I’ve been thinking about this for some time, please bear with me if it seems a little disjointed. Disjointed probably best describes my feelings towards this issue. My primary reason for posting it now is that it’s Black History Month, and so maybe I’m reflecting this on a micro-scale. Then again I’m watching my boys grow up and find myself feeling really anxious over the world they’re growing up into. For whatever it’s worth here it is.
I never really got prejudice. I mean the concept never conceptualized for me until it became personal. I grew up with probably most of the admonishments from my family and acquaintances that most Black Dopers grew up with. Like working twice as hard to receive the same credit; being careful around police; areas of town to avoid, because the people there wouldn’t like me there. But it was like hearing ‘don’t talk to strangers’, just a concept that didn’t resonate. I even remember watching Roots in my early teens, and though I can remember feeling a general anger, it still didn’t gel that this was something I needed to relate to.
When I was 13 we moved to California, and I made a friends with a kid across the street named Mike. One day we were riding our bikes down Doolittle in San Leandro when it hit me, both figuratively and literally. I was hit in the back of the head with an apple, to the accompaniment of the yelling of “Nigger”. Four white guys in a car roared past laughing, then they turned around and came back. They started yelling at Mike asking him what he was doing with a nigger. They did this several times, driving back and forth and yelling at either Mike or myself. It was the first time I could remember thinking “why do they hate me, they don’t know me”, the first time I could remember feeling fear of being hurt for no reason. What I remember most about the incident was thinking, ‘why won’t anybody stop’, cars were constantly passing us, and we were both crying and trying desperately to get away.
Other than a knot on the back of my head, I wasn’t seriously injured outwardly at least, but I’ve carried the incident with me since. Like a scab that you can’t help picking I would revisit that afternoon over and over in my mind, I guess wondering if I caused it somehow. In the intervening years I’ve experienced other incidents, most minor like being escorted out of town by the police for the crime of playing video games. But it was that first incident that told me I could be hated for nothing more than existing.
I think for the most part I’ve successfully kept that incident from coloring my perceptions in my dealings with people of other races. I’ve also resisted teaching my sons the same things I heard from my family growing up. I haven’t told them to expect prejudice. When incidents like the Byrd dragging happened I was relieved that they were to young to watch the news, because I didn’t want to explain something as irrational as racial hatred. I’m not sure how wise that is, because I know the world only changed so much since I was kid. I’m in my late thirties now and I think a moderately successful businessman, but I still find myself wondering should I drive my 87 Escort to work, or the BMW I bought last year, because my business is in the same city I was once escorted out of.
I wonder if I’m doing my boys a disservice by not telling them stories like the one I related. I want them to think of themselves as individuals capable of anything, and teaching them that some people might want to hold them back for something out of their control seems somehow wrong to me. I want them to live in a better world than the one I lived in but I’m sure that world isn’t here yet. What do you Dopers think?