Be honest, are you a little bit racist?

[Xtermin8 H8]

25. I have had critical thoughts of POC through the years but, like True Dough, it was always

"due to ignorance and blind spots, not some sort of willful hatred".

Backstory......

TL,DR: When I was six or so, I made friends with a black kid. The white kids gave me the business. I was stuck in the middle and ditched my new friend. Mom initiated my journey of understanding the wrongness of racism. I should have ditched the white kids instead. My journey continues...

When I was a wee lad in VA, around 1970, I made a friend in the woods behind my childhood home. I was walking along the forest path to my favorite play place, a huge dead-fall tree laying on the forest floor, that I climbed around on and lived out childhood adventures. As I was approaching, I noticed this black kid and stopped to watch him for a moment. He was walking along the tree trunk when he tripped and fell off from about six feet up. He was able to break his fall somewhat and he began crying as he lay on the ground. I ran to him as he was sitting up and I helped him to his feet and tried to comfort him. He was not seriously injured but did get scraped up a bit. Well, you know kids, and soon after he had shaken it off and he asked me if I would play with him and, of course, I did. We had fun and became friends and agreed to meet there again the next day. He was my first black friend.

Back home, I told my mom all about it and when I told her he had invited me to his house to play some time and she asked where he lived. And I said he lives in "n-word town" on the other side of the woods. A split-second later, I was bawling and wiping a bit of blood from my mouth. Now, my mom didn't often use corporal punishment, leaving that to dad (of course). But when she did, it was always made clear to me why I was being spanked/disciplined. Not that time, though. I was too close to her and her reflex took over and POW!, right in the pie hole.

I was shocked and had no idea what had just happened. But my mom realized what she had done and immediately pulled me in and hugged me, saying she was sorry for smacking me like that. She asked me where I had heard that word and I told her that that's what my friends (white kids) call that part of town. She began to explain to me as simply as she could (to a six-year-old child) that saying that word was very bad and why it's bad and that I should never say it again, ever, and made me promise that I wouldn't. Also, she encouraged me to be friends with the kid and promised to take me to his house and meet his parents and said he could visit me at our house.

But my troubles were not over, however, relevant to this event. As it turns out, this event revealed to me the nastiness regarding race when some of the (mostly slightly older) white kids on my street found out I was friends with a black kid. Apparently, they lived in actively racist households and I was called "n-word lover", and otherwise made fun of and shunned, because of it. When this development was relayed to my mom, she suggested that those kids were not worthy of my friendship and that I should disassociate myself from them. This was hard for my young brain to process as I could redeem myself with my white friends by not being friends with the black kid and I avoided the woods, as well as the kids who taunted me, which is what I did. Things seemed weird after that, I felt the wrong that infused the entire affair. I felt caught between my mother's expectations, my friends I had grown up with, and the haunting interaction with the black kid I had befriended and who had hugged me for being his friend as we parted that day in the woods. And that feeling stuck with me as I grew up and it fueled a need to understand it all. I came to understand how wrong it was to hate someone simply for the color of their skin.

We moved some time after, before I could sort it all out, and I never saw that kid again. And my life is a little less meaningful because of it. But I learned a valuable lesson from it all and it has since shaped my view of POC and racism. He was just a kid, just like me, and the blood that seeped from the scrapes that tree inflicted on him as he fell off it was the same color as mine, even if his skin wasn't. To this day he probably occasionally wonders what ever became of me when I failed to show up the next day to play with him in the woods. Indeed, he probably knows by now exactly what happened to me and is saddened by it just as I am saddened, still, that I abandoned him. I wish I could say I am sorry to him and hug him one more time.