Demystifying Diversity (eBook)

Preface

I was at the Boys & Girls Club’s after school program, hanging out on the grass by the side of the building, when I overheard a White girl call a Black boy the N-word.

I stormed over to where they were standing. “Did you hear what she called you?”

The boy hung his baseball-capped head.

“Well… What are you gonna do about it?” I wasn’t trying to further intimidate a victim, but I couldn’t let the girl get away with hate speech. I was an eleven-year-old advocate for justice.

Nicole.

I turned to face her.

Nicole went to Western Middle School, like me. We were in the same grade. She was considerably shorter. The boy must’ve gone to Eastern or Central, one of the other two Greenwich Middle schools because he and I didn’t know each other. And Greenwich was the sort of town where kids of color who went to the same school knew each other. There were so few of us. Unfortunately, due to what ensued, the boy and I would never have the opportunity to be formally introduced.

Nicole elongated herself to her full four-feet, three-inches and planted her hands on her nonexistent hips. She had stringy, mousy-brown hair that dangled to her shoulders, a pinched face—like a Doberman’s—and beady blue eyes. “Yeah.” She sneered. “What’re you gonna do about it, nigger?”

The brim of the boy’s hat remained pointed at the ground. “Nothing. I can’t hit a girl.”

I knew that, if I wanted to remain on the right side of justice, I couldn’t stay a bystander.

“Maybe you can’t, but I can!” I delivered an unexpected fist to the gut.

(To this day, that punch remains the only one I’ve ever thrown—unless you count my brief stint with Billy Blanks Tae-Bo videos, or the six weeks I spent taking Wing Chun lessons).

Before she could react, I leapt on top of her, slapping, clawing, and pulling while she attempted to get away. “Stop! Ow! That hurts! HELP!”

She was crying out, yet she had been the one to inflict the more painful injury.

“You racist pig!” I screamed.

It took three teenage staff members to pull me off and drag me inside to the Program Director’s office.

The Program Director, Don, was tall and kind with soft, chestnut eyes and lips that smiled far more often than they frowned. After I told him my side of the story, he sat for several seconds, unmoving. It was as if he wanted to react one way, but knew he had to respond another. What seemed like minutes (but was probably only seconds) later, he instructed me to sit on the bench in the hall outside his office while he called my mom at work.

The hallway was brightly lit and cheery, adorned with children’s finger paintings. I stared at a red handprint on yellow construction paper. I didn’t quite know how to feel. I wasn’t sorry, but I that didn’t mean I welcomed whatever punishment awaited.

Mom arrived ten minutes later (two hours before the scheduled dismissal time) to find me still sitting in the hall. By then, Don had interrogated Nicole. He’d gone outside to question her. He and the other staff must’ve figured that, if they brought her inside, I’d have finished what I started—after she started what she started.

After speaking with my racist peer, Don had remained outside, so he was there to meet my mom, and give her a quick debriefing before the two of them walked in together.

“Dara…” Mom said.

Don held his office door open. Mom and I preceded him inside. He followed, gently closing the door, shutting out any possibility of interruption or intrusion.

“What’s this about you calling a girl a racist word?” Mom’s expression telegraphed her confusion.

“I didn’t call her a racist word.”

Don looked from me and my burnished skin to my ivory-complected mother, then back to me again. “Nicole said you did.”

“Nicole’s a liar!”

“What’d she say Dara called her?” Mom wanted to know.

The Program Director’s face flushed as he repeated what Nicole had said I’d said. “White trash.”

“Dara! Did you say that?”

“No! I would never say that. You’re White. I’m part White. I called her a racist pig.”

I explained about Nicole’s use of the N-word, and how the boy’s unwillingness to hit a girl hadn’t precluded me from hitting her on his behalf.

Mom let my version of events sink in. “Oh,” she said. And then, “that makes more sense.”

“Racism is wrong,” Don told us both, “and Nicole will be punished. But I can’t ignore the fact that Dara assaulted her.”

My mom was always a bottom-line-this-for-me person. “So… What’s Dara’s punishment?”

“She’ll be banned from the Boys & Girls Club for the next week.”

Mom didn’t ask for a partial refund—which was saying a lot considering her tight single-parent budget and her love of bargaining. She thanked the Program Director for his time and told him she appreciated and supported his need to take action. Then, she took my hand and led me outside, to her gold Honda. The car was the same color as my skin in the summer.

“Are you mad?” I asked after we’d climbed inside.

“Not at all,” she replied. “Dara, I am super proud of you.”

In the twenty-six years since being sent home from the Boys & Girls Club, I’ve continued to be an advocate for justice, but my approach has changed. I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to make more of an impact than a punch. Although I believe there’s a time and place for violence, I don’t think the systems that perpetuate prejudice can be dismantled without engaging with others in meaningful and empathetic ways.

As a Biracial1 person, I exist in the center of the binaries of Blackness and Whiteness and I hate that so many other people can’t seem to embrace both races simultaneously. I’m doing what I can to change that. In 2018, I published a children’s book about loving my Biracial identity and, in 2019, I was interviewed on “Community Voices,” a local cable TV show, about my understanding of race. The woman who interviewed me, AnnaMarie Jones, is Biracial, like me. She loved my message of acceptance and empowerment and we became immediate friends. We’d each been longing to meet someone with a similar spectrum understanding of race. Not long after our “Community Voices” interview, AnnaMarie called to ask if I wanted to work on a project together.

Her initial idea had been to center our project around anti-racism advocacy, but I wanted to create something more expansive and inclusive.

“I’m in!” I said. “But only if we can find a way to amplify as many marginalized voices as possible.”

And, just like that, the Demystifying Diversity Podcast was born. I interviewed over 100 individuals and collected more than 100 hours of audio.

There are a lot of -isms and -phobias that go beyond racism and I want to be part of a movement towards equity and inclusion for every human, not just people with whom I share the same racial lineage. Whoever you are, you’ve likely witnessed, participated in, or been the victim of some form of discriminatory behavior. It might’ve had to do with race, body shape, gender, religion, or any of the many identity markers that people use to justify their mistreatment of one another.

Through independent research, listening to others, and my own personal experiences, I’ve become all too aware of the devasting impact of othering (classifying an individual or group of individuals as fundamentally different from one’s self). I’ve come to believe that the only way to overcome dehumanization is to become aware that we all have complex and intersecting identities, to acknowledge the unique gifts that arise from our differences, and to embrace our shared humanity.

I’ve come to believe that we affect ourselves and each other in three ways:

1.We help.

2.We hurt.

3.We do nothing, remaining un-invested and indifferent.

To help can take a number of forms but any positive contribution requires engagement and empathy. To hurt is also active. It necessitates that we become agents of aggression and dehumanization. Doing nothing is also a form of hurt, but I wanted to create a distinction between active and passive perpetration. By no means does this excuse inaction. On the contrary! It is often those who do nothing who know better and could affect positive change, if only they would be willing to step into the ally zone.

One of my interviews was with Alisa Kraut, Assistant Curator at the National Museum of American Jewish History. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Alisa’s father was born in a displaced persons’ camp. Unsurprisingly, she had a lot to say about the...