My Whiteness ... Part I

I knew I was white when ...

I liked Denise. I was a boy; she was a girl. We played together at the private school in Memphis where we both attended. When family found out that I liked her, they asked me what she looked like. I described her dark brown hair, her thin body, and her dark skin. The family was confused, as the private school I attended was for whites only, either explicitly or implicitly. But Denise wasn't black. She was just a bit darker than all the other white children. She was white too, perhaps of Mediterranean descent, I never asked, I didn't care. But from the confusion and attempt at explanation of their confusion, I first realized (I was slow back then; I still am) that all the children at that school were in fact white, all the teachers were white, the cafeteria workers were white, the bus drivers were white. We lived in a white Memphis neighborhood named Indian Hills, on a street called Arrowhead (other street names included Cochise Rd, Navaho Ave, and Chippewa Rd), attended an all-white Baptist church. Just whites. It didn't bother me, of course, that all my classmates were white. It just "was."

My brother Scott, more outgoing than me, made a friend with one of the sanitation workers -- I wonder if anyone outside Memphis uses the term sanitation worker -- a man named Lucy. Lucy once gave Scott a bag of plastic clothes pins that he had retrieved from someone else's trash. Scott and I played with those orange plastic clothes pins for months. I suppose that probably was the first time either Scott or I had ever spoken to a black person.

You have to understand something about Memphis, capital of the Mid-South. After King was killed, white flight (not necessarily because of the assassination) turned the racial composition of the City of Memphis and the County of Shelby upside down. Before, the city was 90% white. Now it's 90% black and the whites live outside the city, in the county. People sent their kids to private schools not necessarily because they were bigoted, but because the Memphis public schools always were horrible and still are. The prep school tradition in Memphis is a long one and still a very active one. My parents sent me to private schools more out of a concern for my education than to inculcate us in white privilege, and I'm grateful for the financial sacrifice they made -- we were very much working class poor at the time (I think they told me they bought their first house for $14,000) though they aspired for more. We were taught the basics, of course, but we were also taught some Bible lessons as well, probably my first exposure to Protestantism, since I don't recall any church before then. My parents -- unlike parents today -- were comfortable leaving my brother and me with friends as babysitters so they could go out to dinner or movies or whatever grownups did back then. It was with one of these white ladies that I first heard the n-word, said in a context that was otherwise perfectly without hate, animosity, or derision -- she simple called blacks by the word, and wouldn't have thought to use any other word. It just "was." When I asked my parents about the word, they're response was something like, "Older people use that word, but we don't use that word, and you don't use that word."

Memphis. Whacked. Good barbecue, but whacked.

Deeper in the South

When we moved to Grenada, I knew something was different when, on my first day at the school mid-year, I was introduced to my white teacher and she asked what courses I liked most. When I said, "Bible lessons," she uncomfortably replied that we wouldn't be studying the Bible at Lizzie Horn Elementary. My mother left me there, the teacher walked me in the room, and I swear, there were so many black kids. I had never seen as many black kids in one place, ever. They might have been as shocked as I was. I only remember one white girl -- Kelly Ferguson -- long red hair, green eyes.

Lizzie Horn Elementary, Photo Taken 2000

For the first week, the boys would accost me in the boy's room -- first to see if I was "all" white, to touch my hair, feel the skin on my arms. That seems to mean that I was in fact the first white boy they had seen, a curiosity to them. So I was white, but at that age, honestly, I feel like it was more important to be a boy than to be a white boy, so playground time was all about running and competing, sometimes slowing down to talk to the girls. My first playground fight was at Lizzie Horn Elementary -- some boy pushed a girl off the merry-go-round, I pushed him down (Southern gallantry and all). The teachers made the two aggressors stand out the rest of the play time and I learned to stop defending girls. But the fight wasn't a white-black thing. It was just a boy-boy thing. 

The churches we attended in Grenada were all white and I don't recall that being a discussion point. We walked and talked and worshiped with white people. Our neighborhood was all white again, away from the town of Grenada itself, overlooking a defunct golf course, our house number a simple "3" -- the lowest value street number I'll ever live in, I'm sure. The McCurdy boys I played with were white and those two and my brother and I were a constant foursome after school and on weekends. None of us were old enough to be on sports teams, so there was little reason to go into town and practice with, compete against black boys. That would have to come later.

All this brief history shows how inadvertent segregation is just assumed, accepted. My parents never said anything derogatory against anyone that I can remember (except some uncles' wives, but that happens). These institutions -- schools, churches, even neighborhoods -- didn't preach race and class dominance, but the segregation in and of itself creates an identity where otherwise insignificant markers could be interpreted into class and racial markers. In other words, I didn't segregate myself from blacks and Latinos or anyone else. It just "was."

When I moved to Searcy Arkansas, though I was still enrolled in public schools, the demographics were such that I was again in an all-white school. More of that, another time.

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