RACE / CREATIVE NON-FICTION
I Didn’t Know How to Respond to Her Internalized Racism
Hearing her voice in my memory makes me cringe
“When I was a child, I was taught that if a white person shakes your hand, it will change your life forever.”
Hearing her voice in my memory makes me cringe because I know how I responded and wish I could go back in time to change it somehow. I wish I could communicate something to her about my people, but my knowledge of my own language seems to have failed me in her presence.
She had carefully considered each word, as always, communicating beautifully in a language she’d learned from scratch over a period of just a few months. Quite capable of changing her own life, she needed no white person’s handshake.
Her devastating words came with a charming smile and no indication that she found this horrible childhood lesson of racism problematic. The global harm of colonization and its white supremacist ideals had become so normalized, it had been distilled into her nursery rhymes as cute and child-appropriate, just as it had my own childhood books and movies.
Hearing this story that she’d been told, from the removed perspective of us each being foreign to the other, it was easier for me to see how insidious…
