Okay, so when I made this thread I knew that I’d eventually tell this story. So here goes! I think I only told it once before on SB, shortly after it happened, but I probably end up telling it about once a year. It’s a little long, but it’s a good’un!
So, in college I worked at a program in which college kids would go to schools to help out during class or in after school programs. I ended up going to a private Christian school in a working class neighborhood that was entirely black. For those who don’t know, I’m white, and–particularly at the time–I looked kind of like a young Justin Bieber (button nose, big ol’ teeth, swoopy mop top). I was working with a third grade class. They really liked having a pushover adult around who wasn’t a teacher, so we really got along.
One day at after-school one of the girls touched my nose and said, “Mr. B, why is your nose so pointy?” I really didn’t know how to answer that, so I think I said something like, “Everyone’s born different” or whatever. The next day the same girl was like, “Mr. B, why is your hair so soft? Do you straighten it?” and I was like, “Uuuuuh. No, it just grows that way.” The next day, the girl walked up to me, struck a kind of attitude pose, and was like, “Mr. B, I asked my mom why your hair is so straight, and she told me. It’s because you’re white!”
This led to a miniature pandemonium of kids shouting, “No! No! There’s no way! Mr. B isn’t white!” During all this, I had no idea how to react. It felt like this was some weird teachable moment, and I really didn’t know how to handle it responsibly. Eventually, this really bright, funny kid named Makaya said sagely, “I’ll tell y’all if he’s white.” She beckoned for my hand, and I held it out to her. She took my hand gingerly and began inspecting my palm like a psychic. She made “hmmmm” sounds and ran her eyes along the topographies beneath my fingers.
Eventually, she looked up at me and said, “Maybe he’s a little white.”
I’ve had people react to this story by saying the kids were just stupid (they weren’t), and I’ve always suspected that if I told it to a mass audience people would think I just made it up or that the kids were screwing around with me. But here’s how I process it:
These kids had seen plenty of white people in their lives. They had TV. Some of them had Hannah Montana backpacks. But–as probably most of us here know–“whiteness” is not really about skin and not really that obvious a concept for a kid. Just like I forgot that adults don’t just keep growing until they’re giants in my first story in this thread, despite being surrounded by adults, I think these kids weren’t really sure what being white actually was, because it wasn’t something that was ever reinforced in their daily lives within an all-black neighborhood.
The whole thing made me think of a This American Life intro in which a black woman talked about thinking the white people she saw in the city were ghosts. She talks about being a “PBS kid” in the piece. I know that she saw white people on PBS.
A year later, I was eating a donut with an Asian friend in the same neighborhood where I had TA’ed and a little kid rode by on a tricycle, waved, and shouted, “Hi ghosts!”
So, whenever people talk about how fundamental race is or that humans naturally discriminate by race–if there’s time–I tell this story.