How Racism Made Me Racist

How Racism Made Me Racist

"Perhaps we feel our country of birth, physical attributes, or some other uncontrollable characteristic has set our path forward. Those characteristics may determine our starting point, but we decide how to react."

- Evan Scott, 2/15/2022

This is a topic I have thought about deeply over the past seven years and have taken a lot of time to think about and consider. It's a topic I have refused to address recently because of certain economic and social pressures around me, but I was inspired by my own words written two years ago. It's difficult to realize how much I have come to restrict my thoughts over the past two years, and maybe longer than that. I write so much, in order to process my thoughts, so it seems like something that wouldn't happen to me. Even now, I feel pressure and anxiety discussing this topic, but I feel that I should get my story on the record. Not because I want to convince you, the reader, of my opinion, as that is almost never my intention, nor would my words have much of an impact on society at large due to the size of my readership, but I'm writing this to contribute my perspective to the previous, current, and future generations of peoples. As an added bonus, I return myself to some free thought and curiosity. As a preface, I'm processing a lot of emotions related to my experiences and the, what I believe to be, negative aspects of my person that resulted from it. I will try and keep my emotions in check and address my experience with a logical and objective tone, but my thoughts are not unbiased-- the point of this story.

I remember my first experience with race. I was lining up with the other kids in kindergarten to be released from the classroom since school was over and while we were standing in line, a classmate pointed to the kid in front of me and said, "He's black." It was the first time anyone had ever described the color of someone's skin and my thought was, "How long has he been black?! And how have I never realized that there were people with a different skin color than mine?!" Of course, as a five-year-old, I was often not that observant.

I love how innocent I was. I couldn't recognize that people had different skin color, but I'm sure I had known that people had blue eyes and red hair, but for some reason, finding out that all the people around me had different skin colors came as a huge surprise. I believe however, this memory is not completely accurate and may be a combination of memories and experiences from that time. This is the only experience and thought about race that I can recall from the ages of 5 to 14.

While just because I cannot recall any experiences with race, I may still have had some thoughts. But even with that caveat, I find it interesting that I was able to live nine years without ever addressing the topic ever again. I do, however, have a concrete memory of being friends in elementary school and middle school with a kid who had dark skin. The other kids made fun of my friend a lot because his family followed a religious belief that people should not cut their hair to show respect to God. I can't recall what his family's faith was, but a boy with dreadlocks was enough to draw criticism in a school (and town) where no one had dreads. While I occasionally thought about this boy's religious beliefs (and that his hair was probably extremely difficult to wash, something I had brought up with my mother), I don't recall a single thought about his skin color. I cannot remember thinking about race a single time during our three-year friendship.

I cannot recall the second time I thought about race, after the first time in kindergarten, but I know that by the time I had made it to sophomore year of high school, it was all anyone could talk about. It was 2016 and Donald Trump was running for president-- do I need to say more? I'm 15 years old at this point and a lot of nationalist sentiment was going around the country, some of which made its way into high school, even though we weren't old enough to vote. This resulted in students, whose parents were natural born citizens, knowing enough to call for more border security and students, whose parents were illegal immigrants (or they themselves were), knowing enough to be offended by it. One of my friends was suspended for saying the government should build a wall along the border. However, I knew this friend was unpredictable at times and I did not believe that was all they did. Obviously, discussing border security did not merit suspension from school. A copy of the suspension report started as follows: "A student minority student overheard another student in the hallway say..." That was the first time I witnessed the power of using one's race or ethnicity to silence others. It was also the moment when several friends of mine realized that we were living in a "shut up and sit down" era, at least, for those with white skin. No joking about communism (or border security) from here on out, at least, not with people that weren't white.

And it was as simple as that. Suddenly, there were certain things I would only talk about with white people and for the first time in my life, I was discriminating on the basis of race. Maybe I already had unconscious bais based on tv shows, movies, advertisements, and other forms of media, but now, the belief of self-preservation made conscious discrimination a requirement. I had big plans for my life that required me staying in school and getting good grades.

Now I made a lot of assumptions as a child about the motivations of my friend's suspension. For example, I assumed that the school administrator needed to clarify in the report a racial/ethnic difference between the students because race was part of the justification for the punishment. I believe successful organizations and institutions need policies about what topics are appropriate for discussion and perhaps border security was not one of those. This is a hypothetical example, of course, as borders were discussed heavily in my human geography, English literature, and US government and politics classes. In fact, Trump's border policies were specifically included in the curriculum of my 10th grade English class as a discussion day. (I did not become a better writer that year, which had been my hope.)

In hindsight, I think the results of this policy on my psyche are a case study of associative learning and classical conditioning. As a child, race was a neutral stimulus with little naturally occurring conditional response. However, associating treatment, whether good or bad, with race naturally turned race into a conditioned stimulus.

I had many other experiences with this policy and others like it-- topics that were off limits to students, but free range for educators. I do not know what the goals were of indoctrinating students in the way that we were, but I have some theories about the motives to achieve the various outcomes of the policy.

I may write more on this subject at a future date, but in the meantime, it seems that giving up some free thought at the moment is more important to my long-term goals than pursuing this topic into the present day. Hopefully, one day, I will be in a position to explore thought publicly, and as curiously as I did when I was a child.