When did you first know you were “white?”25 People answered the question. Below is a transcription of their handwritten notes. Each story is separated by a blank line.
As a youngster I grew up in a community of mostly white people except for a neighborhood called “Hershey Hill.” When we passed through this area, my mom would tell us to lock our car door, and we did. I noticed that the porches and front yards of these homes were filled with people with brown skin and as I grew older, equated this with the chocolate candy for which the neighborhood was so named. How clever, I thought.
At eight years of age, my dad coached my basketball team and we gave rides to a girl who lived in Hershey Hill. One evening I asked her if she was scared to live in Hershey Hill. She cried, my dad got mad at me and I suddenly realized the thoughtless prejudice of my family.
When I first went to Nipher junior high with kids from the Meacham Park area, I was taken aback by the dark skin and loud, aggressive behavior of the black kids. It took me most of high school to stop being startled by both of these aspects.
My first memories were living on a military base in Germany. We had lived on and off base, so I knew we were Americans and not Germans. In the states, from second grade on, I lived several years in Lincoln, Nebraska. At some point we heard about Omaha having problems but I probably didn’t realize those problems may have been a result of being poor and black until high school. However, we did have a handful of black families all accepted as part of our community. In grade school the immigrant kids seemed more exotic and different than the black kids. The kid’s parents spoke Lativan and the girl with a really long braids had a funny name. They were different.
The three black kids in our high school were just kids. It didn’t seem like they were different. I didn’t really know about problems until I was out of high school. Lincoln was a lot different from Omaha and way different from St. Louis. Now I know there are a lot of black kids at another high school in Lincoln and racial tensions were not unknown. It was just not something my family had to deal with. However it is possible that her family’s choice of high school may have been based partly on race. What we were told was that it was because my brother wanted to be on the debate team.
I grew up in a country that was 99% white and 95% one religion. Sometime around 10 years of age, I was at an amusement park, where they had rides and so on. In one corner they had some shows, singing and so on. One little closed area had inside an exotic “jungle” show. A featured part was a black person, presumably African, who was dressed in a grass skirt holding a spear. He walked on hot coals and broken glass. He said not a word and an emcee narrated. I thought of Tarzan books. It was obviously cool. These exotic people lived in a land far away. Among us white people lived a small number of gypsies, the only minority that were different already by the way they dressed.
We had a sort of passive religion, a religion weren’t mostly in school. Religion was not a major part of ethnic identity, at least not in childhood. Language was a major barrier between “us” and “them.”
I then had to become “them.” though still part of white people! In my 13th year I was in an urban Chicago school and did have one black friend, one of the handful of black kids in the school. I had trouble understanding several kids, they spoke poorly. My black friends spoke perfect Midwest English.
By the time I was a toddler, I knew “white” was considered superior, or preferable, to “black,” but because of an early memory of a friendly black man, I could not figure out why.
When I was six or seven years old my father, a social worker in Kansas City was helping us with bailing people out of jail during the riots following King’s assassination. Late one night he came home tired and frustrated and it was the first and only time I saw him cry. This was a monumental in my thinking about the divide that existed between the races and I definitely knew I was white.
I was 2 ½ years old when I first knew I was white. We had a black cleaning lady once a week.
When we were driving downtown and my father pointed out the ‘ziggaboos’ and I saw chocolate colored people. But somehow I knew he was wrong to call them that. So from an early age – five? – I knew my father and I had different beliefs.
Growing up in Edwardsville, Illinois and going to Catholic school, I had no exposure to any ethnic city other than Caucasians and primarily Catholics. I do remember an African American – although I did not know that term – called “preach” who walked the streets of downtown and ran errands for merchants and lawyers from the county courthouse. He was extremely friendly and well liked by the community. I had a sense that I was different from preach in many ways. Skin color was just one of those ways.
I first knew I was white at age 12, in 1964, in downtown St. Louis. A black man saved my life. Obviously, he was a good person. The only difference between us was the color of our skin.
Somewhere around six or seven years old I learned I was white when my father worked with the Mill Hill missionary fathers were coming and going between Africa and St. Louis and England. As Catholics we work for the poor who always seemed to be black. Living in the city of St. Louis my other experienced was a racist grandfather who – for as long as I can remember – talked about the “niggers” who we saw around us. Then in seventh grade we move toward integrated neighborhood which I loved. It was always confusing until then. Now I am struggling with the “whiteness” in many ways of our congregation. It just doesn’t feel like home. I wish I had suggestions...
My first recollection was when I was around 10 years old walking up to town in Sparta, Illinois where my grandma and grandpa lived. I was with my sister who was 11. Two girls of color approached us and we all exchanged looks and remarks, thus I knew that I was white and they were black.
When I was growing up in Kirkwood I only saw white people. I don’t remember seeing many people with dark skin until TV, and I went to college at a SIU in Carbondale.
I grew up in a town and state that had very few minorities. However, in second or third grade, I became friends with an African American girl named Laverne. My mom and I would go to her house (in a “bad” part of town) and bring her back to our house so we could play together. I was fortunate to have parents who didn’t see people as black or white.
When I was a child, age 5 to 12, I lived in a small town of block from the county courthouse. Our next-door neighbors on both sides were “rich,” business owners in town whose homes were brick. We rented a white framed two-story house from one of them. The other had children my age, my only playmates. They also had a black maid, whom I noticed a dark skin, but I never saw any other discrimination. A block away lived a black family you the mother was renowned for her barbecue, which another neighbor used to buy and take home. I don’t remember any other contact with black people except the black AME small white framed church, which was right next door to our big Zion UCC church uptown, only a couple of blocks on the other side of the courthouse.
I went to church camp in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and met kids from Fort Smith, Arkansas. The civil rights movement and the lunch counter demonstrations across the South came in to my consciousness. The kids I met at Camp became penpals, and I learned there older college aged siblings were participating in the protests. The music at church camp that we didn’t like was due up – early rock ‘n roll – so I joined with three or four black kids and started an a cappella to a group that sang at Camp Aurora and Windyville, Missouri.
After college in a few years at Monsanto – when they started hiring blacks – I met the best friend I had there for over 25 years I’ve been retired six years now, and we still get together for dinner several times a year – recently to celebrate Obama’s nomination.
I still find “white” and “Caucasian” we are words to describe myself. I’m German through and through, but intellectually I know that race as such doesn’t exist scientifically. It’s a weird world and getting weirder the longer I live!
I think I knew I was white when I knew black people were not “allowed” in our neighborhood or schools in 1945. “They” had their own neighborhoods and their houses were not nice – they didn’t keep them up. Then I didn’t think more about it – until I was old enough to see the injustice. I began to imagine what it must be like to be another race. I had to deal with fear also. I was afraid of black people. I stayed clear.
Of course that changed you I’m still afraid of hatred no matter where it comes from – and uncomfortable sometimes. But, I have found love and appreciation. I also see progress.
My parents talked about the Negroes. It seems difficult to say the word... we were driving they talked in general – they did not point. But I could see and feel the difference. I could feel a difference because of the way my dad said the word: Negro.
I graduated in January 1955. And I knew that the schools would be integrated in February 1955. I first realized that it wasn’t because no “Negroes” lived in my school district and that none came to my school – I was shocked to learn that they were not allowed to come to school. P.S. I. thought of myself as “Italian” but then new I was “white.”
There was a woman my grandmother called “the maid.” My grandfather called her “the colored gal.” Tinnie and I loved each other, or at least I loved her and she was very, very kind to me. The first time I realized we were different colors I at least had the sense to feel guilty. My grandma and I had lunch at the kitchen table and Tinnie said on a stool at the counter. I asked me to come sit with us. But my grandmother said, oh no, she preferred to sit at the counter. Tinnie did not smile at me, concentrated on her lunch, and I knew it wasn’t the truth. I knew that she was somehow considered inferior, and I felt very bad about that I felt bad because I loved her. Incidentally, my grandmother always was polite and considerate of her employees and unfailingly went through the annual struggle of paying Social Security on their behalf.
I grew up in Hungary (100% Caucasian population) and the first time I realized I was white was when I saw black students in my biology class at the local university.
I grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois. Quite a while ago now. About that time I was in kindergarten, my mother told me that I should not talk to the “dark” people on the buses, which we regularly rode around town. She said their skin was dark because they were bad and we were very lucky because our skin was white. I can remember thinking two things: (one) that the dark people were different shades and (two) I wasn’t white like milk or my white crayons, but I knew if I said these things, I would be “in trouble are you” shortly after this, I was watching a “arc” mother on the bus with her children and she was very good to them and I thought my mother was wrong or she had lied to me.
This is something that happened with my twin boys when they were four years old. Their best friend was a black boy from preschool. It was early summer and we had invited him over to play. I told the boys that could change into their swim trunks before getting into a little wading pool in the backyard. A few minutes later, my boys came running out of the bedroom and one of them said excitedly, “mommy, mommy, guess what! Vernon’s black all over.”
They had obviously thought previously that only his face and hands were black (the visible parts). I’ve always loved this memory.
I grew up in Chicago and when Martin Luther King was assassinated, there were terrible riots in the city. I particularly remember because it happened the day before my birthday, and the police were telling people not to come down into the city until the streets were under control from rioters and looters.
I remember my dad speaking about the looters "schvartzahs" (blacks in yiddish), how they were acting like animals turning on their own kind and ruining their neighborhoods.
This was the day I knew I was white, and because I was afraid of that was going on in the city, I was glad I was.
Growing up in rural Iowa in the 30’s and 40’s, I had never seen a black person until I entered high school. Then there were two black boys in school. I had little contact with them. I was never taught to be prejudiced even though I had grown up in a white society.
When I entered college, my room mate who grew up in a segregated Kansas City told me how difficult it was for her to drink from a fountain after a black person. I was shocked!
When Duke Ellington and his band came to play a concert at the college, there was no motel in Waterloo or Cedar Falls, Iowa, that would let them stay over night. They had to be housed in a dorm at the college. I was the editor of the College newspaper and wrote an editorial about the irony of this.
I was introduced to the idea of "white" in 1967 when I was 7 years old and I was invited to a friend's birthday party. Melody was African-American and my parents told me I was not allowed to attend the party because she was black. My older sister who was 19 at the time took me aside, out of hearing of my parents, and told me that our parents were wrong and she would get me to the party. Everything went as planned that Sunday afternoon and I did go to the party. I don't recall my parents ever finding out. My parents have both since passed away. Dad would be 91 and Mom would be 88 if they were still living. My parents did "evolve" and make changes in their thinking as they aged, but in 1967, that was who they were.
