The "n" word....we have not changed as much as we would like to believe

I shared my last blog entry on Facebook and someone commented that all the old bigots would have to die off before we ended racism.  Today I wonder if all the old bigots died off, would that even make a difference?

This is my second year to mentor a delightful six year old girl who happens to be Black. She loves all things princess. We have had a few conversations about skin color, the first one being when she was doing a color page of a princess and got to which crayola she wanted to use for the skin color.  She preferred the peach color, saying she wanted her princess to be white. She giggled a little self-conciously when she told me that.  I asked her if the princess could have Black skin color, and she told me no, she wanted her to be white.  "Princesses are white", she told me.

I am familiar with the Black/White doll experiment. In the 1940's and the 1950's, and again in the year 2010, given the choice of a Black baby doll or a White baby doll, children of color more often chose the White baby doll as the "nice doll", or the one they would want to play with. In 1954 in Brown v Board of Education the experiment helped to persuade the American Supreme Court that “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites were anything but equal in practice and therefore against the law. (This link is to the Anderson Cooper replication http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/kids.on.race/) and this link is to the 1940s experiment  done by Dr. and Mrs. Clark. http://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/the-clark-doll-experiment/)

Today I saw my mentee and we had lunch as usual in the library. I mostly let her talk about whatever is on her mind, but usually start the conversation asking about how she is doing, and how is her family?  She told me today that one of her neighbors called her daddy the "n" word while he was outside bar-b-queing.  I told her that was not very nice, and I was sorry someone would say that.

She then told me that on the school bus, they had a new bus driver, and kids thought they could all be bad, and some were saying "the "n" word, the "f" word, and even the "a" word."  I pulled out her princess coloring book and the crayolas, and asked her what a princess would do? She assured me that princesses would not act like that! Her daddy calls her a princess, she told me, and I asked her to remember how a princess would act when others are being bad.  It was good to see her today, and I left feeling happy to be her mentor.

There was a phone call this afternoon from my birth father, which was such a contrast to that, I just had to blog. He and I reunited 20 years ago, and although we are very different, we have maintained a phone call relationship.  We most particularly differ around politics. When he called today, I could hear the TV on in the background, and someone was going on and on about President Obama.  He began telling me how much he  "hated that "nigger", how much he wished he could go to the White House and blow that "nigger" up.  Obama is a liar and a no good "nigger"and he hated him so much he could not see straight."

I know last election I had told my dad he could not use that word when speaking with me.  I interjected and asked him (again) to not use that word, to no avail.  He continued calling him the "n" word.  I was so horrified and was searching my mind for some way to steer this in another direction.  I reminded my dad that so much of the political posturing and the political ads really were for the undecided voter, and clearly he was decided on how he was voting, and I was also decided on how I would be voting. Clearly we did not need to discuss this because we each had our own mind made up, and not likely that either one of us was changing the other's mind.  My dad replied with a bit of anger in his voice, "Well, I will just cancel out your vote", to which I replied, "Yes, maybe you will." Not content to let it go, he began ranting again about the President and continued to refer to him as the "n" word.  I told my dad I had to go and quickly hung up.

Mind you, this man did not raise me. A good man, a liberal thinking, civil rights activist adopted me and my 4 siblings when I was six years old. This adopted father reminded us often that just because we happened to have white skin, we were not any better than anyone else. Our being white had nothing to do with anything we did, we just happened to be born that way.

I was six years old, and this man made a profound impact on how I view justice, equality, racism, the rights of all people. My mentee is only six years old, and already she is hearing hateful words spewed by those in her neighborhood and in her school. She already believes that White is the preferred skin color for princesses. What other disempowering beliefs will she come to have about herself, her race, her place in society?