More Racism

The topic of my last post and a subsequent conversation I had with two of my kids got me to thinking about some things that happened in the past that somehow escaped being recorded for posterity. I think I’ll rehash it now, as long as I’m on the subject.

Just after we got back from Subway, one of my most…interesting…students, Ricardo, came into my room. I love this child – he is absolutely insane. He wears makeup and jeweled barrettes and ties with a big middle finger on them. He is in love with a different boy each week and shares all of this with me frequently. He talks too fast and too loud, and has a serious, serious attitude problem. Clearly I have no choice but to be madly in love with him. So Ricardo came in to my room and said, “I’m mad.” I said, “Me too. You go first.” His was about a boy who he had grown up with and been friends with saying a lot of really ignorant things to him to try to impress Ricardo’s friend Victoria. (It actually turns out that he was not mad about the things that were said but that he didn’t think to mace the guy. Anyway.) Having listened to this story, I relayed mine, and Ricardo was appalled. He, like me, thought this was absolutely insane and was glad that nothing worse had come of it.

At that point, Chardae walked into the room, and Ricardo asked me to relay the story to her as well. I did, and she shook her head and said she couldn’t believe it. She said that if it had been one of her family members instead of me they would have been cracking on the guy and it probably would have gotten ugly. Feeling frustrated still and enjoying the mature conversation with two of my best kids, I told the following story that happened several months ago.

One afternoon when it was warm, possibly January because it was still ridiculously toasty then, but possibly earlier, I was out for a jog. I decked out in running clothes, put on my iPod full blast, and took off. I ran the mile to the grocery store to pick up something I needed to cook dinner, and then walked back home. I was about a block and a half from my house, in the one slightly iffy stretch of street between Mount Vernon and my street, patting myself on the back for making this excursion without someone saying something to me, when I hear “excuse me” from behind me.

I kept walking, thinking my iPod gave me the plausible deniability to ignore it, but the voice was persistent. Finally, I decided I might have dropped something important, and took off one of my earphones and turned around and said, “Yes?” There were two men walking behind me, both of them pretty big and probably a bit older than me, and both of them were black. They had sort of sleazy snarls on their faces. The one who had been calling me said, “I like you. You jog?” Now, if I was new to the city, I would probably have attempted to be polite and shake the guy as soon as possible, but by now I’d about had my limit. We moved out of our old house in part because I was tired of getting hit on in this piece-of-meat way every time I left my apartment alone. My crazy upstairs neighbor had taken to calling me “baby girl.” The other males ages 15 to 50 who lived in or near our apartment complex would frequently make lewd comments to me on my way to the car. I got catcalled about one out of every 5 times I walked in to the YMCA. I finally reached my breaking point when a 10-year-old said, “hey baby, how you doin’ today?” Then, I said sternly “When you want to pay a lady a compliment, you say ‘Hello. You look nice today.’” He said “Well, you look real nice today” while his friends busted a gut laughing from across the parking lot. So we’ll just say I am really, really tired of dodgy would-be players having something to say to me. But I digress…

“I like you. You jog?” (dirt bag)
“Please don’t speak to me that way.” (me)
“What, I just asked if you jog?” (dirt bag)
“Yes, I jog.” (me, putting my earphone back in)
“I like that, that’s real nice. You need a jogging partner? I’d jog with you all day long. Hey. Hey! You got nothing to say? Fucking racist bitch.” (dirt bag)

I managed to keep from turning around and I just walked home. I rushed into the house and locked the door, but the dude and his friend had not followed me. I was fuming, though. Of course it was about the fact that this guy had dark skin – of course it was. It couldn’t possibly be about the way that his comment made my skin crawl, it couldn’t be that I don’t enjoy being harassed by random people on the street, it couldn’t be that he managed to show me in approximately 35 seconds that he is a total swine. No, that’s not it. It’s the fact that he was black. If he had been white, I would have responded, “yeah baby, I jog. You wanna jog home with me right now and screw like bunnies?”

So I told this story to Chardae and Ricardo, and when I got to the racist part, Ricardo interrupted with “what IS it with that word?” At first I thought he might have meant the F word, but since his uses it prolifically I reconsidered and determined that he meant “racist.” I asked what he meant by that, and he said that he’s never, ever heard a white person called racist before. Chardae concurred – Ricardo said “I guess white people don’t get called racists in the hood.” I tend to think it is just that these two don’t call white people racist because they actually have brains, so they’ve also never noticed anyone else doing it. Either way, it was a bit refreshing.

At the end of all that, I felt slightly better because I’d had another good conversation about social issues with my students and maybe opened their eyes and had mine opened more. I felt even better, though, when I found out that the dude from Subway was arrested the same day that he was bothering us. According to the ladies at Subway, he beat up some white guy randomly on the street corner. It would figure.