The Black Friend

by Frederick Joseph

  I didn’t know what to say, and by Fatimah’s silence, I’m guessing she didn’t, either. Eventually I spoke up and simply said, “No, we didn’t.”

  The substitute responded by saying, “I saw you two looking at each other and cheating.”

  To which Fatimah responded, “We weren’t cheating. We were just seeing if the other person was done. We were racing.”

  The substitute then said, “I graded both of your tests after you finished, and you both got a perfect score. It also looks like you’ve both been getting perfect scores on tests almost all year.”

  “Because we’re both really smart,” responded Fatimah.

  “Or you’re both really good at cheating. You’re both articulate and do good work for students from your backgrounds”—yes, she really said this—“but none of the other students are getting these grades. So you’ll both have to retake the test in front of me during recess to prove you haven’t been cheating, or we can bring this to the principal.”

  Neither Fatimah nor I responded. We both went to lunch and came back to the classroom during recess to retake our test.

  As the substitute placed the exams on our desks and told us to begin, I just sat there, confused about what her saying “from your backgrounds” meant. What made me and Fatimah different from the other kids?

  Then I realized that Fatimah and I weren’t just the smartest kids in the class; we were the only two nonwhite kids who were getting these types of grades. And the only way the substitute could make sense of that was to assume we were cheating. I was so distracted and disturbed by that idea that I couldn’t concentrate on the test. By the time the substitute said we had ten minutes to finish the exam, I had to rush through it.

  The substitute graded the two tests in front of us. Fatimah got a 78 percent and I got a 70 percent. (Yes, I remember the exact scores; the moment is etched in my brain.) Not bad for taking our second test of the day and having our intelligence questioned by a racist adult. But the substitute used it as confirmation that we had been cheating all year.

  She looked at us, then looked down at our new grades, and then back up at us, and said, “This is why you don’t cheat. You obviously both need to study more if you want to really be the best in your class. Think about how unfair it is to the other students who are actually getting better grades than you.” (The white kids, she meant.) “You can be the ones to get your families out of your neighborhoods, but not if you’re cheating yourselves.”

  Fatimah and I said nothing.

  When I went home, I didn’t tell my mother about what had taken place. When I eventually gave her my test, she was surprised by the grade and asked what had happened. I simply told her it was hard and left it at that.

  In my mind, there was nothing to report back to my mother. She had taught me what blatant racism was in terms of things like the word “nigger.” The substitute hadn’t done anything that ten-year-old me could identify as racist, yet I felt it all the same. After that day, the substitute sat the two of us far enough apart that not only could we not “cheat,” but we also couldn’t interact.

  I was so traumatized by the incident that I made sure not to get perfect grades on exams for the rest of the year to avoid having to deal with a similar incident.

  I can’t say whether Fatimah did the same, but her grades dropped as well. We were both still seen as good students, but we were no longer top in our class.

  I wish I could say things got better after that year, when Fatima and I moved on to a different grade with a different teacher. But the truth is, I’ve spent most of my life meeting people who were just like that substitute.

  These were the white girls in high school who thought they were complimenting me by saying I was “cute for a Black guy”; the white guys who were apologetic that their parents wouldn’t let them invite me to their house parties because “kids from the ghetto are thugs”; the older white lady at my pet store job who would tell me how “articulate” I was; and the first boss I had after college, telling me I had “great taste in suits for someone from where I was from.”

  I spent years carrying the weight of all of those people who wouldn’t let me just be great, the people who qualified the good and bad things about me by my race. If I was great, it was for someone like me, and if I failed, it was because I was someone like me.

  The worst part is that it’s difficult to call many of these people out, because they don’t think they’re being racist. Society has conditioned us to view people of color in negative ways. Which makes it more difficult to stop racist behavior, because people are often saying things based on assumptions from what they’ve been taught.

  If the president of the United States (I’m referring to Trump) and the media consistently call Mexicans dangerous, rapists, and thieves, for example, a person hearing this could assume it’s true and therefore expect every Mexican to be dangerous, a rapist, or a thief. So any Mexican they find to be an upstanding person is now the exception rather than the rule.

  While these sorts of assumptions are inherently racist, it can be hard to get even well-meaning white people to see them this way. And damn near impossible to get white people who don’t mean well to see them this way. And I get it. This stuff’s complicated—which, I’m guessing, is why you’re reading this book.

  I spoke with my friend Africa Miranda about people saying things and making assumptions that are subtly racist and how those internalized ideas impact not only people of color but white people as well.

  AFRICA: One of the things, I think, is not even so much specific phrasing as it is just the surprise in their voices at times. . . . When you get in these rooms with white people, their level of surprise that you either can match their experiences or supersede them is, like—it almost turns into a little dance where they’ll kind of just throw things out that are very commonplace to them, be it the places that they travel or food.

  It’s like their markers of class, and those different things are food, travel destinations, sometimes clothing, but usually it’s books that they’ve read or things they reference. I was on a reality show on Bravo and made some offhand reference to Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, and someone there had an awed reaction to me knowing about it. I’m thinking to myself, Well, I have an English degree, I grew up reading every type of book.

  I had no clue who Miss Havisham was, because we didn’t read Great Expectations in school. I went to google her, and the first few sentences bored me so much I decided I didn’t need to know at this point. I’ll let Africa and her white colleagues have that one.

  AFRICA: I always go back to that Chris Rock special where he’s, like, “What are we supposed to sound like?” You know what I mean? It’s, like, “What did you think we were going to sound like, or should sound like? These are words. I’m not supposed to be able to string a sentence together?” You know, and it’s not a compliment, and again, they’re so surprised that you’re so put together, and it’s exhausting.

  What I realized was that the more well spoken I was, the more polished I was, the more put together I was, it went from white people’s surprise to their disdain, because as much as they think they like a well-spoken Black person, you go from the well-spoken negro to the uppity negro very quick, and what they don’t like is a Black woman that is too free, too well spoken, too this, too that.

  For many people, whiteness is the standard for intelligence, class, and talent. Which is why, as an example, if you’re a person of color and you’re articulate, some will say you “speak white.”

  It’s why that substitute teacher couldn’t fathom that a young Latinx girl and a Black boy could be the most intelligent people in their class.

  Often when white people find themselves in situations where people of color are simply better at something, they become resentful and sometimes even dangerous.

  I learned over the years that behaviors like the ones Africa and I described and the traumas we’ve faced are microaggressions (which can at times scale to
aggression; the case of that substitute is an example). I’ve spent years growing out of how I internalized the things people have said to me, and the assumptions they’ve made about people like me.

  White privilege and power can take on many shapes, one of which is simply the opportunity to be seen as an individual with your own interests and lived experience.

  Some white people come from low-income communities, some are thieves, some are uneducated, some play sports, some are articulate, some are good people, and some are trying to be. But no one assumes, just because some white people are thieves or are uneducated, that most if not all white people share these traits, and that those who don’t are the exceptions.

  To have someone judge you by getting to know you is a powerful and life-changing thing when you’ve never been treated that way.

  Too often people of color are not treated as people at all but rather as ideas: the sum of what people have assumed and the little they’ve seen in passing. It’s not only unfair; it is deeply racist and can be extremely detrimental. This dehumanization is part of why people have been enslaved and why people are killed by trigger-happy police officers.

  Which is something I discussed with Rabia Chaudry.

  I asked Rabia about the importance of white people getting to know people of color and spending time around them.

  RABIA: Research has shown the benefits, and it’s so scary because we talk about how in this postfactual era, the facts don’t matter. Facts almost never change a person’s mind. So you can provide all the data you want to somebody. They might have this horrible opinion about a group of people, and you can show them all the data you want, all the empirical evidence. It’s not going to change their mind, but there’s only one thing that will, and that is actually having a positive interaction with somebody of that group. It can literally be just one person they know from that group, which will make them resilient enough to say to someone making a bigoted comment, “I don’t agree.”

  That personal interaction is one of the most powerful things to prevent people from falling into adopting really radical or bigoted or biased discriminatory views. That’s really hard to do, though. It’s hard to do. For me as a mother, my eldest, who’s almost eleven now, she also goes to Islamic school. She goes to a Muslim school. But the way I live my life, my life is very inclusive. My social circle is very broad. It includes people of every religion, every sexual orientation, and I expose my kids to culture and music, and I want them to be global citizens.

  I stuck to the Muslim schools because the last thing kids need at school is to be scared of people harassing them for their identity. They should go there, feel comfortable so they can study and learn and grow. That’s why I decided to do that. But I have to make up for the fact that they are in these little bubbles in the Islamic school. Their world is not going to be just Muslims. The way we live, it helps, hopefully, to fill out the rest of those spaces.

  Let’s talk for a minute about bubbles. We all live in some sort of bubble, whether of race, gender, sexuality, religion, or other aspects of our identities or lived experience. Bubbles aren’t inherently bad. Many people create their own bubbles to feel safe within a community of people with identities similar to theirs. For people like myself, bubbles can also help us learn more about ourselves, by being around people who appreciate the things we do.

  But bubbles can also be dangerous, especially when people are forced into them or don’t realize they are in them.

  We’ve all been conditioned in our ignorance; no one can say that they don’t make assumptions about people. The difference in white people making and verbalizing those assumptions is that in our society, white people often exist with privilege and power in spaces that people of color don’t.

  In the example of Fatimah and me, that substitute teacher’s assumptions made her act in ways that had a long-lasting impact on two people of color and, frankly, could have derailed our lives. She had specific ideas about how kids who looked like me and Fatimah should perform in the classroom, and she was determined to put us in those little bubbles.

  What if I’d believed her and lost the drive to ace those exams that people “like me” weren’t supposed to ace? What if I had just believed all of the people who have called me a thug or said Black people are from the ghetto, and those who essentially told me that the white race is more attractive than my own?

  This is how systemic racism works. It’s not just a matter of blatant racism; it’s also about conditioning people to think less of themselves.

  As I write this, I’m thinking I should be calculating how much the government owes people of color for therapy costs.

  We’re not an assumption, we’re not words like “thug,” we’re not a statistic, we’re not a part of your imagination, and we are certainly not to be held to white standards.

  We are the Black boy in class who happens to be from a low-income area who is also the smartest person in class (with Fatimah). We are our mistakes, we are our wins, we are good at things, and we are bad at things.

  We are people, and we should be treated as such.

  “DayVaughn? DuhVon? DayVon? I’m sorry, I just can’t pronounce this. Can someone give me a hand here?”

  Whether it’s a Black name, a Spanish name, an Asian name, or anything else, we’ve all seen this scene before: a white person trying to pronounce names that aren’t white and acting like they are reading Elvish (a language from Lord of the Rings; I already told you I’m a nerd).

  You know what group’s names are actually difficult?

  I want you to take a moment and think about this.

  It’s a trick question. The answer is every group. All names are difficult because they are all made up!

  Think about it. What makes a last name like Zuckerberg any less complicated than Henriquez or Shakur? The answer is simple: one is rooted in white standards, while the others are not. The same could be said for food, music, clothing, or any other aspect of culture that doesn’t originate in white culture.

  As I mentioned once or twice (maybe a billion times), my high school was much whiter than I was used to. My middle school, however, was predominantly Black, though many of the white kids were still very popular—and very problematic. While I definitely dealt with my fair share of ignorance and lifelong traumatic memories (thanks again for reading about these), there are a few things I never went through.

  For instance, I don’t think anyone has ever had trouble pronouncing my name, because it’s common in America and Europe, so it’s been normalized. I will say, I used to hate when kids would call me Frederick Douglass to make fun of me, but it’s been smooth sailing otherwise.

  Shout-out to Frederick Douglass; I’d be honored if someone said that now. If you don’t know who Mr. Douglass is, I suggest you throw your entire school system away—and also go online and learn more about him.

  I didn’t have anything about me culturally that they could deem weird or make fun of. Instead, as you know, they made fun of the fact that a lot of my tastes were actually mainstream—meaning white.

  There were a few students who got it bad from both teachers and classmates. One person who comes to mind from middle school was my friend Karishma Patel, a young Hindu girl who for a long time flew under the radar.

  I mean, teachers would absolutely butcher her name all the time, but otherwise she went unbothered—until she didn’t.

  Before I start this story, what you need to understand is that before there was social media, before there was text messaging, before there was the Internet, there was the school cafeteria.

  I know cafeterias still exist, but imagine a world where there were no phones, and people had no choice but to interact while they had lunch.

  If you needed information, if you needed to talk to someone, if a fight was going to break out, it was going to happen in the cafeteria.

  For some, the cafeteria was a social utopia, while for others, it was an anxiety-inducing hell. At that point in my life, what it was for m
e depended upon the day.

  My strategy was always to stay low and out of sight during lunch. Grab my tray, grab a drink, smile at the lunch lady who always gave me an extra boneless rib, get some fruit snacks, and head out.

  This wasn’t just my strategy; it was one passed down by generations of unpopular students. It was the same strategy that Karishma used. But she was lucky; she had cultural food restrictions, so her parents sent her with food from home every day, which meant that she got to go straight to the safe zone during lunch.

  Sorry, I should explain what the safe zone was. Basically, it was a haven for the outcasts. A table in the back of the cafeteria unofficially reserved for those of us who needed refuge from the potential horrors of lunchtime social interactions.

  If you played Dungeons & Dragons, you would go to the safe zone. If you wore unfashionable hand-me-down clothes from your siblings, you would go to the safe zone. If you used to be popular but you had an “accident” in school, you would go to the safe zone. “Give me your tired, your poor, your nerdy-and-still-growing-into-their-looks masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

  Because of the makeup of the people who sat at the table, there was never much discussion about race or culture. We were all more focused on our core similarity of being bullied outcasts and surviving than we were on the ways we weren’t similar. Everyone was generally accepted for who they were.

  One day, two of the kids at the table decided to have a light-saber duel. (YES, it was that nerdy.) Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem. We could typically do whatever we wanted, and no one bothered us, almost as if they couldn’t see us.

  Our own little middle-school Wakanda.

  In the middle of dueling, one of the kids took it a bit too far and slapped the light saber out of the other kid’s hand, and it went flying beyond our barriers.