The next week, Jenny invited me to her house. It was summer, and the air was thick with honeysuckle. We walked down her driveway and rounded the corner, down a street that led to a part of the neighborhood hidden by trees.
There were smaller houses here, not like her big house that sat on a hill. They were single-story, closer together, and some were separated by chain-link fences.
We walked up to a house with red siding. A dog barked, and I hung back. Jenny led the way through the chain-link gate and knocked on the door.
A kid about our age answered. He was tall, tan like me, and a little bit chubby. He had wavy black hair; his eyes and nose somehow looked different. I thought he was cute. He yanked the collar of the wild Pekingese that danced and yelped around his legs.
“Get down, Molly!” he said, maneuvering it behind the door.
“Hey, Jenny,” he said. I wondered if he even knew I was there.
“Hey, Rich,” Jenny said. Then, as if remembering, said: “This is my friend Sarah.”
Rich looked at me, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. It made me shy, and I pretended like I didn’t know if he was there, either.
We hung out in Rich’s backyard, which had an aboveground pool. We didn’t have our swimsuits, so we just sat in the grass behind the honeysuckle bushes.
“You know you can drink them,” Jenny said, plucking one of the small white trumpets. “They taste like honey.”
We all tried it. I couldn’t taste anything, and anyway, the stamens tickled my nose. I had to wave away bees and eventually gave up.
“Oh yeah, it’s great!” I said, pretending to take a big swig. Rich laughed, and I beamed, knowing he’d noticed me. Then he picked one and threw his head back, pretending to take a swig, too, and then we were all swigging, picking blossoms, getting drunk on honeysuckle.
In middle school, I grew to my full height, and my coordination improved. In softball, I went from being an awkward right fielder to an athletic first baseman. In basketball, I went from being a kid more interested in exploring the locker room with my friends to a star forward, sprinting down the court for layups. With my parents’ encouragement, I began to practice every day and coaches began to notice.
Boys started to notice me, too. I would see Douglas Bradford, who was a year older than I, suddenly creep up next to me in the hall. We knew he was adopted because the older white lady, more like a grandmother, who showed up with him at church could not have been his mom. He hung out with his white friend Chad, who wore sideways caps and basketball jerseys.
One day, Douglas and Chad came up to me while I was at my locker. Chad nudged Douglas, who took out a small piece of paper and in a nervous voice read, “Sarah, you have a vol-up-tu-ous ass.”
I rolled my eyes and stalked away. Douglas didn’t talk to me after that, though I still saw him peering at me in the halls and cafeteria. Meanwhile, I had my eye on Bobby Jones, an eighth grader with blond hair, rosy cheeks, and bright blue eyes. He smiled at me and said, “Hey,” in the halls, but the girls he talked to at their lockers were blond like him.
Rich and I became friends. We even had nicknames for each other.
“Hey, Oreo!” I’d say if I passed him in the hall.
“Hey, Hydrox!” he’d yell back. It was an insult to be called the Brand X version of Oreos, so sometimes I made sure to call him that first.
Jenny told me one of Rich’s parents was black. We went over to his house a few more times, but the only other member of the household I met was Molly. I didn’t tell my parents about my Rich. He wasn’t a bad kid, but he was a year older than I was, and we didn’t know his parents. Something told me to keep our friendship a secret.
But it was a good secret. When he attended my middle school basketball games and shouted, “Oreo!” from the stands, I thought nobody knew what it meant but me.
Four
The Intermediate was our school district’s name for the building that housed the ninth and tenth grades. The senior high was a bigger building, for eleventh and twelfth graders. In middle school, we dreamed of “move-up day,” the day we got to visit the Intermediate to see what our first year of high school would be like.
Jenny and I grew apart by ninth grade, but the students from two middle schools, Carson and Ingomar, were coming together into one building, and that meant I would meet some new friends.
I met Tara and Abby in Mr. Yanzek’s English class.
At the beginning of our first class, Mr. Yanzek told us to take out a piece of paper.
“Write this down,” he said, and he rattled off a list: “Lil E. Tee. Casual Lies. Dance Floor.”
We wrote diligently, but when he got to Dance Floor, we stopped and looked up at him.
“Do you know what you’re writing?” he bellowed from beneath his mustache. “It’s a list of the horses that won the Kentucky Derby last year. Now crumple those papers up and throw them in the trash.”
We crumpled our papers up and threw them at the wastebasket near his desk. It seemed like he was trying to teach us a lesson, but he never told us what it was.
“Hey,” he said to the girl sitting in front of me. “What’s your name?”
“Tara,” she said.
“Tara, why are you wearing hiking boots with that skirt?”
I looked down. The girl in front of me was wearing a white sweater and a long black-and-blue plaid wool skirt with Timberland boots. She had blond streaks in her hair. She looked so cool.
“Uh, because I want to,” she said.
Oh my God, she is so cool, I thought. I never dreamed of talking back to a teacher, even one as strange as Mr. Yanzek.
“Good. That’s good,” he said, and then he gave us a vocab quiz.
After class, I saw Tara at her locker. Two other girls were standing with her. They were tall and pretty.
“Hey,” I said. “That was pretty weird, right?”
“Yeah,” said Tara. “I can’t believe he made us write down the names of those horses. You’re really good at vocab though.”
“Whatever,” I said, but I was thrilled that she noticed.
“I only got a 98,” said Abby, who sat behind me in class. She had a neatly trimmed brown bob, her bangs pulled back with a barrette. Tara and Abby had gone to Ingomar Middle School together.
“Same here,” said Tara. “Does anyone even know what a fo’c’sle is?”
I did because I had already read Moby-Dick, but I wasn’t going to say anything.
“I had Mr. Mossel,” the third girl, Courtney, said. “For the whole class he just talked about the genius of Jonathan Swift.”
I recognized Courtney from a fun run we’d had through North Park in middle school. There was a lanky girl with dark blond hair at the front of the pack with me as we ran through the muddy woods. She and Tara both went to St. Teresa’s. Abby didn’t go to church because she was half Jewish. She explained that her mom was Catholic and her dad was Jewish, so she celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas. I didn’t know someone could have half of their identity be different than the other half, and this gave Abby a certain mystique.
My friends and I related to the world through inside jokes. Now when we saw each other in the hall, we would yell:
“Casual Lies!”
“Dance Floor!”
“Fo’c’sle!”
We ended up in World Cultures class together, our curriculum’s only course on the non-Western world.
As teenagers growing up in the North Hills in the 1990s, we thought we were the center of civilization. I was savvy in art, English, history, and math, but when it came to learning about South America, Africa, and the Middle East, my friends and I just thought it was a joke. Foreign places had crazy names:
Turkey?
Yemen?
The Strait of Hormuz?
The Strait of Hormuz?
The people of these cultures spoke hilarious languages and dressed like clowns. The world of World Cultures was too inconceivably different from our own for us
to take it seriously. Growing up in a small corner of America, we thought all people lived as we did, and if they didn’t, it meant that they were underdeveloped and needed to be shown the way.
After we started taking World Cultures class, instead of playing shirts versus skins at the YMCA, my guy friends and I would play Sunnis versus Shiites. The Shiites, being the more militant group, would take off their T-shirts and tie them around their heads. We’d add commentary like Markovich dribbles down the court, Thomson is covering Markovich, but Thomson’s T-shirt falls off his head and Markovich takes it in for a layup. Sunnis win 5–0.
This was the extent to which we understood world cultures.
Our teacher, Mr. Lynch, was tall, pasty, and balding. He wore ’70s glasses, thin shirts that showed the outline of the undershirts beneath, and brown polyester pants that sat too high on his waist. His awkward manner only served to make the class seem more absurd. He had a slight lisp, and my friends and I would die with suppressed laughter when he pronounced words like muezzin, imam, wa, and shibumi.
He had traveled to Nigeria, but even this we didn’t take seriously.
What was Nigeria?
He talked about participating in the kola nut ceremony and how much he sweated when he had to eat the spicy sauce and kola nut that were part of the welcoming ritual for guests.
All we heard was “cola nut” and pictured Mr. Lynch drinking a Coke filled with nuts and sweating.
“Oh, these cola nuts are spicy! Oh! Cola nuts!” we’d say, mimicking his voice.
I realized years later that Mr. Lynch must have loved what he taught in order to put up with our ignorance. He probably traveled more than most of us ever would, but he was an unfortunate character in the play of our lives and couldn’t contend with our desire to turn everything we didn’t understand into humor. If someone had told us our behavior was offensive, I would have been shocked. I thought we were all “good kids,” living the way our families and culture wanted us to.
Just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Lynch brought a guest to class, a friend he had met through his travels. Mr. Lynch’s intention was to make the seemingly make-believe cultures of the world realer, but we were not ready to meet difference on equal terms.
A dark-skinned man walked into the room. He wore a loose-fitting shirt, matching pants, and cap. His clothes were brightly colored and patterned, and he painted a bizarre picture next to Mr. Lynch’s blandness. We had no idea what to make of this stranger; he might as well have been from outer space.
“Class, this is Buba,” Mr. Lynch said, with an emphasis on pronouncing the name Boo-ba. “He has been generous enough to come to our school. Please make him feel welcome.”
Standing in front of the class, Buba told us that he was Nigerian. We didn’t get much after that, as simply trying to take him in was already too much. He smiled as he spoke, much more at ease than we were. I had never seen or met anyone like him.
I was jolted back to attention when Buba held up a large swath of shimmering pink-and-gold fabric that he said women in Nigeria wore. At that moment, his eyes fell on me. Mr. Lynch noticed and called me to the front of the room to help demonstrate how it was worn.
At this, my classmates and I laughed openly, and it seemed in good fun. He would give us epic stories to tell later.
I stood between Buba and Mr. Lynch at the front of the class, facing the room, trying desperately to keep a straight face. As instructed, I stood still, my arms raised to the sides, as Buba wrapped the stiff cloth in a snakelike fashion around my body. I was wearing bulky jeans, a sweater, and sneakers, and as the fabric wound higher and higher around my body, finally draping the excess over my shoulder, I began to feel self-conscious. Buba was explaining the elements of traditional garb to the class, turning me this way and that as if I were a living exhibit.
Suddenly, I was too warm in all that fabric. With the eyes of the class on me, I could hear the snickering, the whispers; even Abby, Tara, and Courtney joined in. Part of me dismissed it as coincidence; they could have chosen anyone in the room. But another, deeper part of me realized it was something more.
I saw a sea of white faces looking me up and down, recording every detail, but this time I was not in on the joke.
This time I was the “other,” and the joke was on me.
Five
As I grew into my teenage self, my difference felt like a kind of rebellion. My mother and I argued all the time, and I fixated on race as a taboo and inflammatory subject.
One night after dinner, I sat down with my family for another weekly ritual, watching Married … with Children. Al Bundy sat on the couch with his iconic scowl and a beer in his hand. Peg Bundy teetered in on high heels with her signature red bouffant, tight pants, and pushed-up cleavage to harangue Al in a shrill voice, and Kelly Bundy came down the stairs with bleach-blond hair and a miniskirt to the hoots and cheers of the audience. I never thought about the stereotypes or misogyny I saw onscreen; it was just another comedy.
The new, edgy hit show was In Living Color. With a nearly all-black cast and a team of Fly Girls, it was something I had never seen before. It came on after Married … with Children, a prime-time slot. “What is this?” My mother frowned the first time we watched, getting ready to change the channel.
“No!” I yelled. “It’s In Living Color! I want to watch it!” She put the remote down as one of the Wayans brothers in a suit and tie impersonated a white person with a nasal voice and square demeanor.
“See,” my mom said, “they can talk normally, so why don’t they? Shows like this set a bad example. And why are there so many of them on TV?” she continued. “They’re only 10 percent of the population but they’re on every channel. It’s not fair, don’t you think?”
I had just learned about segregation in school, and though my family didn’t drive through the city of Pittsburgh often, when we did, I noticed crumbling town houses with broken and boarded-up windows, sidewalks and front stoops populated with people of all ages, none of them white. I saw men and women in suits, too, driving nice cars and living in suburban neighborhoods like we did, but it was a stark contrast to what I saw in the city. It occurred to me that things were not all that different since the days of enforced segregation.
We didn’t use separate drinking fountains or have to sit in different sections of the restaurant, but with a few exceptions, black people seemed to live in one part of town, white people in another.
“What do you know about it?” I yelled at my mom. “You never had to deal with slavery or segregation!”
“People aren’t poor because of slavery or segregation,” she said with the conviction of someone who knows she is right. “That’s all in the past. People are poor because it’s easier to collect food stamps than to work hard and get a job, and because shows like this make being poor in the ghetto seem cool.”
I was rebelling against what I saw as my parents’ bourgeois suburban values, even as I relied on them for support. It never occurred to me to financially cut myself off or that living under their roof was in itself an endorsement of those values. They were my parents, I thought. They were supposed to take care of me, no matter what. My concern for those I saw as less fortunate was the self-interested hypocrisy of privilege: claiming to defend people I really knew nothing about.
“It affects so few people,” my mother would say. By it, she meant race. “We live in a democracy—majority rules!”
That wasn’t the definition of democracy I had learned in school; I didn’t think “majority rule” meant that the majority of the population got all the rights and everyone else had to fend for themselves, but somehow her point of view was impossible to argue with. During these arguments, she would conclude that even if racial discrimination did exist, it was not our problem.
Soon I discovered Yo! MTV Raps, which provided another window into an urban world I only saw on TV. I marveled at the Ed Lover dance. How did he make his body move in that way? I saw Run-DMC’s jumpsuits, hats, chains, and su
nglasses. They held their mics upside down and yelled words that had to be bleeped out. The sound of a record being scratched; break-dancers surrounded by cheering crowds against a backdrop of gray high-rises; Kangols; girls with big gold earrings and guys with big gold chains. I watched the Fresh Prince take the keys to the brand-new Porsche, its red curves as tight and sleek as the dress on the girl beside him.
I get it, I thought. Parents just don’t understand.
When my mother insisted I couldn’t watch Yo! MTV Raps, I’d stomp upstairs to my room and slam my door. In my bedroom full of stuffed animals and seashells, I’d flop down on my bed and play my cassette tapes: Bell Biv DeVoe, Boyz II Men, Candyman, Digital Underground. I turned to Video Jukebox on my little TV that sat on a white scalloped dresser and watched call-in request music videos through the static; I pulled the antennas left and right, but as hard as I tried, I never got a clear picture.
Around this time a kid named Brian asked me to a school dance.
“What happened at school today?” my mom asked me as she always did when I came home. I plopped my backpack down on the kitchen table.
“Not much,” I said. “This kid wants to go to the dance with me.”
“Really?” she asked, suddenly interested. I was a tomboy, and my mother always jumped at the chance for me to engage in more feminine activities. Getting dressed up and attending a school dance with a nice young man was definitely one of those things. Plus, she knew I was well liked by my peers but had missed out on being asked to other dances. It bothered me more than I let on, but she still saw it; all the guys with whom I hung out, played basketball and tennis, asked flirtier, blonder, more petite girls to dances when the time came.
“What’s his name?” she asked. I told her, and she proceeded to ask what he was like.
“He plays soccer … he’s kind of a nerd. I think his dad’s a doctor.” She could tell I wasn’t enthused about the prospect, but she wanted to encourage me.
One of the reasons I was not excited was that Brian was so shy that he’d had a mutual friend, Kristen, ask me out for him. Kristen and I were friendly but didn’t talk much. In the preceding weeks, however, she’d made a point to strike up conversations with me and ask me personal questions like what was my favorite color and favorite flower.
When I Was White Page 2