When I First Realized I was not Black

[Star Man]

I recently read a collection of first-person accounts by Black men telling their early experiences of racism. I have thought and thought about what's called White privilege and what my experience of being White in America has been. This essay attempts to convey my first experience of realizing I was not Black. Star Man

When I First Realized I was not Black
By John Omaha
Copyright, 2017 by John Omaha All Rights Reserved


I had always loved the movie theater. Going to the movies for the Saturday matinee was the high point of my 9 year old week. It meant freedom from the emotional oppression at home, from the burden of my parents' expectation that I would become a doctor like my father. I had a routine. I walked alone to the theater 2 miles from my home in Seattle's Madrona District. My allowance, for which I had picked up dog shit in the backyard and house where my father's Boxers relieved themselves, would buy me a cheeseburger and malt and entrance to the theater. After the lunch the movie. The wonderful, glorious movie. The experience commenced with six cartoons. Animated wonders. Then Warner-Pathe newsreel. Next came a segment of a serial, a cowboy or adventure story or a Captain Marvel episode running 10 minutes. The first of two feature films followed. Sometimes there was a stage act between the two features, like the time a Philippine man demonstrated yo-yo tricks.


I cannot remember the movie that was showing when I first realized I was not Black. I seem to recall that it was a black and white adventure film. I was engrossed. Captivated. I sank into the movie, inhabited it. Sometimes I suddenly became aware I was acting out the movie, like the time the movie character was stretched out on a ledge of a high building and I had stretched myself across the two seats adjacent to mine. When I realized what I was doing, I quickly sat up.


Half way through the second feature I felt something push against the back of my head. I felt my scalp. A sticky gooey blob of used chewing gum had been pressed into my hair. I could not pull it out. I turned around, and five Black boys howled in laughter. I got up and left the theater hunched in shame and never returned My Saturday reprieve was ruined along with my innocence. I knew in that moment that I was not Black.

[podfish]

...Going to the movies for the Saturday matinee was the high point of my 9 year old week. It meant freedom from the emotional oppression at home, from the burden of my parents' expectation that I would become a doctor like my father.... I turned around, and five Black boys howled in laughter. I got up and left the theater hunched in shame and never returned My Saturday reprieve was ruined along with my innocence. I knew in that moment that I was not Black.

wtf? I have no idea how this was meant... deconstructing the essay into what each passage is attempting to convey gives me no hint. I pretty much already dislike this guy, and certainly don't trust any insight he might have into the role of race.

[Thad]

I was in the third grade freshly incarcerated at a Catholic boy's boarding school in San Raphael. The first day as I was being introduced on the quad, some little shit came out of the crowd and punched me in the nose and then dove back into the crowd. He was white.

Later and it wasn't until lately I associated the event to a following occurrence. I had been as far out as I could be without going out of bounds, when two boys came up to me, a small one and a large black one, and they came up to me and offered me a Seven Up, as I took it, I noticed it was very warm and I got it. They had pissed in a can and offered it to me in friendship. As I put it together later, the little one had been egged on by the larger one and he was the one that punched me in the nose. And that was my first experience of black.

It didn't get much better than that. Through many efforts of being forgiving it didn't really rise much above that. So Sorry to say.

[Star Man]

wtf? I have no idea how this was meant... deconstructing the essay into what each passage is attempting to convey gives me no hint. I pretty much already dislike this guy, and certainly don't trust any insight he might have into the role of race.

Hello, Podfish. We have exchanged replies previously on several occasions. I really hear that you dislike me and that you don't trust any insight I might have into the role of race. Do you feel heard? I hope so. I worked hard on that short essay to connect with my experience of race. What I wrote was my heartfelt expression of my experience, my initial experience. The experience in the theater showed me that I am not Black and that my whiteness will have gum shoved in its hair. I will be very interested to see what your insights are into the role of race. See what you can do with 348 words. Star Man

[podfish]

Hello, Podfish. We have exchanged replies previously on several occasions. I really hear that you dislike me and that you don't trust any insight I might have into the role of race. Do you feel heard? I hope so. I worked hard on that short essay to connect with my experience of race. What I wrote was my heartfelt expression of my experience, my initial experience. The experience in the theater showed me that I am not Black and that my whiteness will have gum shoved in its hair. I will be very interested to see what your insights are into the role of race. See what you can do with 348 words. Star Man

I didn't realize you were the John Omaha referenced as the author. Sorry, I would have been less flippant. But I do dislike the conclusions you draw from your experience. My 'insight into the role of race' is that race wasn't the primary factor in your interaction, and that assigning them roles as a racial representatives is a (not unusual) human failing. That shows up in Thad's post as well. I will deconstruct the story after all: pt1 sets up the author as a disadvantaged but virtuous protagonist, grateful for small things in life. pt2 describes the protagonist enjoying one of those simple pleasures that lifts him out of the troubles of the world. pt3 shows him rudely being humiliated rather than being supported in one of his few moments of relief. Not incidentally, he assignes the role of his oppressor to a racial group.
That's what I refer to when I say this protagonist sounds unlikeable - a narrator sounding self-absorbed, impressed by his own virtue, and very aware of his own victimization. Naming a racial group as is primary nemesis is gilding the lilly.

I've had this discussion with someone else on this site, but never seemed to get through. It's the use of race as the most salient characteristic of another person or group that's offensive. To Thad's point - maybe his experience with black students were that they were bullies. To extend that characterisation to all other black students at his school, much less to all black students or all black people is reprehensible. It's something people have always done. When it's in the past, like Japanese internship, it's considered an error of the times. But it's repeated with Muslims, for example, and in this case with blacks. If you need to choose a group, I'd suggest using 'male'. Most terrorists or bullies (at least bullies boys encounter) are male. Why apply a fake refinement like 'black male' or even 'tall male', as if making the group a bit more selective makes assigning them a characteristic more accurate?

pick the 348 words of your choice...

[podfish]

.. What I wrote was my heartfelt expression of my experience, my initial experience. The experience in the theater showed me that I am not Black and that my whiteness will have gum shoved in its hair...

oops, missed that part. It rings of the alt-right 'whites are being discriminated against'. It's sad that being white makes you visible to some blacks as a representative of a group rather than as an individual. Hard to understand where that comes from, I guess. Do people really do that?

[Star Man]

I totally hear you saying that I "assigned the role of oppressor to a racial group." You later say it is reprehensible to extend race as the most salient characteristic of the bullies. Let's be clear: The boys who smeared chewing gum in my hair were Black. They had other characteristics: they were human beings, they were males, they were alive, they were laughing, they were bullies. I did not extend race as the most salient characteristic to all bullies. I have been bullied by white boys. I did not talk about the other times I was bullied by tall, male, boys, who were Black. As I said, I was trying to speak my first experience of humiliation in the context of interracial relations. I referenced an article in which Black people spoke about their first experiences of being insulted or bullied because of their race. The article made me think about what my own experience of being insulted because of my race. An implied point of my little report was that the only reason the boys smeared gum in my hair was because I was White. I really feel hurt and offended when you say I am self-absorbed, impressed with my own virtue, and aware of my own victimization as if that was a bad thing. You are projecting onto me. I am done with this conversation Podfish and will not respond to any comments you may add to the thread. I have had to do this with you before. Best, Star Man

I didn't realize you were the John Omaha referenced as the author. Sorry, I would have been less flippant. ...

[podfish]

... I really feel hurt and offended when you say I am self-absorbed, impressed with my own virtue, and aware of my own victimization as if that was a bad thing. You are projecting onto me. I am done with this conversation Podfish and will not respond to any comments you may add to the thread. I have had to do this with you before. Best, Star Man

I didn't say you were any of those things; I restricted it to what the protagonist, as you wrote him, sounded like. Check the wording. I haven't met you so I only commented on the character described in your essay. In the same way it's unfair to project characteristics on a group from some members of it, it's not possible to perform character analysis on a writer from the way he describes a character, even if it's a memoir-style version of himself. Writing creates a character separate from the author - I'm pretty aware of that even in the kind of writing I do here.

no need to respond.

[Star Man]

I recently read a collection of first-person accounts by Black men telling their early experiences of racism. I have thought and thought about what's called White privilege and what my experience of being White in America has been. This essay attempts to convey my first experience of realizing I was not Black. Star Man

*******

Half way through the second feature I felt something push against the back of my head. I felt my scalp. A sticky gooey blob of used chewing gum had been pressed into my hair. I could not pull it out. I turned around, and five Black boys howled in laughter. I got up and left the theater hunched in shame and never returned My Saturday reprieve was ruined along with my innocence. I knew in that moment that I was not Black.

As a counterpoint to my account of how I first realized I was not Black, I offer this account of how I realized I didn't fit in with White people either.

I was a sophomore in college at Dartmouth sitting in the social room of my fraternity house. The great high jumper, John Thomas had traveled north from Boston College to the college to compete in a track meet. Thomas was the first high jumper to clear 7 feet. He subsequently set the world record twice more culminating in his best jump of 7 feet 3 inches. He made all his jumps before the Fosberg Flop was invented. There were about 10 men in the social room talking about what we'd do that day. I announced that I was going down to the track meet to watch John Thomas high jump. A senior fraternity brother from the south said, "I wouldn't go watch a Nigger jump over a bar unless I told him to." The room erupted in laughter. I cringed in shame although I said nothing. I lost another part of my innocence in that moment, and I also realized I did not belong with my own racial group either.
Star Man

[Moon]

Here’s the incident that taught me viscerally about the protection, and the lack thereof, that various ancestries confer:
For a white person, I was not naïve about ancestry; about as often as we were called by our name, my family was called “that bunch of ___-lovers.” I was living in a commune in a small Midwestern town, and we knew how much the cops hated us. E.g., one conspicuously pregnant hippie womon had been taken
to the police station, knocked down and kicked in the belly until she miscarried. But one night a fellow communard, white, came home late and said, “A cop just stopped and told me, ‘Better get home, boy—
the ___s are uppy tonight’.” We all looked at each other and got it at the same time: As much as the cops hated us, they hated Black people even more.

P.S.: There's an interesting collection of self-tests at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.