I’m probably making this up, but I swear I remember this all happening in slow motion and someone saying “Noooooo” as it was spinning in the air.
The light saber not only landed at one of the most popular tables, but it hit two of the most popular girls in school. Time stood still for a second before a group of girls sprang up from the table and marched toward us.
All of the girls looked exactly like the main girls in the movie Mean Girls: super fashionable, a lot of makeup, and very white.
I know I do this every chapter, but if you haven’t seen Mean Girls, just google it to get a picture of what I’m talking about.
As soon as they got to the table, one of them threw the light saber down and demanded, “Who threw this?”
The kid who’d knocked the light saber away responded, “I’m sorry—it was an accident.”
The same girl responded swiftly and viciously by saying, “You look like you were an accident.”
Another girl jumped in and started making fun of him by saying, “You look like you don’t even take showers.”
At this point, it’d probably be easier if I called the girls by name. But I honestly don’t remember their names. They all looked like their name could be Ashley, though, so that’ll do.
The first girl (Ashley A.) was getting ready to make another comment, when Karishma jumped in: “He said he was sorry, so leave him alone.”
It was one of those moments when everyone stopped for a minute, and in a decent story where decent people win, there would have been a slow clap into rousing applause. But that’s not what happened.
“What did you say, Gurpeet?” asked Ashley A.
“My name is Karishma,” replied Karishma.
“Your name is bin Laden, terrorist,” replied Ashley A.
At that moment, Karishma’s eyes started tearing up. One of the other Ashleys—Ashley B.—walked over to where Karishma was sitting and looked at her food, grabbed it, and started walking around the cafeteria.
As Ashley B. walked around the cafeteria, she started yelling, “Look! The terrorist brought her terrorist food for lunch!”
Some guy yelled, “It looks like terrorist throw-up!” The cafeteria exploded with laughter, and Karishma began crying and ran out.
I’d like to say that everyone from the safe zone decided to run around the cafeteria punching people in the face for their ignorance and racism, but we didn’t. In fact, some people from the safe zone awkwardly laughed along. We didn’t really blame them, though; we knew it was a form of self-defense, an attempt to avoid being the next victim.
A few of us ran after Karishma. We found her crying in the science lab down the hall. We consoled her and told her that she needed to go to the principal and also tell her parents what had happened.
A few days later, I and a few others got called to meet the principal in the auditorium. I quickly found out why we didn’t meet in his office.
When we arrived, there were at least twenty people. Karishma was there with her parents, the Ashleys were there with their parents, some of our teachers were there, and a few other students who were around that day were there, including the terrorist throw-up guy.
It turns out that Karishma’s family had made a complaint, to which the four girls’ families had made a counter-complaint. We were asked to give our side of the story to the gathered group.
Now, some of you might be thinking this all sounds good. A public forum to address everyone’s complaints—what a great way to get to the bottom of things! But keep in mind that there were some serious power dynamics at play here. Karishma, her parents, and most of us who were speaking up for her were people of color. Not only that, as you know, we were also social outcasts. Those challenging us were all white. They were also well off, popular, and connected. As much as I’d like to say these things didn’t matter, the whole point of this book is that these things often matter A LOT. As they did in this case—which you’ll soon see.
Ultimately, many of the people who would likely have defended Karishma ended up being too afraid to speak because of the power dynamics. Outside of me and two others, the rest of the safe-zone kids refused to speak and chose the option of going back to class to avoid potentially being attacked in the future as Karishma had been.
This was extremely disappointing, because Karishma was only in this position because she helped one of us. Until that moment, I thought we were more than outcasts. I thought we were family.
After we told our side of the story, the Ashleys and their friends gave theirs. Not only did they lie, but they painted Karishma as the villain, claiming that she threw the light saber at them.
They denied saying she was a terrorist, and as for making fun of her food, they said they had simply asked her to cover her food if she wasn’t eating it, because the smell was “disturbing them.”
Then the girls started crying. Their parents grabbed and hugged them and yelled at the principal for “letting them be hurt.”
This was the first time I had seen the power of white women’s tears, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
While the families yelled at the principal, one of the teachers who often butchered Karishma’s name chimed in. “I don’t know Karishma to be a liar, but she certainly has been a troublemaker at times. Every morning she has a nasty attitude with me while I do my attendance. I haven’t commented on it, but all of this makes sense to me now.”
The principal ended up dismissing everything we said to him and told Karishma’s family that they were lucky she wasn’t being suspended for throwing things.
After the meeting, the teacher butchered Karishma’s name every morning while she sat there and couldn’t speak up for herself. The Ashleys and others made fun of her so badly that she started eating her lunch in the bathroom.
She ended up transferring to another school before the following year.
Karishma, if you’re somewhere out there, reading this: I’m working on a time machine to go back and place a tack on a racist substitute teacher’s seat. If you like, I can also throw your food in the face of each Ashley. Let me know.
Karishma’s story always breaks my heart, because there are so many like it. Not just in terms of bullying but in terms of bullying specifically about culture and race.
Those kids didn’t just think up those jokes out of nowhere; I’m sure their parents said plenty of racist things at home, and our teacher fully aligned with them because of her own cultural ignorance, not realizing she was also part of the problem.
While not every instance of problematic behavior is as intense or traumatic as what happened in the cafeteria that day—though some, sadly, are much worse—many people of color live their lives dealing with the same kinds of things in smaller doses. From being told that our names aren’t normal to being told that our food is weird—it’s all rooted in the idea that white cultural norms are the standard, which is not only problematic but often racist.
One of my friends spends a great deal of his time discussing topics like this one, so I thought his perspective would be good to have.
One of the first things Xorje and I talked about was him growing up as a Mexican living in America on the border.
XORJE: I love the fact that I come from the border, and I know in depth what it’s like to sit between these two cultures of American culture and Mexican culture and have so many things that are so outright Mexican about me.
But Xorje wasn’t always knowledgeable about his own cultural history.
XORJE: There was so much I learned about my own history in college. Literally, here I am, a guy who grew up on the border who should know enough about Mexican identity but didn’t even know about stuff like the Chicano movement, certain things that are about my history. The educational system, specifically here in the United States, told me that it wasn’t worthy of my learning. That neither I nor anybody else in this country really needed to know about my life and my heritage. That’s been the case when we’ve seen these different bills that a
re trying to be passed to limit either Chicano studies or African-American studies or Asian-American studies. There’s a lot that’s being done to restrict the amount of education that’s being done about cultures and ethnicities that are not Eurocentric or are not specifically Anglo-American or white.
[In school] you’re going to learn about white people. You’re going to learn about the white history makers. You’re going to learn about the white politicians. You’re going to learn about everybody of note that we think needs to be told to you who happens to be white. If they’re Black, if they’re brown, if they’re Asian, if they’re Native American, [then, according to the schools] it’s not as much of worth to you. I think I had a pretty American life. I think I had a pretty normal life. My parents both worked. My sister and I went to college. It seemed quite normal to me. This idea that somehow I will not achieve my full potential that this country has for me because this country is looking for something else, meaning something more white or something more straight or something more cisgender—because I don’t have that, somehow I am just never going to reach it. I’m never going to get there.
What Xorje is talking about here is white standards. And not just white standards, but white heterosexual cisgender standards. If you deviate from any of these “norms,” you’re considered “other.”
XORJE: When you think about the Fourth of July, you think of cheeseburgers. You think of hot dogs. You think of going down to the lake and having this sort of life and experience. It’s, like, well, I didn’t grow up eating burgers on the Fourth of July. We would have a, like, a carne asada with tortillas and tacos and guacamole and frijoles. That was what was normal for me. Let’s say I were to bring anybody from outside of my hometown to see our celebration, they would think that’s totally weird. I think that’s the problem. This entire time, our society has made us think that we are aspiring to one certain thing.
Unlike Xorje, my Fourth of Julys were filled with grilled corn on the cob, baked macaroni and cheese, block parties, and illegal fireworks. Some of that’s pretty “mainstream”—that is, white people do it, too—and some of it’s specific to my culture and my upbringing. But all of it—including Xorje’s carne asada and tortillas—is normal. Because “normal” is subjective. It’s not the same thing for everyone, despite what white culture tries to tell us.
Many like to say America was founded on multiculturalism—you know, the whole melting pot thing—but it was truly founded on whiteness and the oppression of people of color. When we begin to understand that that is actually our normal, it will help us raise a generation of people that won’t run around a cafeteria disrespecting someone’s culture because it’s not their own.
I’m an American, as is Karishma, as is Xorje. Each one of us comes from a different place and a different culture and is no more or less American than the other.
Around the world, the foundation of what’s “normal” typically stretches only as far as the people and cultures in front of someone, and in most places, the people and cultures in front of someone are their mirror images.
We aren’t the only place that is composed of people from varied backgrounds and races. Parts of the UK are very similar in that way.
So I wanted to ask my friend Toni Adenle (Toni Tone) some of her thoughts on what’s seen as normal as a person who lives in England.
TONI: Well, one thing I can tell you is that people of color in the UK, especially young people of color, are working very hard to make sure that intellect and intelligence aren’t seen as normal for just white people. With that said, though, growing up being smart wasn’t something I was praised for as a Black person. One term that I actually heard commonly used as a tool or weapon against me by even other people of color was the term “coconut”—I think in America you say “Oreo”?
This totally blew my mind. I’m ready to sue Nabisco over the fact that I’m traumatized by growing up being called an Oreo, but I can’t imagine having no company to sue because people are calling you a coconut. The UK is rough, ha.
Toni went on to expand on what “normal” means in the UK and how that impacts Black people there.
TONI: So, going to job interviews, for example, and people talking about how articulate I am, and me feeling a sense of illegitimacy from that comment, like it’s not a genuine comment. I knew it wasn’t a genuine comment coming from a place of, “Oh, yeah, this was generally an articulate person,” but almost like an element of surprise, like “I did not expect you to be as articulate as you are based on the color of your skin.” It’s not seen as normal to be anything other than what people have seen on the news if you’re Black in some spaces.
It’s often as if in the UK, Blackness isn’t ever supposed to be normal. In England, what we see a lot of is microaggressions. England is very different from the United States in that we do not often see—or I have not often seen—direct clear racism. Now in the age of Brexit, people are way more vocal about their xenophobia and their racism. One of the things I’ve noticed young white Brits do is mock other people’s culture in an attempt to make them the butt of the joke. So, for example, someone potentially bringing in certain lunch to school, and the first thing they do is find a way to bully them or mock what they’re eating. So, “Oh, what is that? It stinks. It’s disgusting. Why would you eat that?” It’s just a roundabout way of showing that something isn’t normal because it isn’t white.
In places like America and Britain, we have an opportunity to learn and grow by being around people who are nothing like us in many ways and very much like us in others. By having an expectation of what’s normal, people build an assumption that anything else is abnormal.
We need to do away with the idea of “normal,” especially when it’s used as a stand-in for “mainstream” (whether that’s white or anything else seen as such). Because at the heart of this difference between normal and abnormal is the belief that these so-called normal things are neutral.
An example is when white people talk about something that originates from a nonwhite culture and say, “That’s Black [or Indian, or Asian, etc.]—that’s not normal!” As if only things associated with white culture are normal—and as if white is not also a race.
White people, you know that white is a race, right? And that all races are social constructs? Good—just checking.
Over the years, my favorite things about people have become the ways in which they are nothing like me.
Some of my best experiences have been when I’ve tried new foods, learned to pronounce names and words that aren’t familiar to me, listened to new types of music, and watched movies in languages I don’t understand.
I’m asking you to protect one another and learn from one another. I’m asking you to turn “different” into the new normal, and then tell others to do the same.
I didn’t go to parties much when I was in high school. Even though I had newfound popularity, I never trusted large group events like that. All it would take was one person getting drunk and realizing I might not be as cool as people thought I was at school for everything I had built to come crumbling down.
More important, I didn’t really know how to party with the types of kids I went to school with, at least the ones who had houses big enough for parties. From what I’d heard, or maybe just seen in movies, the white kids threw the types of parties where people did keg stands, shotgunned beers, played beer pong, and listened to whatever music was popular at the time.
For many of you, this probably sounds completely normal, but remember what you learned in the last chapter: “normal” is subjective. The few parties I went to while attending my first (predominantly nonwhite) high school were about one thing and one thing only—dancing. I don’t mean organized line dancing or anything like that, I mean the type of dancing where you’re way too close to your partner and if there was an adult around, they would use a ruler and a flashlight to separate the two of you.
But part of trying to keep my popularity also meant taking calculated ri
sks so people wouldn’t ask too many questions about why I never showed up to events. Which is why when I was invited to a Halloween house party my junior year, I figured I might as well go.
The party was being thrown by a student from a high school nearby. I knew some of the people who went to school there through sports and other activities.
Typically, the kids who went there came from families that were fairly wealthy. Because of that, many of them had huge homes that could accommodate a ton of people, so kids from various schools would be invited to their parties.
I didn’t want to attend alone, so I asked my friend Carlos if he would come with me. I’d met Carlos during my freshman year at my prior school, and he’d become one of my closest friends.
Carlos was from a deeply proud Latinx family and lived in my neighborhood.
His dad was Puerto Rican, and his mom was Ecuadorian, and part of the reason I loved going over to his house was because the food was amazing. The other reason was because his parents loved their cultures.
We would spend hours talking about history and music from Puerto Rico and Ecuador while I stuffed my face with empanadas and other foods that made their house smell like heaven.
I loved being around his family; you could tell how much they all loved one another, especially his parents. Carlos’s father worked at a factory in town and would be tired every time I saw him. But he always made sure to spend time with his children and their friends as well, and to do something sweet for his wife on a regular basis, like bringing flowers home.
Carlos was just like his parents, and honestly ahead of the curve in thinking about things such as privilege and race. Which is why I wasn’t surprised by what he said when I asked him to come to the Halloween party with me.
The Black Friend Page 7