On Being Called “Nigger”: Open Letter to Naje

Dear Naje

I can’t tell you about the sorrow and deep regret I felt when you told me you had just been called a nigger.  We were just about ready to leave to meet you for dinner at the home of a friend when we received a phone call. It was you, crying, emotional, a white man in a dark red Toyota Camry with license plates beginning with BLK had just rolled down his window and yelled: “You could have moved up 10 inches so I could have pulled around you, you stupid, fucking nigger.”

I am sure you felt violated, shocked, and reminded of where you are today—in the “new” America that is supposed to be in the process of becoming “great” again. At 27-years old, you could not come up with words to say to him because you were in a state of shock. But you will remember for the rest of your life the contorted face and angry eyes of this 60-year old bigot (missing four front teeth), as he sped passed you nearly hitting your car yelling out for a second time, “You stupid, fucking nigger.”

What happened to you was unsettling and somewhat ironic. You were verbally assaulted in broad daylight on a crowded street in Atlanta, a city that gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. It happened near Little Five Points, one of the more liberal neighborhoods in town, less than a mile from where you attended a prestigious private school. Not in the exurbs or in middle or south GA where many white Georgians still proudly fly the Confederate flag. In the ATL.

My youngest daughter of two, we are nearing the year 2019, 156 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and 55 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If this can happen to you in the heart of Atlanta, then there is no place in this nation where you will be sheltered from this evil, this attack upon what the late actress and human rights advocate Ruby Dee called, your “somebodiness.”

I know for you, my millennial daughter, the shock and pain of it all must be doubly harrowing. You grew up with friends of all races, graduated from Wellesley College, one of the most diverse institutions of higher learning in the nation, and work as a clinical researcher at Emory University, my alma mater, considered by many as an enlightened “Harvard of the South.”

You believed your world was legitimate. You possessed hope grounded in a faith that if you treated others as you liked to be treated good would not only be returned to you but there would be broader benefits for society. Now your heart has been broken. Now you are less sure about America’s ability to cleanse itself or overcome its original sin of racism.

I remember first experiencing racism more than 50 years ago when I was about seven or eight years old. I was attempting to get on a ride at an amusement park in all places, Des Moines, Iowa, when the ticket taker called me “Darky.” This was in the late 1950s. It happened again a decade later in Westport, CT, when I was told by my friend’s father that I could not stay at his home for the Christmas holidays because I was black. Later, my wife and I, minding our own business, have been called nigger several times at Stone Mountain Park in DeKalb County and in downtown Atlanta.

It never ends. The micro-aggressions, the victim blaming that goes on, and the myth of reverse discrimination that Whites like to charge whenever black folks are in a position of authority.

Each time racism rears its ugly head, overtly or covertly, it stings and chips away at our belief in a society where character wins out over skin color. It is a sad testament that for too many children of color, encountering racial insult is somewhat a rite of passage, an initiation into a racialized society where no matter how high you rise, some white person of much lower status may attempt to bring you down by calling, or treating you like, a nigger.

The tragedy of all of this, my dear, is that your mother and I cannot not prevent such insults from happening to you nor can we adequately prepare you for these insults when they come.

It would not be a far stretched to link acts of racial hostility and aggression like you experienced to the climate in this country set by our president and those who provide him cover. I have to include his fellow travelers, the ones providing cover, because they lack the desire and courage to check 45 when he acts in a way contrary to the interest of our country. They wink and look the other way when they know he is exploiting racial tension for political advantage.

They have given permission for Whites, who for years have had their fears stoked by cowardly politicians, to say out loud what they have felt inside for a long time. They feel innately better than you by the fact of their whiteness and the privileges that stem from that sociological, if not, biological fact. Never mind your neuroscience degree from Wellesley and your many other accomplishments, to the bigoted missing tooth driver (oh how I hate he fits the stereotype), you were just a dumb nigger unworthy of human dignity and respect.

I am sorry my generation has not been able to bring about a better world for you, your sister, and others of your generation. Our country owes you more. If not a world where you are protected from insults and evil, at least a world where you believe tomorrow will be a brighter day.

The struggle continues!

Love always,

Dad

 

 

 

 

 

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