Racist Glitter

Racist Glitter

by E. W. Shannon

People have been trying to indoctrinate me into racism since my early childhood. Sometimes the indoctrination came cleverly hidden, sometimes it wore the blatant veil of an awful joke, and sometimes it came with God's approval. I would love to say none of it stuck, but racism is like glitter, no matter how careful you are not to get any on you, eventually you'll walk under the right light, and the tiniest glimmer will appear.

To be clear, I don't believe any of the people I mention are inherently bad people. They are people who were born without prejudice, as we all are, and somewhere along the way learned an entire group of humans were inferior because of their skin color. If these people were just mere acquaintances, I could easily have discounted them as ignorant and cut them out of my life, but as they are family the dynamics shifted and "respect your elders" became at odds with my innate knowledge of what is true. This paradox is where purity is morphed and where racism persists.

When I was about five years old, a woman entered my life who was different from anything I'd known. She introduced me to unconditional affection, hugs, fried chicken, ice cream with chocolate sauce, nonexistent bedtimes, and a new person I knew nothing about, Jesus. I can still remember the first time I saw her smile and feeling warm and safe like I was wrapped up in one of her handmade quilts, the personification of unpretentious rural Americana. Unbeknownst to her, or anybody else, the times in her company were a haven from my stepfather who had been constructed out of only the worst parts of man. 

It didn't happen right away, but eventually she would be the first person to say the n-word in front of me. Something in how her voice changed from a lilt to a hiss when she said it and the way she sustained an over-exaggerated hard 'r' at the end clued me into the fact the word contained evil. Nobody in the room blinked an eye, it was clearly an acceptable word to use in the house. I figured if she had a framed picture of Jesus in her living room, I probably shouldn't question her methods.

Once she told me about a Black woman (although I don't remember her race being relevant to the story) at work. She didn't use the n-word when talking about this woman, which confused my immature mind. When I asked her why this woman was a "nice Black woman" and not an n-word, she tried to explain to me the difference, but I just wound up more confused. Again, the image of Jesus flashed in my mind and stories of how he had died for her sins echoed in my little skull covered in a hideous blonde bowl cut. If she didn't think her words contradicted her religion and "Jesus's love," then why should I? It would be decades before I would figure out that a "nice Black woman" meant she gave the impression of being complacent and knowing her place; somebody unthreatening to the hierarchy.

Sadly, she would not be the only person to try to teach me racism with an approval from the Almighty. In the nineties, my father was attending school to become a pastor. While I don't believe in religion, his calling to do this work seemed the perfect next step of his religious path. At one point, in the eighties, he had a problem with alcohol and pills and, after a personal crisis where he went AWOL from his life for a short while, he found salvation in Christianity.

Soon his orations on Jesus's love were replaced with hate mined from the Bible. Since gay people seemed to be everywhere in the nineties, I knew I'd hear the old story about how a man shall not lie with a man as with a woman. (Funny how hate always requires a force of resistance, but love does not.) But I was not prepared for how the Bible would be used to back up racism. I forget what prompted the conversation, but I do remember him getting up, retrieving the Bible he was using for school, and pointing out two references proving Black people were inferior. 

He quickly found the stories about the mark of Cain and the curse of Ham, both highlighted and marked with little plastic sticky tabs on the corners of the pages. At the time I intrinsically knew this was wrong, but there is no arguing with somebody who has meshed their humanity with a religion. That scene stuck with me for years and gnawed at me, not for the use of the text in such an evil way, but something else that I couldn't quite put a finger on.

It would be decades before it became clear to me. After he died, I was sent a birthday card he had bought and written a note in, but never sent to me. His handwriting consisted primarily of capital letters with a few lower-case letters dispersed throughout. Occasionally, a letter would reverse, this was especially common with his R's. My father switched schools frequently as a child due to my grandfather's construction job and his dyslexia was missed. Mind you, I'm guessing at the diagnosis, but if you showed my father how to do something or told him how to do something, he would perform the action flawlessly, but if he had to read, he would get stuck. He could read, but slowly and he would follow his finger along the page, so he didn't lose his place.

It was then that it struck me what was wrong with the scene all those years ago: the highlighting and the little plastic sticky tabs. I don't think he had the wherewithal, or the inclination, to know to highlight that text and place those sticky tabs for easy retrieval. Those two stories are generations removed from one another, in terms of the biblical family tree. I doubt he would have made the giant leap necessary to associate Black people with those stories. Somebody had to teach him. Somebody in a school supposed to be teaching him to minister to peoples' souls had taught him this hate and he had tried to pass it on to me.

My paternal grandmother's sense of humor is something I miss about her. She often knew the newest dirty jokes and loved to tell them to me, no matter how age-inappropriate they may have been. While, often, her humor ranged from blue to almost childish, every so often it would veer towards race. One day, sometime in my mid-teens, at the trucking company my family owned, I was doing something at one end of the building while my grandmother told a racist joke at the other end. You could always tell them from the rhythm, they always started out, "How do you tell a..." In the middle of it, the building suddenly went silent, so much so that it pulled my attention and made me peek around the corner. Pat, a driver, had walked into the building and stood, politely, waiting for her to finish her sentence.

Pat was easily in his late fifties, maybe even older, and one of those people who believed in the teachings of Jesus but didn't seem to take the rest of the Bible so seriously. He was the only Black person I had ever known who, I would say, still played by the rules of Jim Crow. My grandmother, of course, froze and he started his question, "Miss Shannon..." After he had the information he needed, he simply walked out with a smile fixed on his face and a nod of his head in my direction as he passed. I rolled my eyes and shook my head in my grandmother's direction, and she retreated to her office. I don't recall her ever telling another joke about Black people, but there were enough other marginalized groups to fill her repertoire. 

So odd really. Looking back on my interactions with Pat, I always called him 'Pat' while he always referred to me as 'Sir' or 'Mr. Shannon,' even though there were easily forty years between us. When had I been trained this was acceptable? Whenever it was, there wasn't a formal lesson that left any evidence, just an evil whisper landing so lightly on me it could have been a feather.

My mother's side of the family had a quiet polite sort of racism. Had you asked them, they would have emphatically denied any racism existed. In fact, my grandmother would have pointed out how friendly she had been with a former maid and how she got along with her mailman without a bit of irony in her voice. While they never used anything so vulgar as the n-word, they still managed to convey the idea of 'other' in reference to Black people. Their brand of racism, usually hidden in concern for my safety, would be the most harmful because it would stick without me realizing it. Looking back, I wonder if it was the cunning of the tutorial or the closeness of the instructors that gave it its staying power. The lesson I remember most vividly happened when a girl in high school invited me to her house in Brooklyn. 

This would have been about 1989 and Brooklyn hadn't yet been invaded by white women pushing seven-hundred-dollar strollers as they sipped eight-dollar lattes. There weren't any white guys with ironic facial hair and bowties trying to sell flights of craft beers. The borough was still tending the wounds brought by the Tawana Brawley case, amongst others. No matter what happened in that case, a fifteen-year-old girl had been found in a trash bag covered in feces and nobody ever investigated how or, more importantly, why she got there. Something bad must have happened to her to make that the best option. The news was full of gun violence and made it seem Black people were killing each other faster than racist whites had ever dreamed.

So, it was no wonder when I told my family of my upcoming adventure to Brooklyn, and they replied with a kneejerk 'no,' eyes full of fear, and language indicating I was white and therefore didn't belong in Brooklyn...for my own good. Through most of my teenage existence I hadn't heeded these warnings and had usually done what I wanted and then lied about where I'd been, but this was different. It could have been their darting glances between one another, the fact they were giving me a rare 'no,' or maybe it was an animal instinct like when a baby impala gets scolded for going too near the lioness, but something hit me on a deeper level. 

I made my excuses to the girl I was supposed to visit, but I hadn't learned one nuance of racism yet: keep it in the family. I told a friend, who also knew the girl, the real reason I didn't go, and she promptly told the girl, who never looked at me the same. And there it was, the family racism, squarely fixed in my mind, handed down like the set of Limoges dishes or the Steinway Model M.

My inheritance is still with me. It has worn away like hard soap, but a sliver remains. It's tiny, but powerful. Whenever I'm alone and see two or more Black men, and only men, I have an internal conversation taking all of a millisecond, but it happens. My unconscious mind says, "Ooh, there might be danger," which is immediately followed by my conscious mind asking, "Based on...," and then it's over. But it happens, and it makes me angry because, in my core, I know it shouldn't be there. And I'm sure there are people reading this saying, "At least you're having the second part of the conversation." Is that good enough though? If the roles were reversed, I doubt I would accept this consolation prize.

I have no history of violence with Black males, my race on the other hand can claim no such innocence. Could it be a microscopic bit of genetic material preparing me for a well-deserved comeuppance? Looking back to the Black men I've dated, had we gotten to the point where I met their families would I have had this internal dialogue every time I entered the room, or would that sliver of racism have completely worn away and gone the way of other things I no longer needed like acid-washed pleated jeans and frosted tips?

I don't pretend to know how to get rid of racism. Like the glitter analogy at the beginning, it's hard to clean up and just when you think you've gotten it all, the light changes and reveals some more. I think the answer begins in two modes of thought, the first from Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." The other mode of thought comes from Alcoholics Anonymous: the first step is admitting you have a problem. Somewhere within these two ideas is a chance for change and a path towards something better. And while I may not have given you a quick fix for racism (because there is no quick fix), at least I know you're scanning yourself for little bits of racist glitter.