–I naively figured that with the election of a black president, we’d move past skin color as an issue, just as we moved past anti-Catholic bias after the election of Kennedy in 1960. Yeah, I know…pretty naive, especially when you look at the stats on arrests, incarceration, the works.

It got me doing some introspection. No one is born a bigot. When do people learn to behave that way? I don’t think it happens at school with little kids. I realized the first I can recall race coming up were events from 4th and 5th grade.

4th grade: As a kid, I was a nerd (yeah, no surprise). Unfortunately, being smart in American society gets you picked on. Kids do it if you are an easy target or sometimes out of jealousy. On the receiving end of it, it scars you, does long-term damage.

One of the kids who did that stuff in my class happened to be black. One day, he told our teacher I called him the N-word. As an 9-yr old, I’d never heard the word believe it or not…I was 9 for God’s sake. The teacher called me in, called my parents in and I wound up in tears. Thank goodness they believed me. At that point, they called in his parents and they backed their son–even as he changed his story. I’d love to say we became friends or something. That didn’t happen. There’s no real resolution here–it was a boy who cried wolf.

5th grade: In my 5th grade class, we had three black kids, two boys, one girl–one of the boys was the instigator from the year before. I don’t think anyone cared about skin color at that point, maybe they did. One day in the spring, all of the erases disappeared from the classroom in what seemed like a prank. The teacher asked for them to be returned after lunch by whoever took them. When we got back from recess, they still weren’t there.

The teacher went off, absolutely exploded. She walked over to one boy’s desk propped open and slammed it down, just missing his hand (his name was Jeff…he was sitting to my left). I do not recall a more angry teacher in grade school than she was at that time. So what did she do? She accused two boys and took them to the principal. Can you guess the two boys she accused?

Yup. To be fair to the whole story, both tended to be involved in trouble…c’mon, 10-yr old boys? They ALL get involved in shenanigans, laugh at farts or giggle when teachers say “Don’t play with your balls on the cement”. That’s FUNNY stuff even now. The one who accused me in 4th grade got in trouble semi-often in multiple classes. The other, not so much. Anyways…

You know, it didn’t dawn on me until reflecting on current society that race played a part in the teacher’s choice of who to accuse because we had other students in that room more than capable of stealing erasers or worse. In a class with 14-15 boys, you’ve got that number of suspects and you immediately haul out the two black kids to the principal. I didn’t see the racism in the moment–but I’d bet the three black kids in the class did, right then and there.

Here’s the other thing–I have no memory of the teacher apologizing…not to the class for her tantrum, not to the two boys for her presumptions. Eventually when the erasers were found (after the class missed recess for a week–no recess until we confessed.), things went back to normal. I wonder if either of those boys thought it was normal after that.

And the reality, it was a 6th grader who disliked the teacher the year before who came in, took the erasers, and glued them to the bottom of a table. The two guys were innocent, the same as everyone else in our class.

How many other times did that sort of assumption happen in that classroom? How many other times did that stuff happen to any of the three black kids with other teachers or parents of others at the school? I really have no idea–I was a kid paying attention to being a kid, to avoid getting bullied/keeping my head down to avoid attention.

Now I can also look back and wonder–when the 4th grade incident happened, what else happened in his life to make him want to lash out like that? What happened in his life that made him realize the power of accusation in terms of that word? He was 9 and most likely dealing with prejudice because of skin color and that made him want to lash out at someone he perceived as weaker. That’s a typical response–get bullied, you look for someone else further down the food chain you can pick on in turn.

How often does this still go on in school? How much of it is done by kids who don’t know better–and need to be taught better? How much is perpetrated by teachers with ingrained biases? At what point do we begin to become stereotypes–and how do we fight that?

I have no answers. I have questions–should I have known the 5th grade teacher was acting with prejudice? Should I have known the N-word when I was in 4th grade? How do we stop things like this from happening? Is it bad to have been so naive? Am I being naive today with things?