Confessions of a Second-Grade Racist

In the second grade, I invited every kid in my class except one to my birthday party.  That only six kids actually came (two of whom weren’t even in my class) is another story.  It could have something to do with the fact that even then, I was a nerd of the first order.  It could also have to do with the fact that I was a racist.

Here’s the thing: the kid I didn’t invite was black.  The only black kid in the class.

It seems strange to me now that I didn’t realize then that what I was doing was pretty terrible.  Really terrible, actually.  In my defense, the circumstance of her race didn’t figure into my decision to exclude her from my party.  At least not consciously.  The real reason was that she had once pushed past me in line for the slide during recess.  There were other reasons, too, but this one was the most concrete.  The other reasons had to do with a vague sense that this particular person didn’t like me.  I will return to this later.

Anyway, in case you’re inclined to blame my parents: don’t.  They had no idea what I was up to.  I was an independent and strong-willed seven-year-old.  I filled out and addressed the invitations myself.  Had my mom or dad known, they certainly would have stopped me and explained a few things.  In fact, I’m pretty sure this will be the first time my mother has heard of this.  I expect she’ll call shortly to ask if it is true.  Yes mom, it’s true.  Your daughter was a second grade racist.

So I show up at school and start passing out invitations, and when I’m nearly done, the little girl in question (I can’t remember her name) stops me and says, “Where’s mine?”  I shuffle through the pile, shrug, murmur something incomprehensible.  I’m avoiding her eyes, but I know she’s looking directly at me.  When it becomes clear that I have no invitation to give her, she turns and stomps away.

It took me about twenty years to realize that I’d done a really bad thing.  I probably would have realized it sooner, but I’d managed, conveniently, to forget the entire episode until something happened to bring it back.  And now I feel awful about it. 

What I did was wrong on many fronts.  First of all, I should never have excluded anyone like that, regardless of that person’s race.  Especially since I was a nerdy kid who was myself regularly excluded from things and knew first-hand how terrible it feels to be left out.  I should have had more compassion than that. 

And then maybe the little girl’s race had nothing to do with it, but there’s no way she could have known that.  It must have hurt her in ways I can’t even begin to imagine to feel that she was singled out because of something she had no control over.  No one should experience that, especially not a child.  Now that I’m thirty-one and have a child of my own, I know how I will feel if anything like this ever happens to my son.  Anguished.  Outraged.  Appalled. 

Finally, I can’t convince myself that the same thing would have happened if the little girl had been white.  For one thing, I’m sure she wasn’t the only kid to bully me on the playground in the second grade.  Like I said, I was extremely nerdy.  I wore plastic framed glasses with thick, tinted lenses.  I routinely came to school with my sweat pants tucked into the tops of my galoshes, which I wore even when it wasn’t raining.  I used words like “eccentric” and “pulverize.”  As you can probably imagine, this didn’t impress my peers so much as confirm for them that I was weird.  So I can pretty much guarantee that I was picked on by a number of my classmates.  Yet when I addressed invitations to my birthday party, the only person whom I remembered picking on me was the black girl.  It may be that she was crueler to me than the others, but I doubt it.  I suspect that she stood out in my memory simply because she stood out in general.  In other words, because she was black.

As for my vague sense that she didn’t like me: It should be pretty clear to you that probably a lot of kids in my second grade class didn’t like me.  Like I said, I was weird.  So why did this particular girl’s enmity bother me more than anyone else’s?  Perhaps it had to do with the aforementioned obvious difference that this girl’s skin happened to be darker than everyone else’s.  In case you’re wondering, I grew up in a very small, very white community.  Most of my exposure to other races and cultures came through Sesame Street.  It’s entirely possible that this girl was the first honest-to-goodness dark-skinned person with whom I had ever directly interacted.  So maybe I found her more threatening than the others because she looked different.  It’s also possible that our misunderstanding was cultural.  I’m a little wary of this particular hypothesis, though, since I don’t actually know anything about her background.  But it is a possibility.

So anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I didn’t mean to be a racist, but I was.  This isn’t a fun thing to admit, and it’s tempting to try to lessen my own culpability by drawing all sorts of grand conclusions about human nature – i.e., that human beings are programmed to categorize and exclude other humans, or that a bullied child will look for opportunities to bully others.  I don’t want to do this, in part because these sorts of theories tend to perpetuate the very things they explain, but also because doing so wouldn’t change the fact that in the second grade, I committed an injustice that hurt another person.  And I am sincerely very sorry.