Prompt: Reflect on the first time you became aware of race—either yours or someone else’s. What meaning did you make of it then? How has that meaning evolved?
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It's unpleasant and embarrassing for white people to acknowledge that we have racist family members. Too bad, though - we gotta clean house, gotta sit with that discomfort because this isn't about our feelings. Worse still, it sucks to admit that those racist attitudes rubbed off on us, influenced our thinking. Maybe at one point we were the racist family member. Hopefully that's no longer the case. It's not easy to unlearn the things you absorbed in childhood, even when those things struck you as wrong at the time. Repeated exposure normalizes even the nastiest ideas.
I have a vague memory of being maybe 6 years old at a relative's house, watching TV with the other kids. We were watching a sitcom with black characters - Fresh Prince? Family Matters? A few minutes in, an adult came in and demanded that we get that n-word show off their TV.
What a horrendous thing to say to anyone, let alone to children. If I had ever heard that word before, I doubt I knew what it meant. Just by the way it was used, I knew it was something awful. I couldn't understand what we did wrong. The show was funny, they weren't using bad words, but for some reason we got yelled at for watching it. I could see that the characters had a different skin color than any of us in the room, claiming color blindness is disingenuous, but the idea that some people were bad just because of their skin color was a new idea.
I'm so angry that that idea was ever put into my head. I absolutely did not and do not believe such a thing, but the poisonous residue is always there. And yet, my ability to not be exposed to racism at an even younger age, to not live every day under the oppressive thumb of a system designed to keep me down and devalue my life, is privilege. I don't want it, I didn't ask for it, but every time I benefit from it, I'm complicit. Acknowledging that is a start, and making a continual effort to unlearn hateful ideas is necessary, but what comes next?
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