“Her smart. Her think she white,” the oversized mahogany-skinned girl whispered to her posse of girls in the hallway of lockers at my middle school in a town in Southern Louisiana. The girls walked away— looking annoyed and childish. When I turned around from my locker, I could see them exiting the school door. I stood there – looking puzzled and shocked. I could not imagine why she would make such an indictment of me. High yellow, I was, but I was simply being me. On my bus ride home that afternoon, I could still hear her voice, “Her think she white.”
I’ve traveled many thousands of miles across the great state of Louisiana, the United States, and many countries around the globe, yet my grade school classmate’s words haunt me still. But why did her words bother me so?
At the time of the incident, I think I was offended by her poor English grammar. After all, if you are going to taunt someone, you should at least use good English. Right? I wanted to fire back at her by saying, “You mean to say ‘She is smart.’“ I wanted to school her on the correct usage of pronouns and subject and verb agreement. But I’m not sure that she would have known any better. I was, after all, a grammar nerd in middle school and yes, I was smart. She was right, so why have her words continued to haunt me?
Looking back on her words, “Her think she white,” I now realize that she had no imagination to see that being smart has no color attached to it; that black, brown, red, yellow, and white people all have the capacity to be intelligent.
My parents had modeled for and instilled in my brother and me a love for books and intellectual curiosity, and they had purposed before we were born that both of us would go the college, so they started a savings account for each of us. Wanting more opportunity and access for us than they had experienced themselves, my parents had both gone to college: Mother graduated from Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA, with a Bachelor of Arts degree; and my father attended Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, as part of his professional development paid for by his company, and prior to this, he had served his country in the United States Army, stationed mostly in Germany.
One of my fondest childhood memories is a family vacation to College Station because my daddy wanted my brother and me to see where he attended college, so my dad and my mother packed the car, and we journeyed west to Texas. Being on the Texas A&M University campus made quite an impression on me. Dad took us to his favorite spot to study in the library. The smell of books in the library offered a familiar comfort to me. At that time, fewer racially diverse students attended the university, but my dad stood as tall, dark, and strong like an Oak tree to represent us.
Like Dad, my mother had a passion for learning, and she demonstrated her love for learning through teaching Math and English at Bethune High School, a mostly black school with grades elementary through high school. This red brick school building in my home town holds a special place in my heart, particularly because the school closed due to legal integration the year I started grade school. But even before I was old enough to attend elementary school, my mother would take me with her to school for mother-daughter visits. Sitting in her classes and seeing her teach, her high school students and I were captivated by her intelligence, as her tall, lean, fair frame moved about her classroom. Little did I know that my love affair with learning would seduce me for years to come.
When I gave my speech as the first Valedictorian student (of color) at Welsh High School, a predominately white school, I did not see the oversized mahogany-skinned girl in my graduating class. I’m not even sure if she graduated from high school but perhaps night school. I’m not sure if she remembers her words to me that fateful day. I wonder if she ever had the epiphany -- that being smart and being black can be quite synchronous. Most importantly, I’m not sure why I allowed her words to attach themselves to my skin and live there for these many years. I could not fault her for her words without bearing full responsibility for harboring them in my skin.
Dr. Maya Angelou has said, “Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.”
Like Dr. Angelou, I over the years have been obligated to challenge myths and stereotypes whenever they are spoken in my presence; something, in hindsight, I should have championed even as early as middle school.
Reference
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706799-words-are-things-you-must-be-careful-careful-about-calling
Dr. Mary Alice Trent is currently Professor of English and the Chair of the Division of Modern Language and Literature at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, USA. She is the Founder and Past Chair of the Conference on Christianity, Culture, and Diversity in America. Along with a number of journal articles and poetry and story publications, Dr. Trent has edited the book, Ethics in the 21st Century America in 2005 by Pearson Longman in Boston/NYC. She has also co-edited The Language of Diversity, published in 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in Newcastle, England; and Religion, Culture, Curriculum, and Diversity in America, published in 2007 by University Press of America in Lanham, Maryland. She is the co-editor of Cultivating Visionary Leadership by Learning for Global Success: Beyond the Language and Literature Classroom, published in 2015 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in Newcastle, England. She has presented at more than 60 regional, national and international conferences. Moreover, she has taught as a visiting professor at LCC International University during the Summer English Language Institute in Klaipeda, Lithuania; and she has taught at Beijing Union University in Beijing, China, where she taught a lecture on the American Harlem Renaissance.