In the early seventies as I was about to enter kindergarten, the adults around me spoke in fretful tones. They would say, “You are going to be in a classroom with black kids. How do you feel about that?”
I felt nothing at all about that. At age four I had far graver concerns. I was expected to leave home and go to an alien place called kindergarten. I had never been to kindergarten before. What trials were going to be expected from me? Could I hack it?
On my first day, sitting at my assigned place at a table, I met a brown skinned boy named Jamal who sat across from me. He introduced himself and seemed friendly. Meanwhile the teacher was handing out drawing paper, but somehow she had skipped me when handing out crayons. She began naming shapes for us to draw.
My stomach dropped, and I felt cold. Disaster had struck. Even at age five, I had an instinct that I had better fit in, or else. Was I allowed to interrupt the teacher while she was talking? Should I pretend to draw shapes with my finger? I was dealing with a problem I had never encountered.
Seconds later Jamal leaned forward and lent me one of his crayons. With infinite gratitude, I accepted the crayon. The verdict was in: Jamal was nice. The adults were silly.
As I moved on to other grades, I forgot about Jamal. I entered an environment full of cues and signs from teachers and other authorities. What I saw was this: the black students were yelled at more often. They were far more likely to be sent to the principal. They tended to be placed in the bottom-rung reading groups. And most of them in my South Carolina town were poor. And they spoke differently, a language style that my grammar books deemed improper.
As a kid, I never thought to ask: “Are the black students yelled at more because they are meaner than white students or because the teacher does not like the black students as much? Are they put into the lower reading groups because they are not as smart as whites or because the teacher has low expectations of them? Are they poor because they have lazy parents or because society does not provide the same opportunities for them that it does for white citizens?”
The questions might have been good ones to ask but as a seven year old I did not ask them. A seven year old accepts a “might is right” principle of morality. What the teacher says and decides must be right. The way things are the way they are supposed to be.
As I grew I absorbed more messages, many of them wordless, without even being aware of what was happening. When a black student was sent to the principal, I had the impression: black people sure do get into trouble a lot; not, maybe white students get away with more. When I heard black students speaking vernacularly, I wondered, “Why do they not talk right?” Not “Who defines which language style is correct and which is not?
As an adult, I question surface impressions because I know how often they have misled me, but as a child, I rarely if ever did. I never thought I was biased. In my mind, I was absorbing the evidence around me and drawing obvious conclusions. But mostly my impressions were unconscious.
Though affected by my social environment, I did not hate anyone who had not been unkind to me. I was far too self absorbed to hate. I was mainly concerned with being liked. Race was an almost invisible backdrop in the drama of my life, until the sixth grade made me more aware of it.
In the sixth grade, I was bullied, mostly by a troop of pretty white girls for being shy, they said. The girl who led the bullying was extraordinarily popular and had friends all over the school. When she ridiculed me in front of them, they followed her lead, which created the powerfully convincing illusion that everyone hated me.
But there was a chink in the illusion where a hint of light shone through. When winter came I made a friend. Her name was Jessica. She had transferred from another school mid-year. She had a thoughtful doe-eyed beauty. She was black but had trouble fitting in with other black students because, like me, she was shy.
Jessica and I compared notes. Being shy was apparently not tolerated by either race. She asked me if I was shy at home around people I knew, and I said no.
“Me either,” she said. “At home people tell me not to talk so much.” She complained about the teacher holding her up as a role model for the class by saying, “Shh. Be quiet. Look at Jessica. Everybody be quiet like Jessica.” I shook my head and agreed that no one understood us.
I loved talking with Jessica at recess. We would walk the dirt track and discuss the perils of being shy and how wonderful it would be to finally escape the school when May came.
One freezing winter day during recess, she saw me shivering and took off her long trench coat and handed it to me. Her gesture was simple, and done almost without thought. But that year, such acts of kindness toward me were exceedingly rare.
Her action showed that she had no fears at all about being associated with me even if it meant being ridiculed herself. My status in the classroom was not something she ever even stopped to consider. At the time I was too devastated by the rejection from others to fully appreciate her gesture of friendship.
She and I made it through the rest of the year. She went to the public middle school, and I enrolled in a private school to get a fresh start with a new group of students.
By the time I had entered my new school I had changed. I had once sought friendships with kids who were popular. I no longer cared how popular a student was, or how pretty, or whether they wore brand name clothing. Now I had a pressing new question I asked myself when I met new kids: Are they kind?
I no longer trusted politeness alone. Many of the kids who had joined in the bullying had been ordinarily polite kids who had been swept up in herd conformity by a charismatic 12 year old girl.
At age 13 I would wonder, if this student had been in my sixth grade class, would she have joined in the bullying?
I stayed away from those who gossiped or back stabbed others. I recognized the expressions that students made when scapegoating someone: the gleeful triumph that ridiculing another person brought to the face or scowling indignation. I recognized how a scorned person could become, with a little gossip, the incarnation of purest evil, and how other students would often rally to the side of the person doing the ridiculing.
My religious private school was strict, so I finally returned to the public school system and created an identity for myself as a straight A student. The old bullies did not seem to recognize me. But one day I saw someone who did. She was taller but her features remained the same. It was Jessica. We started talking and exchanged phone numbers. I found out that she lived only blocks from me, and she invited me to visit her.
But at home, when I asked permission to visit, I met a flat refusal. The reason given was that she was black and that it was not appropriate in South Carolina for a white person to associate with a black person.
I was flabbergasted. It was 1987, and the civil rights movement was not exactly new. Many old boundaries had broken down, and in general the media was working to shatter offensive stereotypes. Besides, I had attended school with black students and knew they were like me.
The adults around me could not say the same. They had grown up in all white schools in a society which forced black citizens to sit at the back of the bus. As a result the white adults had never had a “Jamal moment,” in which a student of a different race had lent them a crayon.
Most adults I knew yearned for the world of their childhoods, which they described as all-white crime-free utopias where they could sleep with their doors unlocked and walk anywhere without fear. Society, they said, had gone downhill.
But I could not grasp their intolerance. Jessica had been far kinder than any of the white students who had bullied me. Were they more deserving of my friendship than she was?
I had a problem. The idea of lying to Jessica upset me, but I was too embarrassed to admit the truth. Other problems loomed; only weeks later, my bipolar disorder manifested in a big way for the first time. I was hospitalized and I spent the rest of my senior year on a home-bound program.
Many years have passed since high school and I live in Florida now, but when I visit South Carolina, I see relatives whose attitude toward other races have not changed since the nineteen-fifties.
I know people from my past who love their house pets and worry about their children. They love chocolate desserts and try to watch their weight. When someone they love dies, they suffer. Some of them are charming and witty and tell wonderful stories.
That is why I feel so surprised when I hear them make remarks that make me painfully aware of how little time has actually passed since the Emancipation Proclamation.
When those from my past make racial remarks, I see the look I remember from so long ago as a bullied kid: the gleeful satisfaction of ridicule; the irrational scowls of hostility; the magma of cruelty bubbling beneath the surface of their polite facades.
I find myself terribly out of sympathy with them, and I think of that freezing teeth-chattering day, long ago, on the school playground, when my friend Jessica let me borrow her coat. The memory reminds me to ask myself the same questions about those I grew up with that I asked while recovering from bullying: Who are they?
Are they kind?
If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here.