EXCERPT

Chapter One – Disorientation: Evidence and Experience

2. Disorientating Childhood

A QUICK SURVEY REVEALS THAT ALMOST EVERY BLACK autobiographical narrative has a moment of disorientation. The Black epiphany, if you will, is linked to a moment of formative racialization.

Eighteenth Century

The beginning of racialization for Venture Smith, author of one of the earliest slave narratives, comes as a literal ambush. A “violent blow on the head.” A rope around his neck. A march toward the sea. i

About twenty years later in 1757, when writer Olaudah Equiano beholds a slave ship and white people for the first time, he is so disoriented that he thinks he has entered a spiritual dimension: “I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.” His words for disorientation are astonishment and terror, feelings that later settle into horror and anguish. His disorientation at seeing Black people chained together on the ship, at seeing the system of whiteness at work, is so overpowering that he “fell motionless on the deck and fainted.” ii

Nineteenth Century

As a little boy in New England, W.E.B. Du Bois is disoriented when a tall, white girl rejects his card: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in hear and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” For Du Bois, that moment of disorientation is sudden, clarifying, a “revelation [that] first bursts upon one, all in a day.” iii

Twentieth Century

James Baldwin suggests that we enter the world with a sense of equality, until a moment or period of disorientation intervenes: “It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” He refers to disorientation as “a great shock” twice in that debate. iv

In West Baltimore, a kid pulls a gun on Ta-Nehisi Coates. He goes home and realizes that other kids, those on TV, those in the suburbs, do not fear for their bodies. He “felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me.” His epiphany is of “a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty.” v

In grade 3, Ibram X. Kendi comes to understand that injustice or unfairness is not, in fact, arbitrary. He notices his white teacher ignore the hand of a shy Black girl, who worked up her courage to participate, then call on a favoured White student. He recalls his fury and her sadness. From the back of the class, to recover, he says, “I needed some time to think.” vi vii

In How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston surveys his friends to find out when they realized they were Black and what Blackness meant, an experiment I don’t need to repeat. One woman, Jacquetta Szathmari, recalls that one day at day camp, as she was about to dive into the water, a white kid said that the grease in her hair would ruin Chesapeake Bay. You can hear how stunned she was at the moment: “I was like, ‘Wow, okay, that’s racism, and that’s what it’s going to mean for a little while for me to be black.” More pointedly: “That’s when I realized that maybe being black could suck a little bit.” viii

Twenty-first Century

A girl calls my niece a n###. My niece had heard the word n### before in the very car where she told my brother about the incident. My brother enjoys his music. The word is integral to rap. It’s used in many ways. His daughter had asked about it. Why they keep saying that? My brother, I imagine, unwilling to give up his music in the erosion of middle-age, taught her about context—who says n###, and, somewhat confusingly, why she shouldn’t.

My brother and I knew the word n### before it was ever used on us. (Because of his children, I won’t tell you how it was used on him.) In Trinidad, children make decisions by singing:

Eeenie, meenie, minie, mo.

Catch a n### by the toe.

When he ready, let him go.

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo

In Canada, kids sang a sanitized version involving a tiger. My brother and I looked at each other, surprised by their naiveté.

In all of the above cases of disorientation, differences are amplified. In all cases, the disorientation that accompanies racial experiences marks an emerging awareness of dominance, a place for the Black person in the hierarchy of whiteness. In all cases, it appears suddenly when one is unprepared to think of oneself in racial terms. In all cases, disorientation is the reaction to a somewhat violent action. It’s the violence of being born. Racialized people are born again into a system we do not choose to inherit. But, inevitably, we must be born.

No doubt, children often have an understanding of difference and race before a direct encounter with it. These moments of disorientation are not simply the introduction of a concept, but the recruitment of one’s emotion and participation in the ordering system of whiteness. Whether these experiences are, in fact, the first or the fiftieth incident is not important. The important thing is the force of childhood disorientation to restructuring our understanding of the world.

White kids don’t have those racially disorienting moments, at least not in the same way. If they are mocked for freckles or red hair or a piggish nose, it’s not racialized. It comes with an understanding of a rather benign difference amplified, but without systemic backing.

For Black children, early moments of disorientation are rarely linked to, Oh, what lovely braids you have. Race is rarely introduced in the positive, affirmative, empowering, almost never in the superior—unless pejoratively or with hyper-voiced good intentions.

For Du Bois and Kendi, disorientation came as refusals to be acknowledged. For Smith, Equiano, and Coates, it came from being in sudden physical danger. For my niece, it came verbally at school when she was called n###. For a lot of us, our first hierarchical introduction to race, our “blow on the head,” is linked to that word.

I’m going to say it and only this once. Nigger.