The last time a racial insult genuinely hurt my feelings, I was in middle school. Before you ask? No, it wasn’t “nigger”.
No. That would have been too simple. Too obvious. Some idiot yelling “Nigger” to insult you is at least honest about the transaction. He hates you, he has the vocabulary of a malfunctioning lawn mower, and he has selected the most ancient piece of racial profanity available to him. Fine. We understand each other.
This was different. This was a teacher, A Black woman. She called me an Oreo. (Black on the outside, White on the inside. Get it?)
Christ.
The great crime I had committed against Black America was that I spoke proper English. I wanted to learn. I behaved myself. I listened to the teachers. I did my work. I was respectful. (Not Yes Sir, No Sir, Thank You Kindly Sir respectful, mind you. This was an inner-city school in the 1980s. I wasn’t THAT nerdy.)
Still, I was a decently good kid. I had assumed that this was what teachers wanted. To be fair, a vast majority of them did. This teacher just kept needling me, though.
“Oreo.”
“Do you think you’re better than the rest of the class?”
This confused the hell out of me.
“Wait. What?” I said in soliloquy. “I’m doing the thing teachers have been telling me to do since kindergarten. Pay attention. Learn. Read. Speak clearly. Don’t disrupt the class. Try to build some kind of future for myself. Now I’m being interrogated for it? What the HELL?”
I had wandered into a bizarre cultural tribunal where speaking proper English was evidence for the prosecution.
I was angry. Worse, I was hurt. Underneath “Oreo” was a much uglier accusation:
You are doing Whiteness.
Speaking proper English was White.
Learning was White.
Wanting something better was White.
You are NOT WHITE. Stop pretending you are.
Apparently, there was something fraudulent about me. I was Black on the outside, but somewhere beneath the epidermis lurked a tiny suburban White woman with excellent diction and a library card. The unspoken rule seemed to be, “Black kids should speak like scrambled cable television. We should not want to learn. We should not behave ourselves.”
Plenty of kids in the class took her up on her invitation to act like fools.
It would take me years to understand the larger arguments people have about culture, identity and authenticity. Back then, I only knew that an adult who was supposed to encourage me was telling me that the things I liked about myself somehow made me “Fake”.
That hurt like hell. It was confusing.
Then my friend Tommy Harrison looked at me and said: “The white part in the middle is why everybody loves Oreos.”
I laughed. Goddammit, Tommy, you magnificent bastard.
Something happened in my brain. Click. Like somebody had found a circuit breaker in the basement of my skull, activating a dormant circuit in my brain.
“Wait a minute. I don’t have to be offended. There is no law. Nobody can make me participate in this transaction.”
You can call me an Oreo, and I can just... laugh.
So I did. I started repeating it back.
“Oreo? Hell yeah. Double Stuf.” I enunciated the reply like I was a news broadcaster.
Suddenly the weapon stopped working. The teasing dried up.
Insults are peculiar weapons. A fist does not require your cooperation to bloody your nose. A brick does not require your cooperation to break your window. If somebody hits you in the face with a shovel, you cannot defeat the shovel by adopting a healthier attitude toward gardening equipment.
But an insult? An insult requires something from you. The bastard insulting you needs you to care.
He hands you a box marked OFFENSE, and somewhere along the way we became convinced that we are morally obligated to open the damn thing. We aren’t.
That lesson stuck with me.
So today somebody can call me “Nigger” and my first reaction is usually some variation of:
“Really? That’s it? You reached into the gigantic thesaurus of human cruelty and came back with that? A word older than your grandfather? Come on, man. Put some craftsmanship into your racism.”
I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’m not requesting an increase in racist drive-bys. Please do not take this essay as a promotional coupon. I would prefer the word to become pathetic.
Pathetic things are difficult to fear. Pathetic things do not inspire anger.
I want some ignorant racist asshole to spit it out with all the venom he can muster, expecting the heavens to crack open, and have the Black kid standing across from him stare for three seconds and say:
“Seriously? That’s all you’ve got?” and then sigh with all the disappointment of a kid getting socks for Christmas.
Imagine the disappointment. All that hate, all that dramatic buildup. Centuries of historical baggage hauled onto the stage like some grotesque racial opera. The speaker thinks he’s about to become some racist super saiyan, and… nothing.
The audience just yawns, and starts scrolling their phones instead.
There is tremendous power in refusing to perform the role somebody has written for you. We used to teach children: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Obviously words can hurt. I know that better than most because “Oreo” hurt me terribly when I was a kid. But that little rhyme contained a useful idea that we’ve beaten out of ourselves: “You have some control over how much power another person’s contempt gets to have over you.”
Somewhere along the way we started treating certain words as though they were supernatural incantations. Say the forbidden syllables and suddenly normal rules disappear. Rage becomes obligatory. Violence becomes understandable. Everybody gathers around afterward to debate whether the speaker had it coming.
I reject that whole miserable arrangement.
Some racist asshole does not get that much control over my nervous system.
He doesn’t get to raise my blood pressure on command.
He doesn’t get to ruin my afternoon.
He certainly doesn’t get to make me throw a punch and spend the night explaining myself to the police.
That’s an absurd amount of power to hand an idiot.
That’s what Tommy taught me all those years ago. The insult only worked while I agreed to carry it. The moment I laughed, the whole machinery broke down.
So call me an Oreo.
Call me “Nigger”
Call me whatever moldy antique you dragged out of the Museum of American Racism.
I’ll survive. I might even laugh.
The white part in the middle is why everybody loves Oreos.
Thanks, Tommy Harrison.
You were a mensch.
I know it’s more of a side quest than a central thesis, but this is why I wince a little whenever people talk about the nobility of teachers. I’ve had some teachers than were heaven sent. And others that I hope rot in hell.
Well said, and thank you, Tommy.
The entire idea that speaking well and behaving in a way to better yourself is ‘acting white’ is laughable and should be ridiculed. We are people. Am I a chronic over-achiever because of my Asian-Pacific Islander blood? Or was it carefully honed out of spite and a desire to prove to my elementary school teachers that I am not my brother, who does not have the same ethnic mix that I do? Or could it be from any reason ranging from ADHD and being the youngest child? More than likely, it’s because I’m an individual with motivations. You know, like everyone else.