peachcherub:

When I was about 5, my parents sent me to a small town private school called Fire Mountain. I struggled to fit in there; I had one friend and didn’t understand why the kids didn’t like me. The worst day there, an older kid tricked me into killing the school’s pet fish. I think he told me that it was sick and needed to be put down. I wanted to be accepted, and a whole group of kids was surrounding me, egging me on, so I did it. Afterwards, they mocked me and laughed at me, revealing that the fish I’d just killed was perfectly healthy. Someone ran out and told the teachers what I’d done while I cried and hid under the table. After that, I remember spending most of my time alone in the library. 

One day after lunch, I went out to play on the playground with one of the younger boys. I was showing off on the swings, doing the “Superman” on my stomach. I lost balance and almost fell face first in the mud. The boy I was playing with started taunting me with “Blackface! Blackface!”. I kept questioning why kids didn’t accept me, and not once in my little innocent mind did I think it was because of skin color.

For me, skin color wasn’t an issue. Mommy was brown, Daddy was pink. Both were perfectly normal and acceptable to me. I was so used to seeing different shades, that I didn’t even notice if I was the only tan-skinned kid in the crowd. This was the first time I was aware of the notion of racism, when I told my mother about what the boy called me and saw her reaction. I didn’t stay at that school for much longer.

About 3 years later, we all moved up to Portland. Then when I was 9, we started living in the warehouse behind our new restaurant location in Portland. Paying two rent checks had just gotten to be too hard. I was being home schooled then, because my parents just couldn’t bear to send me to public school yet.

One night, my parents and I went to the store later in the evening, after the restaurant had closed. We had this massive garage door that we’d enter and exit through. Apparently, someone spotted my mom helping lift the door and called the police. They reported that a “black woman with a ponytail” had entered the building. They sent 3 squad cars on silent alarm and surrounded the garage. We had no idea they were there, until my dad heard our dog barking and assumed it was the local drunks outside. He angrily opened the garage door, ready to yell at some bums, when instead he was grabbed, handcuffed, and frisked.

The police officers barked at him, “Is there a black woman in here?”

My dad answered, “Yeah…my wife, my mother-in-law, my grandmother-in-law. Which one do you want?!”

He was finally able to explain to them that we were the lessees of the building, and that we both lived and worked in it. The person that called the cops had done so just because they thought there was something wrong with a black person being in their neighborhood at night. The cops responded with haste over that information alone.

My dad was let go, and he came inside and told us what had happened. He said he wondered what would have happened had my mother been the one to go outside instead. My guess is we would have worried that she’d been abducted until she was able to call us from the station. Then maybe a wrongful arrest lawsuit. Well, that’s the best case scenario.

When I was in high school, I was a bit of a slacker for various reasons (another story altogether). By my junior year, I had resolved to try harder and challenge myself. One way I tried to do this was taking a pre-calculus math course that I hadn’t taken the prerequisite for. I decided to do this because I had been terribly bored in my math class the previous year.

I found myself struggling with the material, since I had to catch up a bit at the beginning of the course. I still worked hard and managed to pull a C at the end of the first term. I was proud, as I was at a disadvantage not having taken the previous course, and I was still achieving at least an average grade. I felt confident that I would continue to improve…that is, until the teacher pulled me aside. She expressed concern that I was having a hard time in the class and questioned whether I’d be better off in a different class. I let this discourage me, and transfered to the unchallenging follow-up course to the one I’d taken sophomore year.

Later on, I found out that she had giving the discouraging speech to two other students. The other two students weren’t struggling like I was. The common thread between the three of us was our skin color. This teacher had been trying to make all of her students of color feel like they weren’t smart enough for pre-cal. I didn’t think it could happen in a fairly liberal town, in a diverse school, but it did.

I forgot about all of these incidents. I largely forgot about race at all for a long time. Race was never an issue for me in college; I suppose from being at a hyper-liberal open-minded art school. The next time it crossed my awareness was shortly after graduation. I was working at a modeling agency in graphics and blog upkeep. I worked with two other women in their 20s, one was the agency director and one was the booking manager. One day, the agency director expressed some frustration about a model who was difficult, who happened to be black. The booking manager laughingly used the N-word to refer to her, causing both of our jaws to drop.

She used the defense that her parents had always used the word while she was growing up, but not “that way.” I countered that there’s really only one way to use it if you’re not black and using it in the vernacular (and even then, I don’t care for it). The shocking and sad part about her using that word, even while sitting right next to me, was that she was a ethnic woman in denial. She was Indonesian and had been adopted by a couple in a small town in Washington. She wouldn’t even admit to being Asian, she had been so shamed. When I initially asked about her ethnicity (she had jet black straight hair and tan skin), she first said Dutch, then Dutch Indonesian. The Dutch always came first to her.

Since then, there have been little instances. Comments that people have said in passing, not thinking about me. For instance, someone joked not long ago that if I were to go out in the sun, they wouldn’t be able to tell if I’d gotten a tan. Then there was that comment about the black man being an ex con. What I know right now is that I am the only black woman in my department; I have one of the smallest work spaces; I have a manager talk down to me and ask me if I understand things constantly; I don’t have any friends, though trying to make an effort (which is difficult for me); and two people with the same job type who were hired after me have been promoted before me. I am starting to lose confidence in my own smarts and ability to do the job. Is this all a coincidence? Am I being oversensitive? Is this somehow my fault? Or is this more of the same?