A Sharp White BackgroundPosted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2015-04-04 02:14Z by Steven |
Renegade
2015-04-02
Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence (aka the Blazian Invasion)
how I learned what race feels like
Just Words
I am riding home from middle school in Washington, D.C. one day when a white man gets on my bus full of black faces and calls us nigger. My stomach drops. The boys at the back of the bus rise. This is the first time I will hear that word exit the mouth of a real-life white person, not in the movies, but here, on my bus, on this bus full of blackness. As I walk home from the bus stop that day, I struggle to make sense of the feeling this man has left with me, the smallness, the brokenness, the shame slowly growing inside me. I will not hear this word shouted by a white man into a crowd of black and brown for another eight years, and eight years later I will still not know what to do.
In the basement cafeteria of my black elementary school, I am teased for the musubi I bring in my lunchbox, white rice wrapped in nori, pressed into pyramid in the salty palm of my mother’s hand. “Ewww, what is that smell?” “Seaweed,” I answer. The word feels foreign and wrong on my tongue, but I push it out anyway, attempting awkward translation. “Seaweed??” They crinkle their noses and I feel I am foreign, I am wrong, I do not fit into this landscape of lunchables, gushers, and frozen fishsticks. I go home. I ask my mother to pack me a sandwich. I miss musubi.
When my classmates pull their eyes into slits, contort their mouths into ching chong chinaman talk, and call our volunteer chess teacher Mr. Tsunami though that is not his name, my cheeks flash hot again. Do my eyes look like that? Are they talking about me? Somehow I know I am tied to this taunting, that I am target though they’re not looking at me, the words still clinging to my skin as if sensing the yellow beneath the brown. I look at my eyes in the mirror, turn my head to the side, search for slits. Who is this they’ve made of me?…
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