This totally blew my mind. I’m ready to sue Nabisco over the fact that I’m traumatized by growing up being called an Oreo, but I can’t imagine having no company to sue because people are calling you a coconut. The UK is rough, ha.
Toni went on to expand on what “normal” means in the UK and how that impacts Black people there.
TONI: So, going to job interviews, for example, and people talking about how articulate I am, and me feeling a sense of illegitimacy from that comment, like it’s not a genuine comment. I knew it wasn’t a genuine comment coming from a place of, “Oh, yeah, this was generally an articulate person,” but almost like an element of surprise, like “I did not expect you to be as articulate as you are based on the color of your skin.” It’s not seen as normal to be anything other than what people have seen on the news if you’re Black in some spaces.
It’s often as if in the UK, Blackness isn’t ever supposed to be normal. In England, what we see a lot of is microaggressions. England is very different from the United States in that we do not often see—or I have not often seen—direct clear racism. Now in the age of Brexit, people are way more vocal about their xenophobia and their racism. One of the things I’ve noticed young white Brits do is mock other people’s culture in an attempt to make them the butt of the joke. So, for example, someone potentially bringing in certain lunch to school, and the first thing they do is find a way to bully them or mock what they’re eating. So, “Oh, what is that? It stinks. It’s disgusting. Why would you eat that?” It’s just a roundabout way of showing that something isn’t normal because it isn’t white.
In places like America and Britain, we have an opportunity to learn and grow by being around people who are nothing like us in many ways and very much like us in others. By having an expectation of what’s normal, people build an assumption that anything else is abnormal.
We need to do away with the idea of “normal,” especially when it’s used as a stand-in for “mainstream” (whether that’s white or anything else seen as such). Because at the heart of this difference between normal and abnormal is the belief that these so-called normal things are neutral.
An example is when white people talk about something that originates from a nonwhite culture and say, “That’s Black [or Indian, or Asian, etc.]—that’s not normal!” As if only things associated with white culture are normal—and as if white is not also a race.
White people, you know that white is a race, right? And that all races are social constructs? Good—just checking.
Over the years, my favorite things about people have become the ways in which they are nothing like me.
Some of my best experiences have been when I’ve tried new foods, learned to pronounce names and words that aren’t familiar to me, listened to new types of music, and watched movies in languages I don’t understand.
I’m asking you to protect one another and learn from one another. I’m asking you to turn “different” into the new normal, and then tell others to do the same.
I didn’t go to parties much when I was in high school. Even though I had newfound popularity, I never trusted large group events like that. All it would take was one person getting drunk and realizing I might not be as cool as people thought I was at school for everything I had built to come crumbling down.
More important, I didn’t really know how to party with the types of kids I went to school with, at least the ones who had houses big enough for parties. From what I’d heard, or maybe just seen in movies, the white kids threw the types of parties where people did keg stands, shotgunned beers, played beer pong, and listened to whatever music was popular at the time.
For many of you, this probably sounds completely normal, but remember what you learned in the last chapter: “normal” is subjective. The few parties I went to while attending my first (predominantly nonwhite) high school were about one thing and one thing only—dancing. I don’t mean organized line dancing or anything like that, I mean the type of dancing where you’re way too close to your partner and if there was an adult around, they would use a ruler and a flashlight to separate the two of you.
But part of trying to keep my popularity also meant taking calculated risks so people wouldn’t ask too many questions about why I never showed up to events. Which is why when I was invited to a Halloween house party my junior year, I figured I might as well go.
The party was being thrown by a student from a high school nearby. I knew some of the people who went to school there through sports and other activities.
Typically, the kids who went there came from families that were fairly wealthy. Because of that, many of them had huge homes that could accommodate a ton of people, so kids from various schools would be invited to their parties.
I didn’t want to attend alone, so I asked my friend Carlos if he would come with me. I’d met Carlos during my freshman year at my prior school, and he’d become one of my closest friends.
Carlos was from a deeply proud Latinx family and lived in my neighborhood.
His dad was Puerto Rican, and his mom was Ecuadorian, and part of the reason I loved going over to his house was because the food was amazing. The other reason was because his parents loved their cultures.
We would spend hours talking about history and music from Puerto Rico and Ecuador while I stuffed my face with empanadas and other foods that made their house smell like heaven.
I loved being around his family; you could tell how much they all loved one another, especially his parents. Carlos’s father worked at a factory in town and would be tired every time I saw him. But he always made sure to spend time with his children and their friends as well, and to do something sweet for his wife on a regular basis, like bringing flowers home.
Carlos was just like his parents, and honestly ahead of the curve in thinking about things such as privilege and race. Which is why I wasn’t surprised by what he said when I asked him to come to the Halloween party with me.
“Hell, no. I’m not going, and you shouldn’t, either.”
Carlos had an issue with the white kids from the upper Westchester schools. He often complained about the fact that many of them seemed to think they were better than us. Not only that, but he said that during football games against them, some of their players would call him racial slurs on the field when referees couldn’t hear.
While I knew Carlos was right about some of the kids, I felt like those weren’t the ones who were throwing the party. If so, why would they invite me?
I think we’ve established by now that not only was I naive as hell back in high school, but I also wasn’t very focused on exploring any deep and important thoughts about race. Surviving high school was my number one mission. Damn shame.
I knew I could get Carlos to change his mind, though, because, while he felt strongly about those kids, he felt more strongly about Cynthia Rodriguez, a Mexican American girl from our neighborhood who went to my school. Carlos had been in love with her for years but hadn’t had the courage to speak to her.
It was simple: Get Cynthia to come with us to the party, and I would be able to talk Carlos into coming, too. Cynthia and I were on mock-trial team together and had been friends since sophomore year. It wasn’t hard to talk her into going to the party, because she was happy to simply not be the only person without plans.