Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,12

me. We remained friends, and I wonder if he even remembers it, or if the people in the classroom that day remember it. I’m not sure it matters to me either way. I was in my utopian bubble and what I learned was that even in a bubble someone can casually toss off a racial slur and go about their day.

There’s no response to being called a nigger. I’ve been called a nigger a fair number of times. (How many times is acceptable? That’s the question of our age. I think it varies by region of the country, but that may be my Mid-Atlantic prejudice showing. Also, does it count if it’s online versus in person? What are the rules?) Every time it happens, I’m like, “I’m not sure what you want me to do with this information.” We’re not engaged in a dialogue; we never have been. And we weren’t engaged in the room in fifth grade. So, the why of the “nigger” is on that guy. I’m not part of it. And the why of the moment is of less concern to me. It’s like Baldwin says, “What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why.” If it hadn’t been him calling me a nigger for the first time, it would have been someone else someplace else. But in the middle will always be me. I am the one I seek to understand.

To that end, I get stuck, in the retelling, on my own casualness. I’ve never forgotten the mortification of the moment, the shock, the sensation of all the blood running out of my face. Yet, here I’m sanguine. “It’s just a thing that happens,” I’ll say with the sort of horrific matter-of-factness that my parents have adopted when talking about their lives in segregated Baltimore. Is the point that some part of the past will always sound horrific as a price for living in a presumably better future?

* * *

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Because of the incident at school, the principal decided she wanted to put me and Prentice in racial sensitivity training. Both of us? Honey! The two of us, together, learning about difference. My mother, perspiring in Betty Grey’s suit in the humid late spring, was having absolutely none of it. She walked into the principal’s office in that black suit with white stripes, spoke to her at length, and then walked out and took me home. I don’t know what Betty Grey’s suit told them, but you should already know I didn’t take anybody’s racial sensitivity training. Obviously. I mean, hello, I am problématique! And besides, my parents didn’t sacrifice themselves, their time, their prospects, the clothes on their backs, for me to go to school, get called a nigger, and then take a class about it.

My mother showed up to fight for the world my parents so desperately wanted for us, a world that must have seemed ephemeral and fleeting in that moment. I’m sure they never thought that the world they were trying to craft would be perfect for me; why would they? But this particular controversy—a mix of nineties bureaucracy and age-old prejudice—must have seemed a strange kind of trouble.

* * *

—

In the bubble, however, the trouble didn’t last. Things went back to normal relatively quickly. And, to be frank, I was glad. I was a fifth grader and I thought the moment was an anomaly, completely divorced from me or who I might be able to be. It was all just so weird and random and nobody really disliked blacks, so what was one really to do? Besides, we were studying the Middle Ages that year, so there were, truly, larger concerns like flying buttresses and the plague. I never forgot the incident, though, never figured out where to put it.

Prentice and I didn’t stop being friends. In retrospect, maybe this reflects badly on me. I can feel your judgment. And I would like to remind you that you are judging a ten-year-old. And I am judging you for that. So. We’re all just trying here, okay? Maybe it doesn’t reflect badly. Maybe it’s like one of those “heartwarming” race movies where a white person with suspect ideas and