A young Black woman reported that her first experience of White racism was within her own family, when a neighbor invited her very light-skinned sister who had wavy or straightish hair on an outing and didn’t invite her. “I always kind of knew that this particular sister had more value because of her complexion, because my family on a certain level bought into those values. But what that incident did was that it confirmed it for me.” What she felt about it was “awful, because it made me have to face the fact that I had less value.” What she did was to “try to confront the adults by denying it—I was like, we’re all going to the circus, isn’t that great? But we were not all going to the circus. And I kept forcing the adults to say something to me about why we weren’t going by pretending I didn’t understand and that I thought we were all going to go.” Finally the adults told her that only the one sister was invited, and that she and her other sister weren’t. She spent the day of the trip in a corner, “waiting for her to get back, and I probably did some crying. And I think the adults around thought I was crying because she got a treat that I didn’t get, but actually it meant more to me than that.” So an example of a painful first experience of White racism occurring within a Black family, in the form of colorism.
My own recollection of a first experience of White racism was deeply disturbing to me. The first time I ever consciously saw a Black person, when I was still a toddler, back in the day when toddlers were allowed to be outside unsupervised, a Black woman was just walking down the other side of the street. I felt terrified and simply froze. It was disturbing because in hindsight I couldn’t help wondering, is racism something we’re born with and can never get over? Are we doomed? It was a long time before it finally dawned on me that if I had been living in a neighborhood where people of all colors lived, instead of only White people, a Black person walking down the street would have aroused no fear whatsoever: they would have been just another person to me, and very possibly a person I knew, perhaps even loved. And that is how I know that all-White neighborhoods are saturated with White racism, and that White people who grow up in them are soaked in White racism, too.
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