I know a very sweet boy who is currently a senior in high school. He also happens to be a student whose immigration status is vague and generally not up for discussion. I know this much: despite consistently high marks in all of his classes, he will not be attending college (or, I guess if he’s lucky, have an extremely difficult time being accepted but still get in) for no other reason than because that’s the sort of thing for which you need a social security number. He’s taken the SATs, the SAT IIs, and the ACT, all with impressive scores… but he hasn’t sent out any applications, he hasn’t gone on any college visits, he’s not being inundated with brochures and flyers in the mail with happy, smiling students on sprawling green campuses.
So while his classmates who were all lucky enough to be born on US soil (and a good 99% of them to white, fairly well-to-do parents) are anxiously and excitedly discussing their futures, he must remain silent. This is what I hold in the back of my mind every time I see or speak to him, even when the topic isn’t on school or prospective futures, even when he’s giggling and having just as much fun as the rest of his friends.
Of course, there’s another topic - his friends. Every time I watch them, every time I listen to their conversations, his ethnicity unfailingly comes up; sometimes I don’t notice, sometimes it really bothers me. It’s not even that his classmates are blatantly racist (of course, some of them have been, but this is rare) as much as the fact that every day his race invades his discussions, how people relate to him, who he’s friends with, how his actions are interpreted and etc. I’m entirely in support of acknowledging that this boy is of a different ethnicity, that that might come with a host of different perspectives and experiences… But I have to wonder what it’s like to be constantly reminded that you don’t look like everyone around you. I feel terrible knowing that, even though he doesn’t even experience very severe racism and most of it is “harmless,” and “positive,” (emphasis on the scare quotes) if he were to live a day in a white body, his life would be very different.
Because, see, inevitably, if you try to discuss racism with people, someone who believes we live in a “post-racial” society will say, “Get a grip already, slavery ended almost 200 years ago! Nobody thinks like that anymore!” or, “The trail of tears happened such a long time ago, it’s time to get over it! We’re not our ancestors!”
If it only took a few days to make Pavlov’s dogs salivate each time he rang a bell, if it only took seven clangs on a bar to teach Little Albert to fear a white rat, how is it so out of the realm of possibility that after hundreds of years of our society condoning violence, hatred, and intolerance against People of Color, racist attitudes might not simply vanish into thin air now that People of Color are beginning to actually be considered whole, fully-realized people rather than servants, savages and stereotypes by the mainstream?
““So if we need white allies in this country, we don’t need those kind who compromise. We don’t need those kind who encourage us to be polite, responsible, you know. We don’t need those kind who give us that kind of advice. We don’t need those kind who tell us how to be patient. No, if we want some white allies, we need the kind that John Brown was, or we don’t need you.””— Malcolm X (via reinventionoftheprintingpress)
I recall learning about John Brown in eighth grade; per our curriculum he was presented as an insane terrorist who only made everything worse for the cause he was trying to further.
