It’s why that substitute teacher couldn’t fathom that a young Latinx girl and a Black boy could be the most intelligent people in their class.
Often when white people find themselves in situations where people of color are simply better at something, they become resentful and sometimes even dangerous.
I learned over the years that behaviors like the ones Africa and I described and the traumas we’ve faced are microaggressions (which can at times scale to aggression; the case of that substitute is an example). I’ve spent years growing out of how I internalized the things people have said to me, and the assumptions they’ve made about people like me.
White privilege and power can take on many shapes, one of which is simply the opportunity to be seen as an individual with your own interests and lived experience.
Some white people come from low-income communities, some are thieves, some are uneducated, some play sports, some are articulate, some are good people, and some are trying to be. But no one assumes, just because some white people are thieves or are uneducated, that most if not all white people share these traits, and that those who don’t are the exceptions.
To have someone judge you by getting to know you is a powerful and life-changing thing when you’ve never been treated that way.
Too often people of color are not treated as people at all but rather as ideas: the sum of what people have assumed and the little they’ve seen in passing. It’s not only unfair; it is deeply racist and can be extremely detrimental. This dehumanization is part of why people have been enslaved and why people are killed by trigger-happy police officers.
Which is something I discussed with Rabia Chaudry.
I asked Rabia about the importance of white people getting to know people of color and spending time around them.
RABIA: Research has shown the benefits, and it’s so scary because we talk about how in this postfactual era, the facts don’t matter. Facts almost never change a person’s mind. So you can provide all the data you want to somebody. They might have this horrible opinion about a group of people, and you can show them all the data you want, all the empirical evidence. It’s not going to change their mind, but there’s only one thing that will, and that is actually having a positive interaction with somebody of that group. It can literally be just one person they know from that group, which will make them resilient enough to say to someone making a bigoted comment, “I don’t agree.”
That personal interaction is one of the most powerful things to prevent people from falling into adopting really radical or bigoted or biased discriminatory views. That’s really hard to do, though. It’s hard to do. For me as a mother, my eldest, who’s almost eleven now, she also goes to Islamic school. She goes to a Muslim school. But the way I live my life, my life is very inclusive. My social circle is very broad. It includes people of every religion, every sexual orientation, and I expose my kids to culture and music, and I want them to be global citizens.
I stuck to the Muslim schools because the last thing kids need at school is to be scared of people harassing them for their identity. They should go there, feel comfortable so they can study and learn and grow. That’s why I decided to do that. But I have to make up for the fact that they are in these little bubbles in the Islamic school. Their world is not going to be just Muslims. The way we live, it helps, hopefully, to fill out the rest of those spaces.
Let’s talk for a minute about bubbles. We all live in some sort of bubble, whether of race, gender, sexuality, religion, or other aspects of our identities or lived experience. Bubbles aren’t inherently bad. Many people create their own bubbles to feel safe within a community of people with identities similar to theirs. For people like myself, bubbles can also help us learn more about ourselves, by being around people who appreciate the things we do.
But bubbles can also be dangerous, especially when people are forced into them or don’t realize they are in them.
We’ve all been conditioned in our ignorance; no one can say that they don’t make assumptions about people. The difference in white people making and verbalizing those assumptions is that in our society, white people often exist with privilege and power in spaces that people of color don’t.
In the example of Fatimah and me, that substitute teacher’s assumptions made her act in ways that had a long-lasting impact on two people of color and, frankly, could have derailed our lives. She had specific ideas about how kids who looked like me and Fatimah should perform in the classroom, and she was determined to put us in those little bubbles.
What if I’d believed her and lost the drive to ace those exams that people “like me” weren’t supposed to ace? What if I had just believed all of the people who have called me a thug or said Black people are from the ghetto, and those who essentially told me that the white race is more attractive than my own?
This is how systemic racism works. It’s not just a matter of blatant racism; it’s also about conditioning people to think less of themselves.
As I write this, I’m thinking I should be calculating how much the government owes people of color for therapy costs.
We’re not an assumption, we’re not words like “thug,” we’re not a statistic, we’re not a part of your imagination, and we are certainly not to be held to white standards.
We are the Black boy in class who happens to be from a low-income area who is also the smartest person in class (with Fatimah). We are our mistakes, we are our wins, we are good at things, and we are bad at things.
We are people, and we should be treated as such.
“DayVaughn? DuhVon? DayVon? I’m sorry, I just can’t pronounce this. Can someone give me a hand here?”
Whether it’s a Black name, a Spanish name, an Asian name, or anything else, we’ve all seen this scene before: a white person trying to pronounce names that aren’t white and acting like they are reading Elvish (a language from Lord of the Rings; I already told you I’m a nerd).
You know what group’s names are actually difficult?
I want you to take a moment and think about this.
It’s a trick question. The answer is every group. All names are difficult because they are all made up!
Think about it. What makes a last name like Zuckerberg any less complicated than Henriquez or Shakur? The answer is simple: one is rooted in white standards, while the others are not. The same could be said for food, music, clothing, or any other aspect of culture that doesn’t originate in white culture.
As I mentioned once or twice (maybe a billion times), my high school was much whiter than I was used to. My middle school, however, was predominantly Black, though many of the white kids were still very popular—and very problematic. While I definitely dealt with my fair share of ignorance and lifelong traumatic memories (thanks again for reading about these), there are a few things I never went through.
For instance, I don’t think anyone has ever had trouble pronouncing my name, because it’s common in America and Europe, so it’s been normalized. I will say, I used to hate when kids would call me Frederick Douglass to make fun of me, but it’s been smooth sailing otherwise.
Shout-out to Frederick Douglass; I’d be honored if someone said that now. If you don’t know who Mr. Douglass is, I suggest you throw your entire school system away—and also go online and learn more about him.