Race & My Formative Years

In a memoir-writing class I took last year, I found myself writing about story-memories like these:

In the mid-1970s—when I was in sixth grade—the only African-American child in our class and I were the shortest kids in the room. For every line-up, every assembly, every class photo, this boy and I stood side by side. Funny how one gets to know a person. Thirty years have passed, but I often think of him—and about the day some classmates of ours tied his hands and feet together and left him outside while everyone else went inside at the end of recess.

In the 1970s, I learned that it was practice for certain Asian-American girls to have cosmetic surgery on their eyelids to achieve a Caucasian-like crease. My friend underwent multiple surgeries to correct scarring.

I remember another classmate of mine, in perhaps second or third grade. Unlike the rest of us, this boy had brown skin and black hair and black eyes. His ethnicity is unknown to me, but I remember his beautiful eyes—with the longest, thickest eyelashes I had ever seen. After the other kids began teasing him about his looks, he cut all his eyelashes off with a pair of scissors.

Of course, there are many, many more tales to tell from my predominantly white, suburban, American youth—but those three stories bubbled to the surface first.

Worth the Time

Yesterday, it took me twelve hours to read Barack Obama’s speech on race. I started reading at breakfast, continued during lunch, and finished after dinner. (Such is my life, these days.)

Since childhood, I’ve always been interested in how people talk about race, and Barack Obama does it remarkably well. Which is why I’m remarking on it. Really, I’m not telling you who to vote for. I’m just telling you to read his speech.

It should only take a half hour or so, uninterrupted.

Imus v. Coach Stringer

Oprah had the classy Rutger’s Women’s Basketball Team on her show (via satellite) this morning. Mary Mitchell talks about Don Imus’s comments in her column today, likening the use of “nappy-headed” to using the “n-word”. This reminds me, on April 25th the Chicago Public Library will host a free lecture by Jabari Asim, author of The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why.

"It doesn’t matter how you start, but how you finish." —C. Vivian Stringer, Head Coach, Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team

Chicago Columnist

At left, I've added Mary Mitchell's column to my list of favorite links. Mitchell is a Chicago Sun-Times columnist whose perspective interests me. I am often surprised by what she writes, and I like that feeling. She writes a lot about racial issues in Chicago, and her tone reminds me of the many spirited conversations I had as a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, back in the 1980s.