Unlearning homegrown hate: how racism leads to the death of the self
My earliest memory of my grandfather is riding with him and a collection of others on horseback through our family’s cotton farm. I couldn’t have been older than five. I was riding bareback on his Jerusalem donkey, Julio, the only beast of burden trustworthy enough to carry a child in tow. The farm is wet, unkempt, untamed. He’s telling us all a joke, one about a little white boy and a little Black boy sharing their experiences jerking off. You might know the joke, if we run in the same circles; I won’t repeat it. It’s told without pause, without that over-the-shoulder look-and-whisper you see white folks do in public before they say something willfully atrocious. I remember the musty silence of that moment and the laughter that eviscerated it.
I am challenged by my attempts to be anti-racist — that is to say, to not just excise racism from my life, but to work against the efforts of racists. As such, if I want to acknowledge my anti-racist efforts, I must specifically also call attention to my deliberately racist actions. I came up in Thomasville, Georgia, where you were an unspoken outcast if you weren’t racist. The city self-segregates to an alarming degree. The white folks almost exclusively attend the Thomas County School System, while the Thomasville City School system was, at the time of my brother’s graduation in 2008, about 90% Black enrollment. That may no longer be the case, but around the time I moved to Massachusetts, the city school system opened a magnet extension for “gifted” students. The majority of that smaller school, which made the large majority of his graduating class, was white. About 15% of his enrolled freshman class made it to graduation.
These segregations are by design, of course. The city schools that host black students are underfunded and understaffed, siphoned to benefit social bankrolls that support white folks. Many white folks slated to attend city schools based on their neighborhood pay a fee to attend the county schools.
In my hometown, there were two separate verticals for white folks and Black folks. Rising out of the shit just didn’t bear the same path across races. Almost any kindness that extended from a white person to a Black person came with an expectation that we were not saving folks from the shit: we were keeping them in it, just bearable. The only three Black children who were part of my youth group were explicitly identified by their race, and it was the topic of every exchange, including those from the youth pastor and leaders of the church. Mockery was disguised as an effort to “understand better,” as it so often is. I knew what pickaninny imagery was before I knew the name because I saw it in homes and businesses. I started to recognize the difference between laughter at a good joke and laughter as protection.
I perpetuated and enforced the same stereotypes. My actions weren’t limited to micro-aggressions, and I can’t corral the blame onto my community because I had chances to change and refused to. Each interaction with someone who didn’t look like me in my younger days — white, male-presenting, tall, Christian, cis-gendered — stood as a new opportunity to treat others better, and I deliberately chose not to take it each time. I could continue to live with my actions because I told myself that I had the same disadvantages. But there is safety in othering folks because it protects my process of internalized self-othering. I might not have been born Black, but our family was poor, and that was enough for me to hold hatred. But that kind of attitude defies intersectionality. Privilege is a sliding scale, and any oppression that I might have suffered does not save me from any social or emotional aggression that I laid upon others.
There is a reason the modern conservative and Evangelical ideology is so tied to ideas of self-preservation and bootstrapping: it fits so nicely alongside an antipathy for your fellow man. The racism that I grew up in, that I perpetuated, is a direct antithesis to empathy. Treating others as lesser enables us to overcome the empathic instincts that drive us humans, and factoring these behaviors into all aspects of Southern society makes it easy to ignore those impulses. It becomes as much sport as deer-hunting or baseball. One external example is thus: as a toddler, I knew that good folks went to heaven and bad folks went to hell. I knew that I was a sinner because my Methodist preacher had enforced that upon me; but, encountering another child in my kindergarten class who didn’t attend church every Sunday let me cast aside my otherness and sinful nature and condemn him to hell. I might have been a sinner, but at least I went to church.
What kind of society empowers that kind of behavior from one innocent to another? It’s that antipathic force. It’s that safety from otherness. In so many cases, I found that I could ignore my tendency to act the fool because my father and mother empowered me to view the same behavior in public, at Wal-Mart, at church, at a restaurant, from a Black child as unforgivable. We had names for children like that. I don’t need to say them because you hear them in your head. That’s that power of racism. It perpetuates far beyond the speaker and the target. It inflicts harm like a grenade. Merely observing it is a weight in itself.
I can’t speak with any absolute truth about what drives the modern rabidity of these racists any more than I can speak for the folks who disrupted sit-ins, marches, or protests in the 1960s. I haven’t lived in the South in a few years, but the further away from Georgia I get, the more I see folks change. I’ve seen people empowered by the actions of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’ve seen folks who were generally kind twisted like cursed roots of old live oaks. Their patience and kindness have been stolen away as they continue to engage with malefactors brigading as leaders who make it more and more acceptable to be openly racist in public. As my family and friends engaged more with OANN and Fox News, they seem to lose even their sense of self. What started with a bit of anger after watching Bill O’Reilly extended to rage as a lifestyle. The people I knew then are gone. I remember an old verse about God not recognizing folks’ faces as they arrive at Glory: I see more and more what that really means.
But I saw it happen to myself, as well, before wiser folks who loved me yanked me by the collar and rebuked me for my outbound hatred. I found the more I allowed myself to hold and accept racist thoughts, the more I saw my affection for myself diminish. What I found was that by withholding outward empathy, I choked out my self-esteem. In the same way, the more I worked to educate myself, to learn about others’ struggles, to engage people on their own terms and not my own, I found myself allowing self-affection, self-forgiveness, and self-healing. When I slip back into those cycles of hatred, I eat worse, I don’t sleep as well, and I ruthlessly punish myself for small mistakes.
I found that racism was a pure theft of kindness. It extended from me, to my friends, people I viewed as safe. I do still have to check myself, but I no longer blame the community that raised me. It serves as an explanation, not an excuse, and when I’m out in the world, when I’m engaging with others, I know that I’ll extend prejudice toward, I do have to check my perspective, my privilege, and my assumptions. I make deliberate attempts to engage with media that’s not specifically catered to me, to engage with people who have entirely different lives than me. When I do sit down and watch a show like Rami, Insecure, or Nora from Queens, I find that all the bullshit I used to believe about folks I’d never really listened to — actually listened to — was just bullshit.
Thomasville is making changes, too, albeit with that classic slow step of the Southerner. In 2018, the city renamed a significant portion of the heavily-trafficked downtown district as “The Bottom,” the unofficial name it bore during the Jim Crow era, a time when the city’s Black entertainment was cordoned off to a few blocks. The old Ritz Theater, the only joint in town where Black folks could sit wherever they wanted, is the crown jewel (though they have chosen not to renovate it due to cost). I hope the citizens understand that as long as racism makes up the core of their society, any moves the city makes are just gestures. We must commit to anti-racism as a lifestyle. There is no half-assed measure.
