
What if I’d read The Bluest Eye before Huck Finn or The Underground Railroad before Gone with the Wind or The House on Mango Street before Lord of the Flies or Shuggie Bain before Little Women or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings before Heart of Darkness? If I’d read those books in reverse order, I might have been able to jab the red-haired, freckle-faced elementary school bully in the eye before he left scars on my body which faded and scars on my soul which did not, or I might have awakened the AP English teacher as he sat on the desk facing us, head slumped forward, asleep and with his zipper down, or I might have told a high school counselor our family secret (my mom was dying slowly at home, refusing medical treatment for cancer), or I might have accepted the full scholarship to MIT for graduate school if only I believed that a Black woman like me was good enough in math to succeed there.
What if I’d first read those books that came late, but not too late, those books that changed me forever? Imagine who I might have been.
Sometimes I play “chicken” with the white men who won’t step aside when they see me coming toward them on the sidewalk, neither one of us willing to cede the cement until the last minute, when I look them in the eye and they blink while stepping onto the grass, annoyed because I claimed my rightful space.
I stand next to my brown-skinned, blue-eyed son when the grocery store checkout lady or the guy standing in line at the takeout place asks Where did you get those gorgeous blue eyes? and my son refuses to answer and I don’t encourage him to respond or answer for him because they should know that a mixed-race kid has the right to inherit the blue eyes of his white father.
At Sephora I step up to the register, receipt in hand, to return an unopened palate of eyeshadow I purchased a week earlier. The young white girl at the register asks to see my receipt, her tone sharp, staccato. She removes the eyeshadow from the box, turning it over, peering at it like it’s a precious gem and she’s looking for a flaw. She wants to know the reason for the return. I bought the wrong colors. More delays. She won’t look me in the eye. I look up to see the store’s return policy: If you are not completely satisfied with a Sephora purchase or gift for any reason, Sephora welcomes you to return new or gently used products for a full refund to your original method of payment if returned within 30 days of purchase, in most cases. Reluctantly, she makes the return. And then I know. I wait a few hours after leaving the store until I’m eerily calm. Then, I call the manager to extract an apology for the salesgirl’s attitude and a review of the “shopping while Black” incident, knowing I will go up the food chain, hungry for justice, if the manager so much as hesitates.
I think twice before acknowledging these inevitable micro-aggressions—a form of bigotry so casual they could easily be mistaken for an oversight or even a compliment. I disappoint myself when I remain silent. I startle myself with the contempt in my voice when I respond. The most uneasy days are when I decide ahead of time that no matter what someone says or does, I will not ignore their insulting behavior.
Because I read Roxane Gay and Amy Tan and Louise Erdrich and Tommy Orange and Viet Thanh Nguyen and Mohsin Hamid and Justin Torres, I am not afraid to call out insensitivity when my son graduates Cum Laude from a fancy Los Angeles private school, after acceptance to an Ivy League University. At graduation, all eight speakers are white, so I email the board of directors, the head of school and the administrators to tell them this is unacceptable, that the message they are sending to my son and all seniors is the future is all white and then I take a deep breath and type, I will help you find people of color to speak at next year’s graduation.
Christina Simon, is the former nonfiction editor for Angels Flight Literary West. Her essays have been published in Salon, The Offing, Cleaver Magazine, Slag Glass City, Columbia Journal (winner of the 2020 Black History Month Contest for Nonfiction), Another Chicago Magazine, The Citron Review, PANK Magazine’s Health and Healing Folio, Cutbank Literary Journal’s Weekly Flash Prose, (Mac)ro(Mic), The Santa Ana River Review, Barren Magazine and elsewhere. Christina lives with her husband in Los Angeles. She misses her son and daughter who are away at college. www.csimonla.com.
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