As someone who also attended an all white private school in the South who was raised by white conservatives. I call BS. Do I think he thinks he’s BSing. No of course not. Back before I educated myself on racism I also attributed certain interactions I had growing up to random things. For instance I grew up thinking that most human beings were just mean bullies. Which I guess we can be. But in general I thought adults were people that randomly lashed out at you for no reason and chose only certain kids to harass. I learned that if I told an adult that someone was bullying me I would end up in timeout.
As a kid I just grew up thinking life was very unfair and confusing. That some people were just really mean sort of like in the fairytales I read growing up or movies I watched. It was not until I was in my early twenties that I was made aware that sometimes white adults have a bias toward other white children and that they often label people of color as troublemakers. When I understood that this narrative was a well studied social phenomena in our US society. That’s what ended up freeing my mind. I was finally able to come out from under the shame of my own existence I had been living in. I literally thought all these years there was something about my appearance, face or personality that inspired random acts of cruelty and violence toward me. I survived my childhood but did come out of it with major mental impairments. I have PTSD and body dysmorphia. I would like to suggest that many African Americans who come out of completely white class spaces in the US. Are suffering from PTSD. Now my PTSD was a combination of racial bullying and childhood sexual assaults. But both affected me tremendously. I did have memories of being called the Nword and was physically assaulted by a white girl when I was eight. But seeing as I was only a child I never connected those incidences with adult teacher’s behavior toward me which was much more sophisticated racial bullying.
I knew racism existed and that I was African American even though I found out in my teens that I was actually biracial. I was adopted and because I was raised by white class people they don’t really see being biracial as a big deal. To higher status white class people colorism and being biracial is not really a thing. It mainly exists in the black community. I didn’t have anyone really to compare my features to. Even if I may have appeared a shade or two lighter to another person of color. In my eyes I was comparing my skin color to that of a white skin color. So slightly lighter gradations or phenotype differences went completely unnoticed by me. No white people ever said to me, “Well you are lighter than most black people I know so I won’t punch you.” That being said the way I was socialized probably got me some leniency. I sounded like I had been socialized in a white environment which some white class people do actually care about and notice. Essentially it’s hard to look back before you were made aware of colorism and see all the ways things may have been different if you had been darker. This is much how I imagine white privilege functions in white people. They may have access to the head knowledge that in any given situation they may have been treated differently or better based on sociological studies. But as humans we don’t tend to remember all the times things went amazingly right for us? That’s the catch 22 of this whole US system. It is a very silent caste system. Hard to pin down and even harder to analyze. This is why CRT has been targeted. It actually looks at trends and examines all relevant information related to laws and the caste system. How it operates and what is the truth behind the commonly held perception of US laws.
It might be different for biracial kids growing up with their biological parents where the white class parent physically contributed to the biracial person’s biology.
I do want to make a very important note that the only place I never experienced any racism in an all white class setting was within my own adoptive family. Which apparently judging by what I’ve seen of white women who raise their own biological biracial children is saying a whole lot apparently. My white adoptive family never othered me. They almost treated me better in some aspects. I was very spoiled and coddled by all my family members. So it’s very important to say that there are white spaces where racism just isn’t there. But it is very unlikely that you will only ever interact with just that space. Since home and school are not the only places we visit in our lives. What is happening with Tyler Perry seems to be a common conditioned response to trauma. If I don’t examine it and look at it maybe it won’t hurt me.
