NIGGER
The boy who first called me nigger was my classmate in the 5th grade—a dark-skinned Filipino boy, with the darkest skin in my school. He actually didn’t really offend or upset me. I don’t even consciously remember learning about the word, maybe except in my mother’s sporadic mentions of negro spirituals, slavery, and Nina Simone. I also saw old photographs of white Southerners and the KKK holding “nigger” signs, but I thought it was a time long forgotten.
Although I knew so little about the word, I equated it with dark-skinned black people. Bryce was ten to fifteen shades darker than me, and for a while I think I even thought he was black, so as far as I was concerned, if there was any nigger around it was him.
Despite my disconnection to the word, it was as if intergenerational/ transgenerational traumatic memories had been inherited from my ancestors and embedded in my mind before I’d even had a chance to confront the term on my own. But I knew it was bad, and the first time I heard it I could only respond with shock. The second time, I was disturbed.
Mitchell, a plump, red-faced, Chinese boy sat behind me in a classroom of 40 students. Neither of us had ever really fought. I don’t remember a conversation, but he was already upset with some other boys after a game of softball had gone sour during lunchtime.
There was no conversation, but I was facing him when I turned around, most likely to hand over a new worksheet from the teacher, and as he stared directly into my eyes, grabbing the papers, he suddenly muttered, “Nigger.”
I don’t think I even responded, but I told on him immediately.
When Mrs. Johnson took us both into the hall, I reported what he’d said, and with her piercing blue eyes, she viciously retorted, “but you called him fat!”
Mitchell concocted some cockamamie story about how I’d made fun of his weight, and that therefore warranted him calling me nigger. I never called him any names. It was a bold-faced lie. The word wasn’t in my vocabulary. After all, I was always the one targeted for being chubby.
Needless to say, he was banished from school for several days.
Everything became hazy after that point. I only remember being home that evening with my father, as he marched me into his office, shaking with rage, beside himself, rushing to his desk to call Mrs. Harris, the principal, directly bypassing Mrs. Johnson to get her impressions on the incident.
“Who the fuck is this teacher?!?!?!,” my father yelled, and yelled some more, shrieking that nothing I said could ever warrant being called nigger, demanding that some justice be served. Beads of sweat trickled down his tomato-red face as he repeatedly asked for Mrs. Johnson’s home number, ready to “rip her a new asshole” as he liked to put it when talking about assholes. Injustice was the one thing that sent him over the edge. The one and only time I made fun of a Chinese girl’s slanted eyes after she’d been bullying me the entire school year, I was grounded for three months. He was serious.
My father continued to roar, but I couldn’t really hear words. I became scared and began to go numb. I didn’t really grasp what was happening, but based on the steam coming out of my Dad’s ears, even though he had the same skin color as my teacher, it couldn’t be more clear that racial slurs were absolutely unforgivable. He was more upset than I was, but he had already faced extreme racism with my mother, and wasn’t going to deal with it from a ten year old boy and a teacher.
As far as my feelings, Mrs. Johnson’s irreverence disturbed me most. Her contempt for my alleged fat-shaming, and her implicit endorsement of blatant bigotry was unnerving and perplexing. “Well you called him fat” meant that it was okay to call me nigger. I don’t know how in her mind the two could even be on the same level.
It upset me that she had no idea how painfully charged that word is— that I, having no memorable, tangible connection to or experience with truly confronting the word, could still be so shaken, despite not feeling anger . . . the same horror and rage I’d feel today if someone called me a nigger. I’ve lived a little since and Lord help the next person who utters it.
Within a week, as a soft PC gesture, the school principal reserved some time at the end of her daily address to the student body in the morning to condemn prejudice, reminding us that we were a school that encouraged diversity. I was unimpressed. It didn’t help that I was one of two black students out of 300 kids at the time, but even then both of us only had one black parent and the other girl looked Indian.
I didn’t give a damn about Mitchell. Yes, I told on him because it was a naughty word, but I was more concerned with Mrs. Johnson’s response. She confirmed for me that the “black experience,” often a part of mine as a part-time other, was not understood or even really validated, and most of all, foreign to my white superiors in positions of power. It was dangerous. She was dangerous and she’d lived through the civil rights movement.
Looking back, it’s alarming to know such a terribly ignorant, and possibly very bigoted teacher was working with impressionable ten year olds at a critical developmental stage in their lives.
It was frightening because without directly telling Mitchell, she affirmed to him that nigger was, in fact, an appropriate comeback to the most minor of insults, even if they were imagined.
It was isolating because I was the only person ever targeted for my background in such a vicious way.
Despite my father’s six figure salary, my mother’s position as a pre-school teacher at the same school, my good grades, and my relative privilege, to her, I was still just another nigger.
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