The Master Race
This is the phrase that keeps
popping up inside my head. What does this mean?
It’s a bit like pre-destination.
People are either born with it or without. Despite DNA, personality, determination,
physical ability. A master race is about who your parents and grandparents are.
The color of your skin, the color of your eyes, the shape of your lips, nose.
Growing up, even as a little
kid, I knew all these distinctions who so unfair. Yet, I didn’t know what to
do. I remember my father shouting at the TV, at a black football player, C’mon you
spook, pick up the ball! I remember Howard Cosell, TV sports commentator,
calling an African-American player a monkey. My father referred to Brazil nuts
on the bridge mix as “nigger toes.”
I also remember a tension
rising up inside of me, an inner voice whispering: This isn’t right.
No one had to tell me. Of
course I was curious. Were Jews schemers? Money grabbers? I had no idea, I’d
never met any. Until one day in 3rd grade for show and tell one of
my classmates brought in her mother, a woman who seemed small and slightly
hysterical. Her eyes darted around the room. The story she began to tell was
about a camp, but it was unlike any camp I’d ever been to. She and her family
escaped. She recounted how when they finally got something to eat her mother
screamed at her about dropping a crumb. The tone of the mom’s voice (the one
sitting in front of our group) was high-pitched, tight with emotion. There was palpable
fear in her voice and eyes.
Afterwards I read as many Holocaust
survivor stories as I could get my hands on through the library and the
Scholastic book club. Like this book where I read about the Brown Shirts:
Then there was this:
The day after Martin Luther
King, Jr. was killed a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom
experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to
children with brown eyes. I must have seen a clip of this on the news because I
remember a part where a young girl begins to tear up from shame, from the affront
of racism, the coldness of the teacher and loneliness when her friends turned
their back on her.
I have many more memories of—what
can I call it? except—that feeling that this is not right.
God, it’s been forty years
and why am I sitting here at the keyboard crying. Yet I can so vividly recall
the horror and—here’s something important—the implied implication, the
collective guilt I felt. I believe (this is not science, just a theory) that
all children with a conscience must also feel this and how they act upon these
feelings determines who they will be for the rest of their life. Either someone
who empathizes with those being discriminated against or someone who denies
that feeling, rationalizes it away, or decides it’s not important. Or maybe
even a joke.
I can remember as if it were
yesterday: my friend’s parents had adopted African American children. Nicole’s
brother and sister were black. They came to the house to pick up Nicole, likely
the parents were out in the car because they didn’t live in our neighborhood.
Without knowing who the child ringing the doorbell was my brother made the
wisecrack, Hide the chicken. (We were sitting down at the dinner table.) And
this is what I remember the most, how hard my parents laughed. I was horrified walking
to answer the door. I didn’t have the words back then. My anger only made them laugh
louder.
I’ve watched the clips of the
Unite the Right March in Charlottesville, the news conferences and press
statements by --- and I’m telling you now—that feeling rolls over me like
waves. A hand flutters to my mouth.
I cannot change my past, the
color of my skin, eyes, my nose and lips, but I can use this mouth to speak.
This is not right.
I think I’m going to be sick
for a long, long time.
Comments