WHEN THE APPLE FALLS FROM THE TREE OF RACISM

I’ve never been one for the Old Testament. The stories creeped me out as a child and filled my head with the images of murderous brothers, frightful storms and zombie-like lepers roaming the desert. The feminist side of me certainly had issues with the story of Adam and Eve and those literalists who believe that it is proof of woman’s inferiority. The mystical Holy Grail was far more intriguing. And the prose of prophets who spoke in parables? Now that’s my cup of tea! Even though I tended to read into stories, searching for the deeper and more mystical meaning, ala Joseph Campbell, I never could wrap my head around Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge. I knew it had something to do with losing one’s innocence to a more sinister kind of awareness. But surely it couldn’t be just about sex and modesty. Could it?

            It wasn’t until recently that I had a tiny insight through that window of pane Eve had fogged up when she bit from that apple. It has to do with a certain kind of consciousness or self-consciousness which is imposed upon us from the outside, rather than from within. Dah – I guess that’s what that old snake was all about.

            During our church book discussion about Waking Up White (Deborah Irving), we were talking some of the systemic racism we’d encountered as children, i.e. black hats – bad, white hats – good, etc. We were all delighted to include a family whose eight-year-old daughter joined us. The parents brought up a more contemporary version of this imposed coloration in the form of animated films and cartoons where the bad dragons are dark purple or blue and the good dragons are white. Although the girl had noticed that the good dragon was white and the bad guys were darker colors, she hadn’t yet internalized the meaning. She recognized the fact that there were colors for good and bad, but you can’t expect an eight-year-old to make the leap and say “Aha! Those cartoons are racist! This was further illustrated when mom relayed a story about standing in line at the grocery store and her daughter warned her that she was about to step on a boy behind her. Mom noticed he was an African American boy, but the daughter didn’t notice color. He was just another boy. One of the group members asked the girl what she thought about that, and if she noticed color differences at school. But it was clear that she couldn’t comprehend the question. As grown-ups will do, we all tried to reframe the question about noticing different races, but she just didn’t get it.  The fact is – she wasn’t there yet. Clearly, our awareness of race is a learned behavior. And there we were, like snakes in the pit, offering her a nice juicy apple that would taint her for life.

            This reminded me of an experience I had when I was about her age. I remember taking a bite from that apple. As with most of the pivotal moments in my life, it all began in third grade. I remember coming back from lunch. There were lockers in the hallway for the older kids – fourth and fifth graders. As I walked down the hall, I ran my hands along the olive-green lockers, until I reached a roadblock of fourth graders rushing to put lunch boxes away as we waited outside our classroom.  I don’t know how it happened, but an older boy who was nearby slammed my left pinky in his locker door. First, I let out a screech of pain, and then I did what my father would have done. I let out a tidal wave of cuss words that probably went something like this: Jesus H. Christ, goddamned bible backed bastard… punctuated by painful sobs.

            As if that weren’t bad enough, I was suddenly accosted by a girl who had been standing nearby. She was in my class, and already looked down upon me because the teacher clearly didn’t like me, and often picked on me.  As if I wasn’t already traumatized by the teacher and the school and my witness to the terrible words that could flow from the mouths of men, Gabriella turned on me with the pent-up middle-class rage of her own adult community.

            “You’re a racist!” she shouted.

            My finger was throbbing. I was going to lose that fingernail, and that really grossed me out. My heart was sobbing as I tried to figure out what the heck she was talking about.

            “You wouldn’t be making such a big deal about it if he wasn’t black.”

            You could hear the apple cut loose from that old tree and roll toward my feet. Up until that time, I’m not sure I noticed the boy at all. I was preoccupied with my finger. But then I looked up, and I saw the astonished, frozen face of the one African American boy in our school. Did I know that he was African American before Gabriella pointed it out?  I’m not sure. But her words “You’re a racist!” rattled around in my brain for years, effectively making me walk on eggs around any person of color so as not to appear in the least bit racist.

            The truth is, I didn’t really understand what the word “racist” meant. I only knew it was bad, and that my people were somehow marked as bad, and that my father must have been a racist because he swore all the time, and of course the teacher didn’t like me. In this case, Gabriella was the snake who offered me a bite of that apple. Prior to that encounter, I was pretty much unaware of the color of other children. Yet I knew what it meant to be an outsider and treated as “other”. I had somehow internalized the racist remarks about my great grandmother who was a very dark-skinned Mic Mac mix of French Canadian. But I hadn’t yet externalized or understood the concept of racism. Thanks to Gabriella, I now had one more burden to carry through life.

            Gabriella was the daughter of the Unitarian minister in town. She was the kind of student teachers loved having in their classroom. Curious, precocious, and thoroughly middleclass. Both parents had gone to college, whereas mine hadn’t graduated high-school. Her world seemed large and extended to a larger community of adults which I could only glimpse through her interesting show & tells which included Russian nesting dolls and African artifacts. What did I have to show? Not much. I did bring a purple rock found in the potato field, which was supposed to have been an “Indian Stone”. But it didn’t generate much interest among my peers. Clearly, there was no small amount of looking down the nose at me. In fact, my distorted memory has Gabriella towering over me as if she were wearing stilts, while the African American boy and I stood frozen with our jaws equally unhinged.

            I’d like to think that the African American boy and I both ate from the same apple that day. Perhaps he too hadn’t noticed that he was different from the other kids until Gabriella pointed it out.  But I suspect that encounters with varying degrees of racism was nothing new for him. My rude awakening had been slow and painful and muddled by class. Leave it to a middle-class person to assume that I must be a racist because I was comparatively poor. It’s always “those people down South”, “Those redneck crackers”, those “Ignorant mill rats” and someone else to blame. I bet if you asked most people to conjure up the image of a racist, it would be a picture of someone who is white and most likely poor, rural or Southern, except for President Trump thrown into the mix. Yet racism was perpetuated by an owning white class both in the South and the North. Just follow the money, the laws, the institutions and the circles in which wealth travels. I’m not saying my family wasn’t racist or that certain elements of the family aren’t racist now. I haven’t bridged that confrontation yet, and to be honest I’m not close enough to my family to have those kinds of conversations. I travel in different circles that no longer overlap.

            If Gabriella hadn’t handed me the apple and urged me to take a bite, would I have been aware of differences regarding race and class? I don’t know. What I do know is that I took the bait and bit off a large chunk of ISM. Racism, classism and all the little isms that trail behind.  I realized I was naked and had to cover up where I came from. I realized that I must be guilty and therefore ignorant and racist because I was poor. I realized that the boy who slammed my finger in the locker was a different color than me and because I swore about it, I would never be able to have a close relationship with a person of color. I was immediately and long lastingly shamed. Just like Eve.