It’s like a dull headache or a plastic couch cover atop hideous upholstery.
Prejudice in white suburbia is always right there, looming over your shoulder. It’s rarely overt but casually present — an exclusive reality for the people who experience it daily.
I was born and raised in a tight-knit town, wherein the only black faces were those of my sisters and me. While growing up, life was love, basketball, piano lessons and sleepovers. And the distinctions between my (then) best friends and I were non-existent. That was the case until elementary school when *Ivory Typic and her parents hosted a Bush-Gore election party. I was 10 years old and I remember being passively interrogated as to why my parents failed to display a ‘Bush 2000’ sign on our perfectly manicured lawn. My friends poked fun at Democrats while eating elephant shaped red-sprinkled sugar cookies, calling them hippies, lazy and out of touch. So did I.
Fast forward a couple of years to *Pearl Standard’s 12th birthday sleepover party where we whispered and giggled about our childhood crushes. Ironically, in the moment that I chose to narrate my unbridled affection for *Scott Swoonworthy, Pearl’s 10-year-old brother entered the room and said, “Miatta, you’re like a black cow looking for white spots.” He and my friends erupted with laughter. So did I. I recall proudly rocking my fresh Marley twists to my parents’ all-white church on Fathers’ Day (the same church I’d been baptized and grew up in from infancy through early adulthood). One of the church’s long-term members and our family friend approached me, patted my head and joked, “all of that horse hair must be heavy, huh?” As he cackled, I stood, paralyzed and silenced in dismay.
Not only will I carry these events with me, locked in my memory, for the rest of my life, but I will carry the guilt of not having defended myself in the heat of EACH moment.
You see, Small Town, America had a way of candidly illustrating the truth: I was but a single black face in an overwhelmingly white space. It took years for me to accept the double-edged badge of honor that accompanied being black in America. The aforementioned events and more slapped me in the face with my truth. No matter how good my grades were, how well I shot a basketball or what college I got into, it was imperative that I be acquainted with this vague otherness that they so effortlessly defined, questioned and mocked.
Akin to white suburbia, history has a way of strategically codifying black bodies. As Malcolm X eloquently said in a speech delivered to SNCC in 1965, “Just as the slave master of that day [slavery era] used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slave master today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th-century Uncle Toms…passive, peaceful and nonviolent.” His rhetoric, although dated, remains valid in lieu of modern day Ben Carson, Don Lemon, Raven-Symoné, Stacy Dash… From politics to pop culture, these people of color represent exactly who Small Town, America was grooming me to be.
When I moved to Atlanta for college, I thought I’d escaped white suburbia — literally and figuratively. I quickly learned that I was only entering a new battlefield, equipped with the same double-edged sword. Despite my arsenal full of experience, I lacked the confidence to fight the good fight at my PWI. Although my black classmates were more prone to forums and rallies, I detested and avoided them like the plague. I felt as though the former was breeding grounds for semantic arguments between people from opposite poles of life while the later was a form of preaching to the choir. Lo and behold, my Small Town, America had successfully molded me into the appropriate, intellectual-yet-silent bystander. Even amidst pursuing a degree in African American Studies, I couldn’t identify my role in the good fight nor could I validate my voice as worthy to be heard. Every experience that perturbed my black female being at Emory University led me deeper and deeper into the very abyss that Small Town, American began digging years ago.
White suburbia, PWIs, popular culture and even Capital Hill are all microcosms of real life. We live in an era where prejudice does not commonly translate to white hoods, noses or tear gas. Prejudice is telling a black girl that her hair is too poofy for class. It’s an institutional faculty comprised of only 6.8 percent African American academics and professors or a presidential candidate that evades using the term “Black or African American” in a prime time interview, only to appease her default neutrality/progressive campaign. Prejudice is institutional, fashioned by white clusters of power and fostered by their allies and silent bystanders.
It’s covert, but prejudice is very real.
Cue the light at the end of the tunnel
But all of those experiences, relationships, and networks I’d built over my last 20-something years were not established in vein. In fact, I found my form of protest rooted in my ability to connect with the same community that overlooked me for so long. My being was the ultimate form of resistance. Whether through conversation or prose, my existence and association to my white friends or past mentors highlighted an otherness that oozed honor, pride and appreciation for every contrived racial experience that molded me into the excellent woman that stood before them. No, the 10-year-old girl who could barely articulate the premise of the Democratic Party couldn’t answer Ivory Typic’s questions way back when. But when I saw her father in Wal-Mart a few weeks ago (after 11 years), he was genuinely interested and impressed by my brief narrative of how far my life had taken me. After I told him my story he said, “Miatta, you are so intelligent and so beautiful.” The same person that laughed at me alongside with his daughter and our mutual friends over 15 years ago, finally saw me, and not just the prejudiced chronicle wrought from the color of my skin. That is how I protest the seed of prejudice planted in Small Town, America.
So I write this article not as a means of lecturing or educating white people on racism in their respective suburbias, but as a message to my network and my network’s network of white people who doubt present-day prejudice. This is for my parents’ church members who follow me on Facebook and for the few occupants of my Small Town, America who care to follow how I’ve grown, not in spite of, but because of them.
I hope that I personify what was once the object of your oblivion. I implore you to be cognizant of your actions and words and how they might aid in building or breaking down the walls of prejudice that permeate your monolithic communities. You can’t solely pray it away or write a Facebook post expressing your sympathy or opinions concerning *insert an act of racial politics here.*
Faith without work is empty.
Listen. Adjust. Grow.
Someone, somewhere (probably another little black girl like I once was) will appreciate your willingness to transform your unconscious exclusivity to conscious empathy and really see her.
Stay woke. It goes a long way.
