A Tale from Within

A.C. Hawley

NB: In previous columns, I have asked you, the reader, to email me (achawley@gmail.com) with your own personal stories of discrimination and/or racism. This is one of those stories.
    
Dennis (not his actual name) is black, Latino, and white. When he was a youth, he and his brother were adopted by a Mexican family whose skin tone matched his. Although this might have made things easier at home, it amplified the varieties of racism that he experienced as a person.

One of the first stories he told me was a story about when his father was pulled over by the police while driving home from work. His father rolled the window down and began to talk to the officer. The officer pulled his father over because he had some mud on his back windshield, which is in violation of a law that dictates that your car windows need to be reasonably clean so that you can see out of them.


The stop served as a pretense for the officer to pull Dennis’s father over and give him a huge fine. In the process of doing so, Dennis’s father was interrogated in an aggressive tone, told to step out of his car, frisked, and taken to the police department, all for having a little bit of dirt on the back windshield of a car. If you talk to many minority men in the world—myself included—this story is not far beyond the pale. In fact, something similar has happened to most minority men at some point in their lives.

Dennis passed on other stories about ways that his family had been discriminated against based on their skin. One that stood out was when Dennis’s father got a new job and attempted to cash his first paycheck at a bank. The bank would not cash the check; they said he had forged the check. Despite all of his efforts, he could not get the bank to believe that he had earned the check legitimately. The problem wasn’t solved until his boss called the bank. The family’s troubles with the bank did not stop there. The family was also denied the ability to take out a mortgage from a bank even though they could make the payments. Banks that deny loans to minorities is not unusual in America. If you would like to read a history of this practice, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s excellent article “The Case for Reparations” is a very good place to start.

The racism that Dennis’s family experienced translated into his own life. He saw it when he went to school. Dennis and his brother were graded more harshly than his peers. He found that he would be scored consistently lower than his nonminority classmates, even when he had put in considerably more work than them. This was only one way that Dennis felt his teachers in school penalized him for his skin tone.

Another way was through discipline. Dennis recalls that his parents were frequently called due to his “behavioral issues.” These issues included such things as bumping into a white girl in the hallway and being falsely accused of bumping into a teacher. On the other hand, students who were causing actual harm to other students through bullying did not have their parents called, which should have happened. Dennis believed this difference in treatment happened for one reason only: They were white, and he is a minority.
While it is enough to deal with being considered different because of one’s skin color, Dennis had to negotiate another form of otherness. Dennis is also gay. There is a double dislocation that comes from being both gay and a minority. You are already considered to be on the outside if you are a minority. This is only amplified when you are also gay. While many people can see past skin color, they may not be able to see past sexuality.

When Dennis came out, he was in high school. Dennis recalled that he was called a “queer” and a “faggot” many times during that time and afterwards. He said that it is hard being gay where he lives because he lives in a more rural area. In his parts, people are less tolerant to his lifestyle due to their more conservative beliefs.

Dennis believes that his possible friendships have been ruined because of his homosexuality. People will like him as a person, but as soon as they find out he’s gay, the entire relationship changes. People start to treat him like he has a disease or mental illness rather than as a human being. He told me a particularly sad story to this end. Dennis was becoming friends with a man named Phil (not his real name). They would hang out together and have a good time. At one point, Phil found out about Dennis’s homosexuality. Rather than taking it in stride, the once-warm friendship became very cold. Phil told Dennis, “I hate you stupid queers! I don’t support you or your faggot lifestyle!” This is a brutal thing to hear from someone you consider to be a close friend.

All of these various incidents create a struggle within a person, making them grapple with know who they are and how to fit into the world. How would you determine your value when you believe that everyone is out to put you down and make you into less of a person? How can you figure out who you are when your family is subject to undue harassment and prejudice because of how they look, not what they did? How do you figure out your worth when people make decisions about who you are solely based on what you do behind closed doors? For many people reading this column, these are questions that you have not had to face.

For others, these questions hit very close to home. Dennis struggled with his race and sexuality for many years. It is hard to come to grips with being a sexual and racial minority when the world around him was less than accepting of his identity, when his identity served as way to mark him as other rather than as a person. Although he has found peace in his life and made friends that accept him for who he is, he still struggles with his racial identity, trying to understand how all of these different cultures fit together into one cohesive whole.

If you were hesitant to write in before, use Dennis’s strength as inspiration. Tell me your story and contribute to the discussion that I want to start in this space about the ways that discrimination shapes who we are and the world around us. Things will not change through magic. Only we can change ourselves. That can only happen when we recognize the various shapes that discrimination takes around us all, much of which happens in the shadows and through small actions that many of us may not think twice about. By bringing those actions out of the dark and into the light, we can create the world that we all want: a world where we are equal with one another, judged on our talents and abilities rather than our skin and sexuality.