I have always been a minority. In my small-town Connecticut elementary school, my sister and I were often the only non-white people in the building, until I unexpectedly had a Black music teacher in fifth grade. That was the only time I ever had a Black teacher, out of 127 classroom teachers and professors.
I was always painfully aware of not being white. When fashion fads spread through the school, like feathered hair and cute ponytails that swung impishly to the side, I was stuck with braids that steadfastly refused to feather or swing. On Picture Day, while the others ran the free plastic comb through thin and silken strands that obediently arranged themselves into order, I ineffectually ran mine over hair already held down by blue hair grease. I was embarrassed that my hair was so puffy, so not-straight. After all, everyone I ever saw had hair that was the right kind.
As a teenager, I walked through school hallways filled with girls with stiffly-hairsprayed masterpieces, while my inadequate Jheri curl dripped curl activator all over my shirts. I resented how white girls’ hair didn’t need any more product than Aqua Net, that makeup was available only in white-girl skin tones. Being Black was a clear deficit.
Being the only Black child in a classroom means you are in for some very uncomfortable situations. When your class reaches the dreaded “slavery” chapter, the whole class will be uneasy because you are Black. You, in turn, will be embarrassed, as though you yourself were careless enough to be kidnapped and trafficked into human bondage. During the “family tree” Social Studies project, you will be ashamed because you don’t know your genealogy, because of slavery. If you are mixed race, when your English class reads “To Kill a Mockingbird,” your white teacher will stop at your desk while discussing Dolphus Raymond’s children and their troubling racial status to ask you in front of 25 peers if anyone has ever called you mulatto.
These uncomfortable situations don’t end as an adult. I am still a minority in a predominantly white region. In 30 years of employment with schools and child-focused agencies, I have only worked with a few Black or brown coworkers. The consequences of being one of the only Black people at the work table is far more serious than not being able to feather my hair at Enrico Fermi High School.
It is exhausting: the daily assault from white-centric viewpoints, having to be the spokesperson about racial biases while coping with being ignored when I speak out about them. The despair of being given token assurances of anti-bias goals with no concrete actions to show any effort to actually work toward change. Having to calibrate my rage and exasperation about the continuation of biased perspectives so as not to be labeled the Angry Black Woman or risk my job. Dealing with multiple white agencies that angrily decide that they aren’t racist, so they don’t have to do anything when clients and staff state otherwise. Dealing with traumatizing racist incidents both in the country and in my own workplaces, and then having the only official acknowledgements be ones that are designed to communicate that racism is all about my own hurt feelings about it — and not about white people having to do any work to fix the problem.
This oppressive dynamic exists not simply because of the racial demographics of the region, but because of the aggressive lack of willingness to shift the lens of white-dominant culture, a lens that begins with childhood experiences and trickles upwards. White-dominant culture starts as a function of lack of exposure to alternate ethnicities in infancy and a sustained internalized message that might makes right.
The issue is that these babies with white skin and a white lens grow up to be CEOs of most human services agencies, superintendents of school districts and politicians. When you are a white person in a position of power, seeing yourself as the correct and relevant version of humankind means that you have to work harder to think of issues from a perspective that does not center your personal experience as the one from which your decisions should stem.
And brown people dotting the white landscape of this region are the collateral damage of a culture that is firmly aligned with white values, that has to squint to see through a non-white lens and is passively resistant to meaningful change.
Agencies in our supposedly progressive region refuse to make changes to actively mitigate the white supremacy of their makeup and outlook. The inevitable result is that people of color as token hires arrive, experience the hostile climate and quit, thus fulfilling the agencies’ implicit goals of remaining biased.
This surreptitiously orchestrated strategy to keep schools, communities and agencies white-centered means that Black employees are inevitably driven out of workplaces, Black people who stay are tasked with the responsibility to keep things comfortable for white people, and lack of Black representation throughout our lives guarantees that we will all accept our roles without question.
Your Black students are watching, wounded. Your Black employees are waiting, exhausted. We know when your superficial words of assurance thinly obscure the truth: that you think our hair really is the wrong kind, our skin really is the wrong color, and that to you, we don’t matter at all.
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton with her two children. She has worked with children and families in western Massachusetts for over 30 years. She is currently an intensive care coordinator.