Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘EVERYONE THAT I LOVE IS BLACK’
Tachianna Charpenter grew up in Duquette, Minn.,, a town of less than 100 souls in the mostly white northern region of the state. Charpenter, who is mixed race, said she constantly encountered racism as the only black child in her school.
“As a kid, I vividly remember just coming back from school all the time crying and asking my mom to dye my hair blonde,” she said. “I thought that if I had blonde hair, like a lot of the girls in my class, they would be nicer to me.”
Classmates would touch her hair to “see if I could feel it.” They’d talk about wanting to date a black woman when they got older — “not a black girl like Tachi, a real black girl.”
There was the student who whispered “I hate black people” when she was around. And another who spit on her in the fifth grade.
Charpenter moved to St. Paul to start her education at Hamline University in 2017. There, she learned the vocabulary to describe her experiences growing up, words like “microaggressions” and “implicit bias.”
In recent weeks, she joined demonstrators in Minneapolis in the wake of Floyd’s death. She felt compelled, “first and foremost because I’m black, and everyone that I love is black.”
She’s 21 now, a special education teaching assistant, and she said she is fighting to ensure her students will not grow up to protest — and be tear-gassed — for the same issues.
“Now as an adult and being aware of these things, I intentionally go out of my way to challenge those narratives,” she said. “Especially because some of those people see me and say that they look up to me, so I’m hoping that my actions cause them to challenge what they’re thinking about.”