It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
I come home from work full of rage. My nephew-son greets me at the door with a smile on his face. I started raising him when he was 10 months, after the unexpected death of my sister. He is African-American, now 15 years old — tall, athletic, and one of the kindest people I know. He presents his resilient open heart to everyone he meets.
He says, “Hi, Momma, how are you today?” I love it when he calls me that. There is an uptick to his voice. It is sweet. He calls me “Momma” only sometimes, which makes it special. He says it when he is excited to see me or overjoyed about something he wants to tell me.
I do not acknowledge his kind question or the sweet tone of his voice. I just start right in on him, barking out accusatory questions and orders: “Why is the trash can and recycling bin still on the corner of the street? Go outside and get it right now.” I can hear my misplaced rage, but I cannot stop myself from projecting it onto him
Why am I so agitated? I take inventory. A minority student came by my office upset about being called on in class to speak as a representative of her race. I had to translate her pain to my white colleagues. I pitched a proposal to a senior colleague for resources I need for some of my projects and was told that I did not need them. I felt patronized. A friend, another African-American female faculty member, called me to share her frustration about an idea she had posed to her colleagues that was not validated until a male colleague repeated it. A prospective minority student asked me if I thought her experiences would be honored, and if she would be cared for in our community. Although my picture is on the front of the brochure for the program she is considering, and we intentionally aim for cultural inclusion, I cannot guarantee her psychological safety. I felt sad.
My nephew-son interrupts my inventory and asks, “Momma, what happened to you today?” This time his love reaches under my rage, and I hug him and greet him properly.
It occurs to me that my anger is about more than just the day’s perceived slights but flows from events that have occurred throughout the year. I head out the door for a long walk to sort it all out.
Racism overflows my daily life and distorts my view of my relationships. It buzzes around me all day, erupts from inside of me, and then I bring that agitation home with me. I regularly experience subtle slights in which I cannot rule out the influence of racism. A store clerk looks past me and serves another customer first when I am clearly next in line. Students question me insistently about an assignment that I describe in detail in my 17-page syllabus. I realize that racism may not be the motivating factor in these examples. But as an African-American woman, I cannot rule out race as an influence.
I put these types of microaggressions through my racial screening regularly and choose not to act. Sadly, I do this screening effortlessly. It is a tax I automatically pay to exist.
‘Racism overflows my daily life and distorts my view of my relationships. It buzzes around me all day, erupts from inside of me, and then I bring that agitation home with me.’
About eight minutes into my walk, I begin counting the accumulated events of the past school year that may have tipped the scales on this particular day. The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; the fact that the police officer who shot him was not indicted; a 7-foot-tall effigy of a Ku Klux Klan member erected on my own campus — it was an art project, but terrifying nonetheless; Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity’s racist chant at the University of Oklahoma; the racially motivated killing of nine black men and women in a Charleston, S.C., church.
I see on the news a number of African-American males losing their lives through questionable encounters with law enforcement. I am afraid for my nephew-son.
It seems to me that we do not acknowledge the fact that you cannot live in this country without having received very specific messages about racial privilege and marginalization. Yet we continue to act as if racism is a surprise rather than an ordinary atrocity. We don’t realize how many of our relationships are affected by it.
I remember my nephew-son coming home from school one day when he was in the third grade and declaring that he “was not like the other black kids.” I asked him what he meant. He said his white friends had told him he didn’t talk like the other black kids, or wear his clothes like them, or cut his hair the way they did. He said: “I am different — I mean, I’m an American!” Then he burst into tears. “I feel like I just insulted my entire race,” he said.
I told him that he was the one who got to choose what it means for him to be black. And, in third-grade language, I explained to him that his white friends were conditioned to view him through their distorted understanding of race and whatever signified, to them, their racial privilege in order to make sense of how to fit him into their group.
I know that my colleagues, for example, or random sales clerks, for that matter, are not intentionally trying to disempower or dehumanize me. Even so, if racism were a disease, most Americans would want to believe it is in remission. We interact daily denying its presence and are therefore unable to treat it, to stave off its effects. The first step in any treatment is to acknowledge that there is an illness.
I embody many paradoxes of privilege and marginality. I am a highly educated, heterosexual, cisgender female. I am a homeowner and have health care and a retirement plan. I am from a two-parent household where both my mother and my father earned college degrees. I occupy a position of status as a tenured associate professor at a research-intensive university. Even though I hold these privileges, I also exist in a society that devalues my race and my gender. It is impossible to see my privileged experiences without the cloak of my marginalized ones.
Living in a racialized society is like having an infection that eats away at my sense of calm and reason. I find that I have to review my interactions to tease out which parts have been tainted.
I am always looking for the antidote, constantly trying to manage the pain, so that I can keep intact my relationships with colleagues, students, and my sweet boy. I must resist the distortion that this disease of racism has interjected into my life. When I arrive home and my nephew-son greets me, I want to see him clearly, not through the scrim of my rage.
Sherry K. Watt is an associate professor of educational policy and leadership studies at the University of Iowa.