White mom wakes up to racism
With my green eyes, freckles and white skin, I have never personally experienced racism, heard a racial epithet used against me or been discriminated against because of my color. Perhaps this is why I was so seriously impacted when I first witnessed my child and her friends encounter racial bias
My 15-year-old daughter is one of the growing number of multiracial children in America. Without breaking her racial/ ethnic identity out by ancestry, she is best described as being half Hispanic and half white.
Following a tough soccer game in Northern Virginia the other day, my daughter was standing with her teammates, who are predominately Latina, when a white grandmother of one player from the other team came up to them, screaming. The woman was upset that her granddaughter’s team had lost the game and felt that our team had played too aggressively — a common issue of debate within teenage recreational soccer leagues.
An older sister of one of the teenage players (who is also Latina) asked the woman to stop and to walk away. This prompted the woman to aggressively advance toward the older sister of the player, to within inches of her face, and announce it was her right to continue her tirade because “pays taxes.”
The players, parents and siblings of my daughter’s team were in awe. This woman had assumed that because these players and their family members are Hispanic, that they were non-tax-paying undocumented immigrants.
I was so completely disgusted by the woman’s behavior that my eyes started to well up with tears as I apologized to the girls for what they had just experienced. However, I was more unprepared for how the girls responded to my emotional reaction. Each player came up to me and hugged me, before my daughter said, “It’s OK, Mom, this kind of stuff happens all the time. You just don’t see it.” All of the other girls nodded in affirmation. “This isn’t the first time this has happened to us and it won’t be the last,” another girl said.
I was absolutely speechless, and I physically felt ill. My daughter and her friends had told me about experiencing racism from others in the past, but this was the first time that I had witnessed it with my own two eyes. More importantly, this was the first time that my child and her friends had expressed their experiential belief that racism was par for the course of their lives.
The angry woman’s statements were completely uncalled for, and her aggressive words and actions toward a group of teenage girls were disgusting. However, I am even more disturbed by the fact that in 2017 my child and her friends have come to terms with a realiy that is inextricably tied to experiencing racism. Words cannot express how disheartening it feels to hear your child say that she is just going to deal with discrimination “the best way I know how.”
Ultimately, the experience after the game was another grim reminder for me that the United States of America is not anywhere close to being “post-racial.” The erroneous denial of the existence of pervasive prejudice and racism is one of the reasons why these forms of bias continue to be institutionalized and are perceived by our youth as being immutable. In order to make progress on race relations in our country, it is imperative for political leadership and the public to come to the same awareness on the existence of racism as those who experience it.