OPINION: The many colors of discrimination

My education began at a Lutheran elementary school in Richmond, Virginia. The school was small with only two hundred students, twelve classrooms and a staff of twenty teachers. It was very sheltered and, in reflection, must have been quite oblivious. My mother, acutely aware of this, sent me to an array of summer programs so that I would be well rounded.

At one particular camp, a girl threatened to hang me from a tree with a jump rope. She claimed I deserved such punishment for being “too white” and allegedly thinking I was better than her. What she assumed was my arrogance was rather my lack of understanding.

I never told my mother about these incidents because I did not want her to remove me from the camps. As terrifying as they were, I enjoyed the fresh air that existed beyond the sheltered school that hid me from this remarkable dichotomy of being both black and white. When my mother told me, in the middle of my fifth grade year, that I would be transitioning to public school, I remembered the grotesque grin on the girl at camp’s face when she threatened me. I feared everyone in public school would act in similar ways. Every word, I imagined, would echo her hoarse voice on that July day when she threatened me for reasons I have only now come to understand.

While many people like to disregard the effects of slavery in a modern world, the “team light skin” and “team dark skin” rhetoric that often appears on Twitter is only a technologically savvy perpetuation of Willie Lynch’s hierarchy of slaves. The lighter slaves were better respected and treated; conversely, the darker skinned slaves were minimized and not respected. Now, in the hands of darker-skinned people ourselves, it feels almost dangerous. When I was six, a girl who knew that, because my skin was a lighter complexion than hers, I would be better respected to some degree, threatened me. I had a privilege, she thought – people would look at me and think I was nice and friendly and automatically assume she was the antithesis.

Language is couched so that white is defined as pure and black is synonymous with every wretched, filthy thing.

Although I couldn’t have articulated my understanding of those realities then, I acted on a blooming knowledge of this discrimination to survive. It was crucial to my avoidance of potential bullying in middle school, where there would be no camp counselors to hide behind.

I knew that I was going to have to insist upon my blackness and begin slitting syllables from words to be accepted. Sometimes, I would accidentally leave an “-er” on the end of a word and have to start the process of being accepted again.

 I’d pray for summer to hurry and bate me holy; gift me my father’s burnt copper skin and save me from the burden of my mother’s pink hue. I wanted to dismantle my privilege of being “other” – the favored kind – and blend in.

This journey is continually enriched as I delve deeper into studies of language and travel seeing how differently it is used to, as James Baldwin says, “define the other” who is “refusing to be defined by a language that ahs never been able to recognize [them].”  

Would you like to respond to this article with a letter to the editor? If so, send an email to exec.editor@connect2mason.com with the subject line "letter to the editor." Please specify to which article your letter is responding.