Losing My Anti-Racism

by R.L. Stephens II on February 10, 2016

The Box

It was my junior year at Carleton College in Minnesota. I had just returned from four months studying in Bolivia. My identity was in flux as I tried to integrate my changing worldview after experiencing political struggle at a level far more advanced than anything I’d seen stateside. My first week in the country the rightwing attempted a coup that killed nearly thirty people, resulting in the president declaring a state of emergency. At one point during my research project, an interview subject showed me a cache of homemade dynamite he claimed to have stolen from Cuban radicals in the neighborhood. I had to decide whether he was lying or if I should break my research ethics and tell everyone he was a snitch. What a time to be alive.

Throughout Bolivia, I lived places where they had never even heard the word nigger before. I was in a country where people in the street would pinch each other upon seeing me because Black people were thought to bring good luck. I didn’t have to worry about strangers expecting the worst of me. It was the most free I’d ever felt. Obviously, once I returned, I hardly felt comfortable back among the first-world comforts of campus life in a town known for “Cows and Contentment.” Then, I got the box.

My school placed me in temporary housing as a result of overcrowding and my room’s door didn’t lock. Within a couple days of being on campus, someone snuck into my room and stole a few of my personal things. Then, days later, the burglars sent me a box filled with my stuff as well as a number of seemingly random items. Among the random trinkets was a novel from the school library about a Black lawyer lynched by a white mob in the middle of the street for not knowing his proper place. It was well known that I wanted to be a lawyer, so the book’s message combined with the the break-in obviously felt racially menacing.

Carleton had the trappings of an inclusive liberal college space. The school had a commitment to diversity, with student support centers for race, international students, and gender/sexuality. We also had anti-discrimination and sexual assault policies in the student conduct handbook, which were recently updated after a campus climate survey. Nonetheless, I still felt incredibly alienated and powerless.

The months lingered and no one came forward. I had no one to lash out against. My anger turned inward. I started drinking more, the type of blackout drunk where the next day your friends have to tell you to whom you owe apologies because you can’t quite remember who carried you back to your room the night before.

The months continued to tumble along. Junior year turned to senior year and there was still no resolution. With about two months left in college, someone finally admitted to being behind the harassment–two Black girls. One apologized to me privately. Then, she wrote a letter–anonymously–in the school paper. The other didn’t feel she did anything wrong. The revelation certainly didn’t make the situation any less racist in my eyes, but it definitely added a whole new layer of betrayal.

The deans spoke to the students, following the spirit, if not the letter, of the school’s anti-discrimination policy. I’m unaware of any disciplinary actions that resulted, but in hindsight, what punitive measures would I have wanted? Did I want them expelled? Did I want their actions to follow them for the rest of their lives? Did I want them hurt in some way? In the end, we simply graduated and never spoke again.

Clearly, this situation had an impact on me psychologically. But truthfully, writing to you at this moment is the first time I’ve thought about it in years. Once I left college, the nature of racism’s impact on my life changed. Racism is no longer just about hurt feelings. No matter how many slurs I was called or times I felt alienated in white schools, I still ate each day and had somewhere to live. Up to that point, a hearty fuck you was the way out of much of the racial hostility I faced. In life beyond school, personal courage and strength are no match for pervasive systemic racism that threatens my very physical existence.

The Basement

In spring 2014, five years after the box, I was working a dead-end job at a boutique grocery in DC. The owners were two white women who met in the Peace Corps in West Africa. They were that type of liberal white women, and I imagine they’re super excited about Hillary Clinton right about now. Every employee was hired on a two week probationary period. They assured me that it was just a formality and everyone was always hired once the two weeks passed.

One of the owners was a mother who had an immigrant Latina nanny, a fact made all the more odious by the store’s role in gentrifying the surrounding Latino neighborhood. Cops were a fixture on the block just outside the door; that’s how you knew the neighborhood clearout was serious. I was the only Black employee, and usually the only Black person to even enter the lily white store. “Are the cows grass fed?” white liberals often asked as they perused the beef section. “Yes,” I responded, stomach growling. I could barely afford to feed myself on my $10 an hour wage.

My first day working, the boss ushered me to the basement. She told me to take money from the cash register to the bank across the street. Before handing me the bills, she looked me in the eye with a strained expression and said “NOW, DON’T RUN OFF WITH THIS.” She didn’t yell, but with her expression and tone, the gravity of the situation was frighteningly apparent to me. I smiled and nodded, like a fucking Sambo, because I had just lost my housing and I needed this $10 an hour job. She repeated, “DON’T RUN OFF WITH THIS, YOU WOULDN’T GET VERY FAR.” My first day, and she already suspected me of being a thief. Immediately, I knew I was in trouble.

Unlike college, there was no diversity office I could visit, and no dean of students I could call. It was just me, alone in that basement of that lily white store in that gentrifying neighborhood with this liberal white woman who had all the power while I had none. One day, the register was short and from the look in her eye, I knew she thought I stole. The tension mounted. What was I to do? I couldn’t call out her micro-aggressions. I was a lone Black worker and she was the white boss, no conversation about race would change the dynamic. When the two weeks was up, the boss again told me to meet her in the basement. I was fired. I was the only person to ever not be hired after the probationary period. I had nowhere to live, no way to feed myself, and no job to dig my way out.

Racism, I discovered, was more like that basement than that box. It was a polite termination. It was quiet. I was quiet. What could I say? In any other situation, telling off with some racist liberal white woman came as easy as breathing. But this wasn’t just any racist liberal white woman, this was a boss at my dead-end low-wage job. How could I check her privilege?

As she told me I was out of a job, it felt like a body blow. I lost my balance. I felt ashamed. I felt humiliated. I lost my confidence and sense of pride. I felt new depths of powerlessness, and ultimately worthlessness. Of course, there was an emotional trauma in being racially profiled and fired. But in time, and through therapy, I healed those wounds. But, people can’t just heal themselves out of poverty.

The reality that many people, and most Black people, are trapped in the various basements of US American society has stuck with me. 22% of Black households make less than $15,000 a year. In 2015 Black people faced an unemployment rate twice that of whites. In 2013, even recent Black college graduates were over twice as likely to be unemployed as recent white college graduates. Just getting a job is challenging and even once employed, Gillian B. White of The Atlantic reports, “Black workers receive extra scrutiny from bosses, which can lead to worse performance reviews, lower wages, and even job loss… black workers are disproportionately monitored and let go, while white workers are allowed longer stints.”

When I walked off the job for the final time, a thought struck me. I needed a union, as do all workers, but especially Black workers likely to face job discrimination. A Black boss won’t cut it. Diversity among the bosses won’t fix the problem because harassment and discrimination knows no color line and takes many forms. As historian Barbara Fields says, “From Peterloo to Santiago, Chile, to Kwangju, South Korea, to Tiananmen Square and the barrios of San Salvador, humanity has learned again and again that shared colour and nationality set no automatic limit to oppression. Ultimately, the only check upon oppression is the strength and effectiveness of resistance to it.”

When faced with the material consequences of racism, it became brutally apparent that my anti-racist techniques and philosophies were irrelevant. I needed to adjust. I realized that many Black workers literally couldn’t afford to check the bosses’ privilege. I worked for hours with no breaks, making $10 an hour in one of the most expensive cities in the world. What I needed was the power to secure tangible improvements at the job, no matter who was in charge. I needed a collective worker platform to leverage my objections to the racial harassment I suffered at the hands of the boss and to protect me from reprisals. I certainly did not need to morally redeem that racist boss with “yackety-yak about race.”

Millions of Black people work low-wage service jobs. I want an anti-racism that’s relevant to their positions in society. It’s hard to check your boss’ racial bias without tools like a collectively bargained grievance process. In the final analysis, what’s the point of an anti-racist toolbox if it’s useless to millions of Black people, if it ignores the political economic conditions in which millions of Black people actually live? Our current preoccupation with racial reflection, awareness, and diversity may be appropriate for college campuses where the stakes are lower. However, in the broader working world these approaches amount to little more than a trickle-down anti-racism that caters to the elite and the upwardly mobile at the expense of the Black poor, a racial Reaganomics. Much more is required of us if we are to ever get free.