Being Racist

One of my mother’s proud moments is the time she told my grandmother that if she used the n-word in front of us kids she would never be allowed to see us again. I was definitely proud of using the n-word in high school. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Sometimes I blame JK Rowling (j/k). Fear of the word increases fear of the thing itself. Except Voldemort was magic Hitler and the n-word is fucking cruel. My white teenage self had the privilege of seeing both of those as equivalent intellectual arguments. Freedom of speech! But my freedom to speak is not hindered by my inability to say racist things.

I can almost understand my parents racism. My mom was born in 1957 and grew up in an unstable household in West Philadelphia. She was mugged for the first time at the age of four. She admitted to me recently that she really didn’t know it was possible to get to know black people until she was an adult. My dad, born in ’55, grew up in the Polish neighborhood in Camden, NJ. They were the poor whites, “forced out” of their homes by shitty racist policies that “protected” the rich whites. And so, the city of Camden, to this day is considered a lost cause by most white people.

My dad participated in racial violence. To hear him tell it, “If you were out alone, you got your ass beat by a group of black dudes. Then you’d go find your friends and beat the shit out of a random black dude that was alone.” Which, honestly, sounds like a hellish way to live, but I would believe it felt true to him at the time. Mind you, he also told me…