The recent attention focused on police shootings of unarmed black men has really brought into focus some thoughts I’ve been having about my childhood. I never felt like I had to worry when I saw police cars, especially the rare times that they were present in our suburban, mostly white, upper-middle class neighborhood.[^n] Now, when I see police cars, I feel very conscious of my blackness. My parents and I never had the conversations that so many black parents have with their children about fearing the police. The only time I’ve been pulled over by a police officer,[^n] I remember being more afraid about what my parents would do to me than maybe ending up dead if I gave the officer a funny look. This is not to say that my siblings and I were raised to be unaware of racism in America, but I think that I did not experience things in the same way that others do, for better or for worse. In a way, I definitely grew up black without fully realizing it most of the time.
Of course, in hindsight, racism touched me plenty of times during my youth, even if I didn’t consciously register them. I got my fair share of microaggressions throughout my pre-college schooling, where I was almost always one of the only black kids.[^n] A lot of these experiences didn’t really register with me until much later, but I can really see now how often I was treated like an “other” because I’m black. I certainly felt a distance from what might be seen as a “standard” black American experience when I took Intro to African-American Studies during my sophomore year (during which Barack Obama was elected president), and I think I feel some of that distance still, but the gap has shrunk considerably since then. This is not to flatten the complexity of the black experience in America, but at the time, the broad themes that we focused on in AAS 201 really didn’t resonate with me like they do now.
It no longer escapes my notice that when I get on the subway in Cambridge, there are very few black people coming from Harvard Square to work in Kendall Square. Further, it’s a lot clearer to me how and why the Boston area is so severely segregated, and how clearly Cambridge is divided between where the black people live and where they don’t. It no longer escapes my notice that I work in a lab building where almost all of the black people are support staff, rather than faculty or postdocs or graduate students. It no longer escapes my notice that my long and funny-looking name isn’t typical for PhD students (and that some people think that might make a funny joke), even at a place as supposedly cosmopolitan as MIT. It no longer escapes my notice that just the suggestion that there might be a problem with racism in this country makes “reasonable” people absolutely hysterical. My experiences may have been distinct and different to many other black people in this country, but I’m fully aware that I can’t escape the weight of the history of black people in this country, from slavery to Jim Crow to the present-day, no matter how much education or prestige I can acquire. When I see the bodies of black people broken in the street, I see my own. I really do try not to be crushed by this weight, though. It is just a fact of my existence, and I learn more and more about what it means every day.