A Dangerous Word
It’s hard to believe now that I was ten years old when I first heard of slavery in America—or anywhere, for that matter. I was in the fifth grade, in 1950’s San Antonio, Texas, and must have been studying the Civil War. What I remember is not the history lesson but the feeling: shock that people could be made to work for free, beaten if they didn’t, and not allowed to leave the plantation. The unfairness, not to say horror, offended my child’s budding sense of morality.
But that reaction did not mean that I was free of the racism around me. Its effects came early. One day when I was four years old, my father and I were walking on a downtown sidewalk in Waco, when a childhood friend of my father’s, a black man a few years older, came walking toward us. As a boy (I’ll call him Sam), he had lived across the tracks from my dad in the little town of Rogers. The boys became acquainted as my dad walked past Sam’s house every day on the way to school. In fact, they soon made a point of meeting and walking the rest of the way together, until they parted to go to their separate, segregated schools. So on that day in Waco, Sam and my dad must have talked for a while until Sam walked one way and my dad and I another. At that point, so the story goes, I pulled on his jacket and said, “Daddy, did you know he is a nigger?” I heard that story first as an adult, to my great embarrassment. Even though I never remember a racist comment in our household, by four years old, I had already soaked up the racism around me.
As I grew up, black people were scarcely in my sight. There were none in my elementary school, none in our neighborhood. I do remember, at about age five, going into a department store in San Antonio with my mother and seeing separate drinking fountains for whites and colored. I didn’t understand the logic: if the store doesn’t want black people drinking in the same drinking fountain with whites, why do they let them in the store? Why does the store take their money?
The isolation continued in high school, in late 1950’s Corpus Christi. There were two public high schools that I knew anything about; mine almost all white, with a few Hispanics, and the one across town with mostly Hispanics. If there was a school for blacks, I knew nothing about it until one day I went on a volunteer project to the public housing apartments. It was full of black people, and I was astonished. Questions began appearing in my brain: why did I not see black people around town before? Why were they so poor? It’s hard now to understand how I could have been so ignorant, but there were no black people in my school, church, or neighborhood. It was as if the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 had never existed.
That year when I went off to the University of Texas in Austin, I still lived in a white cocoon. I remember only one black person, a woman in my swimming class. But in 1962 I came across a book that was to pierce the ignorance: Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who had darkened his skin and lived as an unemployed black man in the 1950’s South. Although now the book is not considered to be an authentic account of life for a poor black man, it began my education. It tapped into the capacity for empathy I felt as a ten-year-old child. Over time, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and so many more, continued educating me.
On this 400th anniversary year of slavery in America, I think more and more that language itself, the word race itself, is one of the culprits that keeps racism intact. The word has become more a hindrance than a help. There is no biological accuracy in the concept of race. Color in the so-called races varies so much as to be meaningless. And even cultural distinctions are becoming permeable. That is not to say that groups of people do not have distinct cultures, but the boundaries seem less fixed than when I was a child. So what is left to give the word any credibility? In my diverse Houston, racial categories do not account for the multiplicity of origins, cultures, and geographical mixtures of people in the city. In my classes at Texas Southern University, I taught students whose mother was from Japan and father from Nigeria, or mother from Ethiopia and father from France. So how do we peg these people? And what is the point of labels anyway?
The point is that the dangerous word race perpetuates our distinctions among people and helps to perpetuate racism. It is so embedded in our history that I could not have written this essay without it. But the ten-year-old child inside me still is horrified at that history and at the role of language in that history. When people are enslaved, categorized as less than human, and named as a separate “race” that has no biological validity, the word race itself becomes dangerous. It messes with our thinking. As the little girl of long ago would say, “It’s not fair!”
