I am a white, progressive, 37-year-old man who was raised in a city so proud of celebrating its diversity and education system that it was blind to both its ever-growing economic divide and the clear lines of segregation that had been drawn within it. The Cambridge I grew up in loved to celebrate our diversity, inclusion, and progressive politics. As a former resident of Cambridge, MA, I have on numerous occasions dislocated my shoulder trying to pat myself on the back for how “woke” I was and how unique and special my city is. I’m sure it’s a pretty common diagnosis at Cambridge City Hospital.
I grew up in a place so quick to point out Cambridge was the first city to have an African American school principal in the state, at one of the first desegregated schools in the country back in 1889. We were quick to celebrate anything that made sure we didn’t have to really scratch the surface of our own systemic racism and allowed us to pat ourselves on the back for living up to our unofficial title of “The People’s Republic of Cambridge”. What we never discussed but was widely known was the permanent stain that FHA-introduced Redlining left on my city when it first began in 1934. While our schools and classrooms were quite diverse, when we left school, we went back to our own segregated neighborhoods.
In my own neighborhood of North Cambridge, Rindge Avenue clearly defined where white people lived vs. where Black, Latinx, and Asian immigrant families lived – you’d think we had traveled back to 1950’s Mississippi. If snow needed to be plowed, a streetlight was out, or a pothole needed to be fixed, my side of Rindge Ave was taken care of… This was not the case for the side of Rindge Ave that my Black Brother-In-Law grew up on.
Venture over to other areas of Cambridge, like Cambridgeport/Area 4 and the same thing applied. Why? It had to be an oversight. After all, the mayor of my city was Black.
I spent my early years going to Agassiz school. A school named that until 2004 when an 8th-grade student actually dug into who Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was – a prominent racist espousing the pseudoscientific belief of racial superiority. My friends were White, Black, Latinx, and Asian-American, and as grade schoolboys tend to be, we would get rowdy in class, often getting excited over sports, music, cartoons, or episodes of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. When I got loud, or disruptive, I was met from my teachers with a “Time to calm down Robert” in a gentle tone. If my friends Michael, Yuseff, or Omari got excited or loud, they were often met with a vastly different tone telling them to be quiet or sending them to the Principal’s office.
Looking back on it, I don’t believe any of my teachers were overtly racist (although I’ve been quite surprised lately by people I know, so nothing is out of the realm of possibility). Rather, systemic racism had been unconsciously entrenched in them.
Both my parents are professors so I was brought up to hold teachers in the highest regard. I basically thought of teachers as infallible. This belief that teachers are never wrong, coupled with their vastly different reactions when reprimanding me vs. my Black friends, quietly reinforced the notion that my friends must be doing something “worse” than I was, and so deserved a harsher tone and punishment.
I know that is totally untrue, we all do, but when it’s so systemic and subversive, it’s impossible for anyone not to absorb that feeling. If that’s the effect it had on me, I can’t imagine the damage it did to my childhood best friend Omari’s psyche and sense of self-worth.
Like many High School kids from Cambridge, I joined every social justice group I knew of in High School, and yet while being a highly active member of those groups, I never quite took inventory of my own school experiences. Truth be told, I’m not sure I ever received the tools needed as a teenager to really understand so much of the nuance that I’m discussing now as an adult.
During my Freshman year of high school, I joined the swim team. Somehow, I convinced Omari to join as well although, as I recall, he had little interest joining at first and was the only Black swimmer on the team. We were the ultimate ragtag group of outcast athletes in the school. As a team, we were basically the kids who were relatively athletic but had zero chance of making it onto any other team at school, and we could all at the very least tread water.
From our freshman to sophomore year, we got a new coach. Our team turned from the Bad News Bears to a legit swim team largely in part to the fact that Omari had become a strong, skilled swimmer. We knew he was going to win 90% of the races he’d enter, and we counted on it.
Omari was an awesome teammate, participating in a lot of the weird shit us white kids on the swim team would do that he would surely catch shit for from his Black friends, like wearing Hawaiian shirts on days we had meets.
Before school let out each year, the team would get together and vote on who next year’s captains would be. By the end of our Junior year, I had become a decent swimmer, but the best swimmers on the team going into next year were clearly Omari and our other friend, Artis. Artis and I, both White, were voted as next year’s Team Captains. Omari never swam with us again.
Imagine, Michael Jordan or Tom Brady not being the captain of their team. That is what this was.
Omari teammates betrayed him. He had outworked, outperformed, and had singlehandedly won swim meets for our team. Even I, as his teammate and close friend, passively betrayed Omari because we should have selected him, not me, and instead of stepping away from the title and arguing why Omari should be Captain, I stole that honor from him, instead.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone on that team didn’t vote for him as Captain because he was Black, just that subliminally we thought of him as an “other”, an outsider we didn’t feel fit in as well as Artis or I did. I bought into the idea that somehow Artis and I must have deserved it more than he did because that title of Team Captain was bestowed upon us, not him. It must have been the “intangibles” I brought to the table. My enthusiasm, and rah-rah spirit must have been what was recognized in me, and my lack of performance, when stacked up to Omari’s, must not have been that big of a deal.
It probably sounds silly to say it’s painful to write about this moment in my high school sports career, but writing about this actually brings up some real shame because I betrayed my closest friend, and from that moment on we grew apart.
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After High School, I took a year off to volunteer with City Year (an Americorps Organization often referred to as the Domestic Peace Corps) and present workshops on racism, sexism, and other social justice issues to middle school and high school students all over the greater Boston area. I tried to learn everything I could about institutionalized racism, participated and led many discussions and exercises geared to show just how deeply ingrained the systems of oppression are in this country.
With all that said, I failed the most important part of being an ally; I think it’s something we white people fail at time and time again: I failed to search into my own deeply ingrained biases, think critically, and question them. For all the education I received about social justice and racism, being raised by the most wonderful, loving, and socially conscious parents anyone could ever ask for, I fell into the White Liberal Do-Gooder trap of patting myself on the back and telling myself I’m part of the solution, not the problem. That way I never had to think about some of the lies that you’re taught and are reinforced culturally as a white child to be true.
As I got older, I began to learn that undoing the indoctrination I received culturally as a white man is something that is an ongoing task, and it lies so deep within us, that it’s hard to access it in order to flush it out. Honestly, I am not even sure it can be fully flushed out; it’s an ongoing process that needs to addressed daily.
I’d hear stories from even my closest friends and family members who are black, about being treated differently by teachers, harassed by police for “loitering” in front of their own houses, and having store owners follow them around while shopping just to make sure they don’t steal anything. While I knew it was true and deeply messed up, there was always that tiny little sliver of me that thought to myself there must have been some reason why, though.
How screwed up is that?
I had all the education and experience to know better, and these are people who I hold closer to my heart than any others. Still, that part of my brain that had been indoctrinated with this racist rhetoric our societal system is built upon told me to doubt them.
For me, I am realizing that racism is even more deeply rooted in me than any other type of systemic injustice. If I hear of a woman being assaulted, or a child being abused, that stupid thought bubble of Well, what did they do to bring on the assault or abuse doesn’t pop into my mind. Yet that thought bubble can still make its way into my head when confronted with examples of blatant racism, even though now I dismiss that thought bubble almost as soon as it pops up.
Why the racist thoughts pop into our head is the question we white people need to examine. I wholeheartedly believe the statement “Racism is as American as Apple Pie” because I’m living proof of it, like every other white person in this country. I am an uncle to two incredible black nephews and a beautiful black niece. Soon I will be a father as well. I must be better. I must continue every day to root out that deeply entrenched racism like a coal miner going deeper and deeper into a mine, getting closer and closer to the fires of hell.
I owe it to the people I love. I owe it to my country. I owe it to the world. I owe it to my unborn child, who doesn’t deserve to be burdened with this utter bullshit. I owe it to you who is reading this. And you owe it to me, my family, and my unborn child to do the same. We cannot allow ourselves to be complacent right now. We aren’t going to get a second chance.
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