The Day I Became A Nigger

December 31, 1997 — Just like every winter break, I spent this one in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. at my dad and step-mum’s house. I had a few friends in the area, and this time, one of them invited me to join her and her cousin at a New Years party in Bowie, Maryland. So exciting!! I was fifteen and had never been invited to a New Years event before. No parents! Boys I didn’t know! And in Bowie – home of a new minor league baseball team in the Baltimore Orioles family. I’d been there for a game, and I liked it.

I don’t remember how much time I spent preparing, but I remember wanting to look attractive. My dad suggested I might not want to go to the party because Bowie might not be as cool as I thought, but I waved him off. “Dad, this is the 90s. Just because we’re south of the Mason-Dixon line doesn’t mean everyone’s a racist. You’re white. You’re not.”

Mary’s sister picked me up and drove us me, her, her cousin, and a male friend the 30 minutes to Bowie. We were slated to be picked up sometime after midnight. This was 1997, so none of us had a cell phone, but Mary’s sis had the number for the house.

When we got there, I think we were a bit disappointed. No hot guys really, and it was fairly quiet. We giggled because they were a little backwoods. Then again, it was Bowie — not in the DC Metropolitan area. So who could expect them to be as cool as we were?

People didn’t talk to me much, but I took this as a confirmation of my low self-esteem: I wasn’t pretty and my breasts were small, so I wasn’t really the one to talk to. Mary and her cousin were definitely more deserving of the attention.

“Nigger …” I don’t know what the rest of the sentence was. But I came from Los Angeles, from 1997, from the modern era. So I said, “What did you say? Were you talking about me?” And he said, “I was talking about some niggers. Not Mexicans like you.”

Was I stupid to come out? Perhaps. I said to him, “I’m Black. Don’t use that word.” And suddenly the room collapsed. People were saying things like, “There’s a nigger at the party.” I don’t know how I got there, but suddenly I was screaming at someone to shut up, that they were wrong, that this wasn’t okay. And we were using the phone to try and call Mary’s sister, who I think wasn’t answering. We were hoping to get picked up, to get the hell out of there.

It turned out that that night was the coldest night of the year in the area. Which added to the pain when we were essentially forced to leave the party. There was some concern as to whether we were safe. As the evening crawled toward midnight, we were essentially in the middle of nowhere with no money and nowhere to go. We decided to walk back toward a crossection of highways that we remembered passing through. There were no sidewalks, so we walked down the street.

We got to the intersection and happily discovered there was one lone business — a McDonalds! They had closed minutes before, but we banged on the door, pleading with the manager to let us in. We had not dressed for the cold. I was in a pair of docs and a dress and a coat. Mary was in heals and something approximating a jacket. Etc.

The manager pointed us to a callbox outside the restaurant and proceeded to ignore us. As I write this, I am remembering to thank my mother for letting me memorize her calling card number. We didn’t have any change, and I didn’t know anything about calling someone collect. Tearfully, I called my dad, told him the intersection we were at, and begged him to come pick us up. He promised he’d be there in 40 minutes.

Those 40 minutes were some of the worst moments of my life. As my watch turned to midnight and 1998 began, I was shivering in a huddle with three friends, trying to get as much heat possible from four cigarettes that we had lit up and were holding in the middle of our circle.

To their credit, Mary, her cousin and friend Mike stuck with me. They never questioned my reaction, they stood up for me, and they walked out with me. They huddled with me, and they comforted me while we stood in the cold. Never once was the blame ever laid at my feet for what had happened. You’ve probably guessed by now that they were white, and I am not.

It took me a long time to feel safe around white guys my age again. Every time I saw one that I wanted to meet or talk to, I thought “but what if he is thinking nigger in the back of his head?” I thank those three who stood by my side for keeping me from thinking that this is how all white people are. And my dad for being aware enough of racism to try and warn me. Not everyone is so conscientious. I wasn’t.

–

Today the US remembered Martin Luther King, Jr. and though Canada doesn’t really bother to take a moment to remember him, I took a couple of hours to have some alone time. I decided to watch “This Is England,” which captures of a snapshot of working class youth in small town England during 1983, in the midst of the Faulklands War. The film confronts head on the painful mixture of sorrow at lost comrades, nationalism, and racism that combine when people have been kicked in the teeth enough times. And as I watched the individualized violence it can beget, I realized how grateful I am that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and so many others marched and spoke out to try and end that violence. (And Malcolm X was killed in part because he stopped advocating another kind of race-based violence against Jews.)

I’m lucky nothing happened to me, physically, at that party. I didn’t even catch a cold the next day, I don’t think. But I realize now what could have happened. It scares the living daylights out of me. What scares me more is that I might carry that experience with me and never do anything productive with it.

May I always find the strength to walk a path that is inspired by Dr. King.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries…. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. — MLK on the Vietnam War, April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination.