From the backseat my grandson announced, “I just thought of something.” He was too young for the front seat. “I’m the only White kid.”
“Oh yeah? What does that make you think?”
He shrugged, “Nothing.”
He lived in a Chicago bungalow among Black, White, LatinX and Polish neighbors. It struck me how different that was from my childhood, or his dad’s, and especially his great-grands’.
Old Myths
In 1952 I was 5 years old, living in an all-White world in rural Indiana. Holding my Mama’s hand, I bent down to pick up a pretty comb on the sidewalk. “No, Honey, don’t touch that. You don’t know who had it. Maybe even a Black person. You could get germs.”
In 1974 my son, his dad, was a baby when his other grandmother visited us in Virginia. She opened the Washington Post to a page with twenty Black faces, all running for office in D.C. Her tongue clicked and her head shook: “Look what the world is coming to.”
A Black friend tells me her story from high school in the 1980’s. She was an exceptionally fast runner on the track team. When a White runner complained, the coach explained within earshot, “They’re faster because they have more tendons in their ankles.”
Myths are slow to die. Today we know they are false, but they still echo in White ears. When our forefathers installed separate-but-equal laws after the Civil War, they manufactured a two-worlds America. Knowing nothing about life in the Black world, White society imagined, and the old myths from enslavement fed their imaginings.
Myth Breaking
Today, my grandson’s generation experiences the world as a conglomeration of people. He sees ordinary humanity in diverse faces everywhere. Advertisements, video games, Tik Tok reels, movies and TV, all are breaking down the old separations. Instead of myths, he sees just people in the faces around him.
Meanwhile, my generation and the one after me are still alive and remembering old messages. A myth can crop up unbidden at any moment. We need to learn from our newest generation. Then, eventually, it won’t matter when we notice, “I’m the only White kid.”
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