honey and sting

Racist

I grew up hearing about "colored" people.
Daddy said, pointing, "this is where the colored people live."
I looked, but they were dissappointingly brown.
I had pictured something like my crayola box,
with rainbows sliding across their skin.

3 new kids came to my school.
I thought they looked like monkeys.
They were scared.
Good reason.
I practiced telling myself the girls were pretty,
even though I didn't think so.
They didn't look like my idea
of a pretty girl.
I made myself say, "oh, she's pretty."

A little while after that (I was 12),
someone threw a rock through our front screen door.
It had a burning piece of paper wrapped around it.
We were the dirty Jews, the Christ-killers.

We moved to California. Black is beautiful.
I liked the idea. I looked for it.
My sister brought home a friend with a "curly fro".
We talked about the rollers it took to get it that way.
So it wasn't "natural", after all.
Still, it was fascinating, and I was learning, too,
to do things with my frizzy hair.
I had stopped trying to glue it down
with Dippity Do.

The idea of a nose-job was raised.
I demurred, until I was in college and broke my nose
from a fever and a drug reaction and falling down.
My mother gleefully announced, after it had set wrong,
that I'd need to have it "fixed."

I was starting to like
my Jewish nose, but this was just too much.
Here I am, partly modified, now.

At 53, I still have a little voice in my head that says,
"Black person" when I see a human being with skin tone
darker than mine.
I try to wipe it away, not the fact of it,
but the trail of threat assessment, judgment,
and fear.

Am I racist?
Classist? Sexist? Do I hate Christians,
or have internalized contempt for Jews?
Do I wince at a person who can't walk or see or hear?
Am I an intellectual snob, or a liberal one?

Of course I am.
I don't want to be. But here I am,
with all this stuff, permeating the air I breathe,
the social sea I swim in, the media, the stories,
the linguistic memes. Nigger ass, and dirty Jew,
and female hysteria, and men with male personality disorder.

It's not all I am, thank Goddess or God,
or Darwin, as one friend would have it.
It's not even the main part, anymore.
But still.

I just keep praying, every day,
to be free. To never, ever impose it
on someone else (or myself). To keep digging at the roots,
clawing with my fingernails if I have to, get that stinkweed
out of my garden. I live in this society,
and I'm not better than that.

It would be dangerous
to believe otherwise.


ETA: for anyone responding on LJ, I can see your responses but can't get to LJ from work to answer back. Sorry! Re: question about linking, yes, that's fine, and thanks for asking.