When I was about 13, I had one of many weird incidents. I haven’t ever talked about it too directly to anyone, and never mentioned it to my parents. I don’t like to talk about it or a bunch of other things that I or my friends survived, living in the same neighborhood, because I feel like it will make people judge me, or pity me, or tarnish some image that I’ve been convinced I’m supposed to have. So this is a heavily filtered version: I was walking home after watching two of my friends, who didn’t always get along, fight after school. At least 40 other people watched, if not 60. The whole thing was planned. Some kids jumped in and hit them, often the same kids who were in gangs or fought regularly. They eventually let the two who planned to fight kind of fight it out, though. Afterwards, everyone dispersed, but a group of about 30, including me, followed a few of their friends, including one who was in the fight, home. As we stopped by his house, three guys walked up the block with a bulldog. They said something about hearing there was a fight, and asked if anyone wanted to fight one of the guys. I had my headphones on, and saw that there was a crowd drifting off, talking to these strangers, so I moved towards it out of curiosity. I took off my headphones to hear what they were saying, and one spotted me. He said come here white boy, and snatched my CD player. This moment felt all too familiar. I was the only white kid in sight pretty much anywhere in my neighborhood, or in school. After he grabbed the CD player, he ran across the street. I followed. He drops it on the ground. I reach for it. It must have been an uppercut and two jabs. The gravel felt warm, friendly, even. My body was flaccid like nights after sports practice, and I wanted to wrap myself in the sheet of concrete, curl up and disappear. I felt like a fish. I remember helping my dad gut them, how blood from their loose jaws gathered around our fingers. The cement felt like fingers. The guy says something and laughs, walks off with his friends and the bulldog. There’s a little person in me that wants to grow twenty times bigger and choke them at this point. But it takes a while for this thought to register, and it is weak. It’s almost not my thought, but how I thought I was supposed to feel after and during violence. I anticipated what happened; threats and racial profiling were common on the streets. That’s why I felt the eyes of the crowd on me the whole time, all of them just standing there: witnesses. I get up, get my CD player, and walk back to where I was. A girl says Are you okay. I say I’m not crying am I. It gets weird here. With blood on my lip and chin and hands, I put on this stoic face. This face that I’d gotten used to putting on because I knew that wasn’t the last of it. Walking with those 30 kids down the street, some looking at me, me refusing to talk or show emotion, all the way down to the end of the block, until I can slip off into my own little street, reach home, wipe off the blood, lie to my parents about what happened, which didn’t feel weird by now, slip into my room upstairs, play video games for an hour to get numb, answer three phone calls from friends that are concerned and got my number from other friends, cry a bit, do homework, and go to sleep. Wake up and go to school on time the next day because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Answer with less than three word replies to questions like “I heard what happened,” avoid the guy who punched me for the next year, who never ended up recognizing me when I ditched the old haircut, and don’t speak a word about it to anybody for years. I kind of knew why it happened. There are a lot of reasons, race, SES, and etc don’t even cover it. But the history books said that discrimination worked the other way around, so I felt a little silly talking about it. I kind of thought that it would be a burden on people to talk about it anyway, especially on my family, because it didn’t even start or end there. My friends too, though. People in my neighborhood. This kind of stuff happened often, to many people I knew, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I sometimes don’t feel comfortable in college because mentioning stuff like this is taboo. If they’re not close friends, there’s this risk of alienating yourself or whoever you’re talking to. I’ve grown tired of not saying anything though. Maybe I have to learn one step at a time.
