do you remember when middle school started and all the white kids started going through their “racist phase?” when i started using swear words, white kids started using racial slurs. when i started referencing memes, white kids started making nazi jokes.
everyone likes to joke about how horrible middle school is, but no one is willing to acknowledge how traumatic it is for kids of color. we understand what racism is from the time we are little kids,–i knew what racism was before i understood what race and ethnicity were–and we understand how it feels to experience, but when white kids start to find out about racism, it’s a joke to them.
i didn’t know any white kids in middle school who weren’t racist. the ones who didn’t use slurs or make racist jokes or find nazis and nazi propaganda funny hung out with those kids. they segregated their friend groups to the point where even white kids who were friends with kids of color wouldn’t have black friends or dark skinned friends. i experienced tokenization and microagressions and outright being called slurs and mocked for not being white the whole time i was in middle school from both other students and the school’s faculty.
i need to clarify here that i did not grow up in the south. i did not grow up in a conservative place. i did not grow up in a predominantly white place. i grew up in a racially diverse and liberal city in southern california. racism still existed there. i heard the same horrifically racist slurs and jokes and preachings as kids of color who grow up in texas do. the kids saying this shit had democrats for parents and teachers, but they were not told they were wrong for being racist. any time a teacher overheard a kid being racist,–even when a white gentile wrote an ode to hitler for our poetry unit–the kids who suffered because of their racism were told that these racists in the making would grow out of it. we had to forgive them. the authority figures were just as racist as our classmates even though our principal wasn’t white and we lived in a progressive area.
the most painful part of this experience was that i didn’t have the words to explain what was happening to me. i didn’t know it was a collective experience that other kids of color were having. i didn’t know what was so wrong with me that i was being made fun of for not looking white or for acknowledging my culture. it wasn’t until i was in the 8th grade that i finally felt seen by anyone else when i got seated with a bunch of other kids of color in algebra and they would comment on the racism they experienced and noticed in our school. that was the first time in this whole experience–in my whole life even–that i felt like i wasn’t crazy. i was right. none of us had the vocabulary that we all must have now to explain what we were experiencing, but we were all experiencing the same thing.
the white kids i was friends with back then are all around 19 now. i see some of them post about racial injustices in the world. i see some of them wear maga hats. none of them have ever apologized to me or any of the other people of color they hurt with their racism. their activism is performative at best and nonexistent at worst. what’s the point of this post? racism isn’t a phase. racism isn’t a character flaw. racism infects every aspect of our lives. racism exists everywhere. i want the white people i grew up with to understand that the internet didn’t radicalize me, you did. i was not radicalized by learning what racism is when i was 17 or by learning that racism still exists when trump was elected. i was radicalized by growing up a girl of color.
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