My first encounter with a person of color is one I look back on with shame and pain. I think I was about three and my oldest brother had brought home one of his friends from medical school--a young black man, the first person of color I had been face to face with in my whole life. Growing up in my part of rural Kansas people of color were an anomaly that caused whispers and gossip to arise from white residents.
And here was a black man in my living room, probably the first person of color to ever step foot in our home. My mother is very progressive and has always raised me with an awareness of social issues, but race was always a difficult topic to discuss amidst a sea of white in the middle of the country.
I remember how much I loved his hair. I remember sitting next to him and just patting his head.
"I like his hair!" I exclaimed excitedly to my mother as I smiled.
"Can I keep him?" I asked hopefully.
Whether that question arose from innocence or an already deeply ingrained racism I am not sure. Perhaps it had its origins in both. But when I think about race, I know it is significant that this was my first reaction to a person of color.
I think that at three years old I was merely a reflection of the not-so-subtle clues given to children concerning race. Despite my progressive mother and even my own natural inclinations to always be concerned about others, I was not immune to the rules of race that are posted everywhere in our society. I was influenced by the television shows I had watched where blacks were always criminals or stupid. I was influenced by the words I had overheard in my school and in my community: "He's a zebra, that one there, a half-breed."
"I'm tellin' you, they're startin' to move in."
"And then that black boy looked at her like he was gonna do something."
At three, I hadn't yet learned to censor myself and separate my thoughts from my words. I was a completely innocent product of an insane and hateful world. We are all products of this same world, of our environments, and so now the question is: Where do we go from here?
At Duke, when white students are faced with the race question we usually try to disappear like a student slouching in the back of a classroom to avoid being called upon. "What? Me racist? Na I love black people dude! Yeah. And rap and stuff."
Sometimes though, we let our guard down and our true racist selves come out to play. How many times do white students get together and bash affirmative action when we think no people of color are listening?
How many times do we make racist jokes when we are safely surrounded by fellow whites?
And don't even get me started on the whole "self- segregation" thing. It's self-segregation when people of color group together. It's a nightmare when whites are surrounded by people of color. We don't know what the hell to do. When faced with the same social situations that students of color have to deal with all the time, we freeze up and usually try to escape the scene as quickly as possible: "Oops, I thought more white folks were gonna be here. Yeah I was just headed out, actually."
I think most people of color know that white people, even Duke students, are fundamentally racist. This doesn't mean we hate people of color. It doesn't even mean we are bad people. It just means we are products of a society that is able to take innocent children and teach them where they fit on a racial hierarchy.
The sooner white people are able to realize this, the sooner we can stop this silly, "Is racism still a problem?," debate and begin the real, "So what the hell do we do about racism?" discussion.
It will always amaze me how Duke students can go to courses taught mostly by white professors, live with mostly white classmates and yet be served almost completely by people of color and still claim that racism doesn't exist.
At some point, one has the choice between two options: The Objectivist route that some people just have "bad cultures" and could advance if they only adopted "Western" ways, or that some folks have engineered a system that keeps certain people up and certain people down.
I know the first option is a far easier one to pick, because it absolves the individual of any responsibility to question the advantages one has by virtue of birth and circumstance. However, I think white students need to choose the second option and begin a serious questioning of how we really managed to get to the elite positions we occupy today.
It's a damn scary journey. It means admitting to ourselves that there is more to who we are than just hard work and intelligence--there's also an undeniable background of unfair advantages and benefiting from the oppression and the suffering of others.
In choosing to take this difficult route however, we might reclaim the innocence and compassion of our human spirits and get those racists out of our mirrors.
Bridget Newman is a Trinity junior. Her column appears every other Wednesday.
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