Q: But I grew up in a mostly Black neighborhood and the other kids touched my hair! And picked on me! I was the minority!
A: And so was I, actually, growing up in a Protestant family in a Catholic neighborhood. Did that make me entirely free of prejudice against Catholics? Dear Lord, no. Not for a nanosecond. I compensated for my supposed minority status by looking down my little nose at Catholic people, neatly compartmentalizing out, because cognitive dissonance is a thing, the Catholic cousins who lived elsewhere. I was thirteen years old when I learned that Protestants are not in fact a persecuted minority in this country, and, at about the same time, that my absent paternal grandfather’s family was Catholic, too, so I got to be doubly embarrassed. Thank you, religious bigotry.
Q: But I’m not really White! I’m of Italian/Irish/Jewish/you-name-it descent, and when my ancestors came to America they were treated like dirt! And I’m not really White because rumor has it that there’s some Black/Native American (all together now—Cherokee!)/you-name-it ancestry in my family! And if I’m not really White, how can I be a White racist?
A: It’s amazing how much we have in common. I have a smidgen of Native ancestry myself, from somewhere in what is now New England, not Cherokee and way, way back, so possibly even less than the kind of smidgen that Trevor Noah spoke of when he said, “Being part Native American is cool, right, but just part Native American. Like, enough that you’re interesting at a party, but not so much that they build a pipeline through your house.” Just walking down the street, people are going to say, “There’s a White person,” and anytime I might be applying for a job, a loan, or a mortgage, or renting an apartment, or hailing a cab, or not being followed around in a store, or not having the cops called on me for being in a White space, or not getting killed because White people believed their lives were in danger from the color of my skin, I am just so White. My Irish Catholic great-grandmother and her parents may have caught hell and not at all been thought of as White when they arrived in the U.S. in the mid nineteenth century, but they’d certainly be White now, and for damn sure whatever they and my Native ancestors suffered did not shield me from the steady blizzard of White-racist lies that told me White people are the very best and that it is my sacred duty to defend to the death—preferably the death of other people—the upper reaches of the kyriarchy, where White people are ordained to reside.
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