While walking to work the other night, I saw two high school aged girls run across what is normally a very busy street to seek shelter from the rain which had only just started. I noticed that they were both rather pretty and for a moment found myself wishing I were their age again if only to continue the fantasy that if I could be given a second chance that I (somehow) wouldn't make the same mistakes over and over again.
The thought left me when I saw the group of four guys they had been with bicycling and skateboarding across the street to meet them. Three of these teenaged boys were black and the one on the skateboard, latino. I scoffed to myself wondering what these pretty white girls were doing hanging out with these black and latino kids.
It was an automatic reaction. It caught me off guard. It had been a while since I had felt such a thought in me. I don't know where it comes from or how it got rooted. Is it something my parents had taught me subtly? I don't remember either of them ever being overtly racist.
My father would drop the N-bomb every once in a while in conversation but I would describe his use of nigger more like the Black People vs. Niggaz bit Chris Rock did all those years ago. My Dad was not wanting for black friends throughout his life so I find his use of nigger puzzling, almost like he believed blacks ought to be better than the stereotypes attributed to them. I never heard him use the word in anger nor did I ever hear him direct the word at a black person.
Maybe it was the lack of interracial relationships in my life? I cannot think of any except on TV and whenever those relationships did appear the couples always had to justify their being together. That alone presses the idea that such relationships are unnatural and ought not be pursued. Perhaps it plays into the mind over the years?
My personal thoughts upon seeing a pretty white girl - and it's only when it's a pretty white girl: I could care less if it were an unattractive white girl or a white boy with a black girl - my thought is that of disgust but not disgust in that I find a black guy with a white girl disgusting, but a jealous disgust that derives from my loneliness. This idea that there are plenty of white men for you to be with and you chose a black man? This idea that white girls shouldn't go for other races until all the white men in their local group have been taken.
The jealousy is still there if the guy with the pretty white girl is white. Perhaps since jealousy comes from an ugly place, it is only natural that racism will follow when presented with the opportunity?
It is the only racism that lingers on inside me. Personally I think I hide it well. No one I know has ever suspected it in me. It is something I intend to die with and do my damnedest not to pass along to the next generation should I actually have kids of my own.
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