I Was A Casual Racist Once

The path of life, learning, unlearning, evolving, and growing.

I want to set the scene.

Probably out of my ego and pride, I want to ensure that my readers are fully aware of my “origin story”, as it were. For context, for background, to place you in the time and setting in which I was steeped as a person.

I was born in rural upstate South Carolina, nestled in the low valleys of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, in 1982. Between 1983 and 1989, my older brother and I cycled through eight foster homes. Most were abusive in some way, some were abusive in all ways, and our early formative years of language were percolated in the lexicon of white southern redneck.

Some of those homes flew Ol’ Dixie. Most of those homes threw around language that would make David Duke proud. Our foster homes were all white, as was extremely common in those days. Placing a black child in a white foster home was not done.

Even in the lowest dregs of societal shit, we segregated ourselves.

Foster homes were a bit different then. Typically a family would set aside a room, sometimes even a utility room, garage, etc., and line it with metal bunk beds. They’d take as many fosters as the state would give them, and we (especially those of us under school age) would stay on that property 24/7.

We did not go to the doctor. We did not go to preschool or daycare. We did not leave the property. And this is how it came to be that I did not lay eyes on a black person in real life (not television), to my knowledge, until I was at a McDonald’s when I was four, almost five years old (I remember the visit so keenly because it was Christmastime, and the only gift I received that year was a Pound Puppy gifted to me by my social worker at our quarterly check-in, which happened that year at a McDonald’s).

I was raised in those early years steeped in the belief that “they” were so different from us we just weren’t meant to be together in any meaningful way in society.

I simply did not know any differently.

In August of 1989, my brother and I were adopted into the home of a United Methodist pastor. Shortly thereafter, we met one of his friends and associates, the man who would go on to become the first black bishop of the South Carolina United Methodist Conference (an honor that would later lead to him being stabbed by a rabid racist in the parking lot of a church after a meeting). The black pastor baptized my brother and I, his dark skin a cloying mystery to me.

My male adopter made humble-brag statements about his “involvement” in the Civil Rights Movement, which consisted of letter writing campaigns safely behind his desk, far away from the protests in the streets and sit-ins in the lunch counters, the snarling dogs and stinging pepper spray.

He insisted he was always on the side of the black community, seeking to overthrow their oppression and secure their equality in our society.

But what lay between those words, the years of behaviors, word choices, comments, and vague references, would tell an entirely different story. The casual racism that coated certain gestures, benevolent as they may have seemed, that’s the stuff that rubbed off on me and colored my own view of black people during my formative years.

What follows is a story of deep self-examination, one that continues to this day, and a conscious, intentional unraveling of decades of innocuous, filmy racist ideology that clung to the webs of my mind for far too long.

I had to admit I was casually racist before I could unlearn it.

Photo by Josh Berendes on Unsplash

The Early Years

My elementary years were spent in a town so small it could hardly be called one at all. A mere few hundred inhabitants, and from my recollection, nearly everyone I came in contact with was white.

In fact, we were in white towns with white churches and white schools for most of my childhood. Even though we moved as he was transferred to different churches, it felt like each town was a continuation of the last.

The one exception was the brief period, one or two years, when my female adopter decided that she would boldly, bravely, and self-sacrificially take up the mantle of teaching “inner city” children. This is when that ‘racist film’, the murky stuff that coated even seemingly benevolent actions, set in.

She went through her class list and bemoaned the “strange” names. She made a point of sharing some of those names with anyone who would listen, along with anecdotes about how hard she scrubbed to get the “hair grease” out of her shirts from where the small children would sit on her lap.

Now, many subtly racist comments and behaviors slid under my radar in those early years, but I cringed when she talked about those kids to other people, other middle-class white people who crowed about her benevolence and spirit of charity in taking such an unpleasant job to work with those poor black kids down in the hood.

I cringed because it reminded me, even in the moment, of how she humble-bragged about adopting us, even when we were standing right there. Her need to feel seen and validated as some hero overrode the very humanity of the people she claimed to “save”. It was not a job, just as it was not an adoption, for altruistic purposes: it was to bolster her resume as a white savior.

Further, we never, ever had black visitors to our home. In fact, the only time a person of color came to our home in my childhood was to maintain our lawn or clean our house.

Yes, I’m serious.

High School Hierarchies

By the time I was in high school, we had moved around a couple of times and landed in yet another predominantly white, ultra-small rural South Carolina town: one light on Main Street, everyone knew everyone, and whispers of an active KKK organization.

The town population demographics were reflected in our high school: just shy of 25% black. I had black classmates, marching band-mates, and friends, for the first time in my life. I enjoyed spending time with them, although I frequently felt completely foreign in their presence, as if they were speaking a completely different language.

(I now know that they were; I learned what code-switching is and how often it was done around me, how my black “friends” held me at arm’s length with mistrust, and how they did not let me into their inner circle of friendship and camaraderie. My embarrassment now is that I expected them to.)

The first comment that dug itself into my memory was a casual statement made by my female adopter. In a discussion with another adult, their identity unimportant and lost to time, the topic of the black students at my high school came up. Because my adopter had that experience working in that “inner city” school, she was, of course, the local foremost expert on black people, I suppose. I recall how arrogantly she pronounced:

“We do have black students in this high school, but they’re the best kind. They know their place. They behave.”

Man, that statement dug into my psyche. I contemplated the black friends I had at school. How polite they were around my parents. How polite they were around me. How cautious. How stand-offish.

They weren’t “behaving”. They had been trained restraint borne from fear.

They reined in some of the most glorious, effervescent aspects of their personality to be more beige. For us. For our “comfort.”

The “know their place” rhetoric was not a one-time offhand comment. It was a recurring theme, up until the one explosive incident that cemented how my adopters truly felt about black people, especially black boys.

The one recreational activity in that little slow town was something we teenagers called “cutting town.” Also historically referred to as “cruising”, the gist is simple: teenagers pile in cars and drive slowly all the way down the main drag, turn into a parking lot and socialize, switch cars, before setting back down the strip again. Just driving back and forth, sometimes for hours, seeing and being seen.

That was it.

I was cutting town with my friend (a white girl with a single mom who lived in a trailer, which already made my adopters not like her) on a Sunday afternoon, in broad daylight. When we stopped at the parking lot, two black boys from school jumped in the car, and we turned and set off down the strip again.

Now, in a town this size, one thing was certain: there were eyes everywhere. I’m still unsure if it was Hazel down at the Bantam Chef Grille, or Suzanne at the drugstore, but someone called my home phone and alerted my adopters that I was riding in a car with black boys.

By the time we reached the end of the strip and pulled into the parking lot, my female adopter was there waiting. The back door was wrenched open, I was hauled out bodily by my arm and summarily thrown into her car. Her face was beet red with rage, and, I can only presume, embarrassment. She could barely speak, spittle flying from her mouth as she launched into a tirade.

I was immediately sentenced to six months’ grounding, a time period which covered my junior prom. Even my male adopter tried to reason with her, to allow me to go to prom, but she held firm.

“How will she respect me if I back down on my punishment?” she screamed at him, as if I had even an ounce of respect for her by that point.

It was as clear as day: my innocent adolescent car ride may have only been irksome to her when it was with the “white trash” girl, but once black boys entered the scene, her rage was white-hot and palpable.

I got the message. Several weeks later, when a cute light-skinned classmate with a sprinkle of freckles across his nose left a note in my locker, confessing a crush and requesting to spend time together, I folded it up into the smallest square, pretended I never got it, and avoided his gaze for weeks.

I knew he, and anyone with his skin tone, was strictly and absolutely off-limits in my home.

Which was wild for people who wrote such strongly worded letters in support of the Civil Rights Movement.

We demand equality. Just not under our roof.

Photo by Chris on Unsplash

University

I went off to university and was delighted to find that a friend, a black girl I’d met in a summer camp the prior summer, was living just a few doors down and would be on drumline with me in the university marching band.

We instantly became fast friends. She was part of our growing friend group [of white girls]. Well-educated and well-spoken, she was “just like us.” I heard a phrase one day and repeated it more than once to her:

“You’re just like an Oreo… white on the inside, black on the outside!”

How I cringe now. How I wince and want to travel through time to snatch back those words. The implication with this phrase, which was extraordinarily common at the time, was that a black person being well-spoken and well-educated was displaying “white” characteristics, as if only white people were capable of behaving that way.

She laughed off these comments good-naturedly, but of course I really can’t ever fathom how she felt. I was in my very first stages of detoxing from an extraordinarily sheltered, abusive home environment, so I was just simply not a very good friend at that time. I was drinking myself to oblivion every weekend, partying, trying to drown the rush of emotions finally freed and honestly, trying to delay actively processing all the trauma I’d endured.

She was, on reflection, insanely patient and good to me. A real friend.

Years later, we reconnected on Facebook, and I did apologize to her and take ownership of those awful decisions, and comments, I was making at the time. By then, she had read some of my writing and, in the largesse of her giant heart, had already found empathy and forgiveness for me once she understood what I was processing at that time.

We remain friends to this day.

The Real World

In September of 2001, shit got real. I watched on a tiny, grainy television from the pizzeria where I worked as a plane hit the Twin Towers and we were plunged into an entirely different America, just like that.

I enlisted in the Navy and after many months of being in limbo, shipped out to Great Lakes, IL, for basic training.

Suddenly I was surrounded by women of all stripes:

…blonde white girl from Minnesota
…brash Latina from LA
…shy refugee from Haiti
…bold black woman from Harlem.

The variety of America was on full display in our division, a true melting pot of many of the cultures and ethnicities represented. At this point, I knew enough about life and the world to do one thing: keep my mouth shut.

But even without words, we can cross cultural boundaries without knowing. While performing our daily “field day” [cleaning], I was assigned to sweeping the deck. I was rushing, as we all were, and as I swept around the rack [bunk] of the fiery black woman from Harlem, I accidentally brushed part of the broom over the tip of her shoe.

She reared back, stopped only by a nearby woman from clocking me dead in my face. I was clueless, apologizing profusely, thinking perhaps she was super averse to dirt on her feet.

Once she calmed down, she informed me of her cultural practice that instilled a belief that if your feet were swept, you would never get married. She did not explain this in a kind way. She was clearly not thrilled with having to explain what was, to her, a common cultural fact, one well-known in her home neighborhood, to a southern white girl.

I apologized profusely, again, and then began making what would prove to be a pattern of mistakes. I tried to be her friend.

Time and again, I reached out to her. She rebuffed each and every advance, growing more and more frustrated with my attempts. Finally, she snapped, “I don’t like you; we are not friends and we don’t need to be. Leave me alone.”

This was not the first time during my Navy enlistment that I would be met with this reaction when attempting to befriend a woman of color.

I realized in time that I am not owed anyone’s friendship, particularly women who are of a heritage or cultural background that has been historically and systemically oppressed by people of my heritage and cultural background.

I am not my ancestors, but I wear their skin. No one owes me friendship because of that or in spite of it.

Nonprofit, Social Work, and Representation

After completing my enlistment and going to college for a couple of years, I began working in the nonprofit sector. I discovered quickly that the vast majority of those working in direct-service positions in the nonprofit industry, particularly social workers, are black women.

Black women made up the backbone of nearly every single nonprofit that I worked for or with over the next twelve years of my life. They were the caretakers, the service providers, the community care managers and the therapists. They worked long hours and were most often the staff that dealt directly with clients, with all the mess and stress that accompanied such a position.

More often, the administrative and executive positions were filled with white women.

It was during this time that I fully realized how talented, strong, tireless, and smart black women are. I watched as they navigated blatant and latent racism, ‘ignored’ countless low-key racist comments and behaviors, and code-switched in real time to communicate client’s needs to an executive or board member.

I watched how intensely they built their careers. Their days were not over at 5 when the office closed. They participated in Young Professionals groups, volunteered with their local United Way, and sat on the boards of their local civics leagues and nonprofits. They continued their education, gaining Master’s degrees during evening hours on a nonprofit shoestring salary. They not only participated in rallies and protests, they organized and ran them. And then they showed up the next morning to work looking fresh and beautiful.

I was, and remain, in awe.

I was inspired so much that I, as a single working mother, dug back into my own education and attained a Master’s Certificate in Project Management from Villanova University and a Master’s Certificate in Transformational Nonprofit Fund Development from the University of Notre Dame. I finished both with nothing short of a B in the grade book. I accepted an invitation to sit on the board of a local nonprofit, United Housing Solutions. I was going on all five cylinders to match the energy of my black coworkers.

It was an incredible time of personal development for me. So much so that I ended my traditional office career at that point and began my own consultancy, making more in my first year with independent contracts than my salary in my previous position at the nonprofit.

Black women, in ways big and small, changed the course, trajectory, and tone of my life. Not with their labor, but simply with their inspiring presence.

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There’s a saying that was also common back when the “Oreo” phrase was trending, and that was: “I don’t see color.”

I was guilty of that one, too, even when as I said it I knew it to be untrue.

I had been raised to clutch our bag and skirt away from a black man on the street. To engage with the black community only in terms of the black parishioners at a church. To inherently distrust black housekeepers and landscapers. To see their color, and to then act accordingly.

It was deeply embarrassing and uncomfortable. Well into my thirties, I would have an involuntary physical reaction if I found myself walking by a black man on a dark street at night. I fought it down and walked on. After all, I’ve been assaulted and brutalized multiple times in my life. Not one abuser has been a black man. So the very fact that the physical reaction springs forth, unrequested and unwanted, makes me feel sick.

I was trained, so very subtly and quietly (and sometimes overtly), from my earliest years of life to be racist.

It wasn’t necessarily intentional. The adults around me were repeating the behaviors of their parents and community members. My adopters began noticing just some of the inequalities in society, wrote letters to their congressmen, and felt very good about their participation as polite warriors of the Civil Rights movement. They should feel good about those letters. They should not feel good that their personal growth stopped with the passage of civil rights legislation.

They wiped their hands of it as if full and total equality had just been accomplished, even while continuing to perpetuate racist ideologies decades into their adult lives, then passing those ideologies onto me, where I fight continually to purge myself of them.

The cycle ends here. In my home. I’ve raised my children to treat people as people. I didn’t raise them to “not see color”, I raised them to celebrate the contributions of and sacrifices of people of color that have shaped and molded the world in which they live. I raised them to be keenly aware of and fully knowledgeable about the oppressive and colonist behaviors of their own ancestors, people of our skin tone, so they could be better grounded in their place in the timeline of history. We are only sixty years out from a four-hundred year period of human slavery and segregation. There is so much more healing that has yet to happen.

I teach my children so infection doesn’t set in, infection like MAGA.

We cannot keep healing with a raging infection.

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Why did I decide to write this today?

Because we are sick. As a nation, a society, a culture, not just domestically but globally, we are facing a deep infection that is preventing the healing and societal evolution that will push humankind forward into a better future.

Identifying, naming, and confessing our internalized racism is a necessary step for this infection to be purged. But an enlightened people are not an easily controlled people, so a cohort of far-right, White Nationalist organizations and people are stripping away the societal antibodies that were healing us and empowering us to move forward. “DEI” was only one example of this type of corrective methodology that has been villainized and ultimately recalled.

This is now a grassroots effort of the most basic variety: we work in our homes, neighborhoods, and communities to heal at the micro level, knitting together our nation in a web of progressive, kind, welcoming communities, regardless of what chaos is going on at the federal level.

None of us can control Kristi Noem or Stephen Miller. We can control our personal decisions to admit and deconstruct our own racism, xenophobia, or other societal conditioning and step boldly into our neighborhoods. We can learn Spanish and speak with immigrants to inform them of their rights. We can listen and learn from our neighbors, placing our “professional opinions” on the back burner as we listen to a community’s elders share their wisdom, experience, and vision to cultivate communities that are truly by the people, for the people.

A handful of people at the top are wreaking havoc on a daily basis. But the millions of us here on the ground hold far more power to affect true change throughout the fabric of our society… if we work together.

It’s time to strip down to our core humanity, humble ourselves, listen, learn, and act.

No one is coming to save us. This is our only option to survive with our dignity and humanity even remotely intact.

If we go down, we all go down together.

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Telling my stories, sharing some intimate, some embarrassing, and some shameful parts of my life, is a continual process of reflection. I am proud of my growth while being keenly aware of my shortcomings and where I need to continue working.

I hope that you feel seen in some of my stories, and recognize that we’re all messy humans doing this with no roadmap, no guidebook, no idea of what’s around every bend. We’re all experiencing every day for the first time, together.

We might as well join forces.

I still have idealistic hope for a strong undercurrent of stubborn progressives to stir up a movement powerful enough to belay the MAGA poison from destroying everything. Not because I believe in myself to do this, or you, one single person in Seattle or Jacksonville or Springfield, but I believe in us. Millions of us have showed up to protests and rallies in our respective cities. We simply cannot stop.

Rest, reflect, and then keep going. As I rest, you march on, and as you rest, I’ll march on. Keep pressing forward, stay safe, drink your water, and be well.

As always, I am yours in solidarity,

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Telling our stories, like the story of my life, or my son’s life, humanizes the nature of these horrific actions by our government’s leaders. If you would like to share your story, as a member of the LGBT community, or as an immigrant or migrant or refugee, or a veteran, or whoever you are because of whatever it is that you have overcome, please send me a message.
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My name is Melissa Corrigan, and I’m a freelance writer/thought sharer/philosopher in coastal Virginia. I am a mom, a wife, a veteran, and so much more. I deeply enjoy sharing my thoughts and receiving feedback that sparks genuine, respectful conversation.

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