Origins: A (Personal) Race Lesson

In the 1970s, I was a student majoring in Architecture at a large university in Chicago. Our class was broken into several teams for our first year design and construction project. My team was comprised of 4 or 5 white male students (who all lived in the suburbs and came from financially successful families) and me as the sole black male student who lived in the city. Despite differences in our backgrounds, I thought our team was a good one. Everyone was bright, interested, friendly and relatively mature for a group of 18 to 19 year old students. For a long time there was never any animosity among us. I genuinely liked all the members and I was under the impression that they liked me as well.

We worked primarily in a huge, two-story room in the Art and Architecture building. The university supplied some equipment and materials including plenty of plywood which was used in our project. We also spent the night many times in the work room as the project neared completion.

Late one evening I was catching up on my studies while the other members of my team took a break and went to the canteen or lunch room on another floor in the building. Eventually I went down to the canteen to get a soft drink out of a vending machine. At that point my college experience had been free of racism.

I wasn’t planning on staying long in the canteen before returning to the main work room but I stopped to talk with the guys for a minute. One of my teammates suddenly began making fun of my ancestry, laughing cynically and saying in a criticizing manner that I probably didn’t know anything about my origins. It went on quite a while. The other guys were laughing or silent although I knew at least one of them was very uncomfortable with the race-based verbal attack on me even if he didn’t object or try to end it. Regardless of what I said in return, the guy who insulted my racial history kept it up. To him, my background was unknowable and untraceable which made me a considerably lesser person. I was without honor and inherently insignificant as compared to the clear, solid, respectful history of whites.

I stopped trying to defend myself. It wasn’t doing any good. I didn’t want to endure any more and finally I just walked away, shocked into a new reality. Racism was alive and well in my own classmates.

I never viewed the white guys on my team the same way again, not only the guy who made the offensive statements against me but also the ones who supported him by their acceptance and snickering. I was angry but moreover I simply couldn’t understand what the mockery and scorn was supposed to accomplish. Did it make him feel good to put me down? What did they get out of it? None of it made any sense to me.

At the same time I realized that I needed to listen closer to all the stories about our family’s history that my mother told me as I was growing up. I wanted my truth and knowledge to always be able to confront such a smear in the future.

Ironically, decades later I completed work on a series of web journals that are repositories of my family’s history, with photos, stories and the results of years of research by my mother which she left to me when she passed away. I have spent hundreds of hours digitizing and restoring images and documents, and preserved her recollections and mini-biographies of our ancestors. I know a great deal about our family’s history including who were slaves, which great grandmother was descended from an American Indian woman and a Scots-Irish man, and information about the white and black ancestors of my father.

Of course the maintenance and expansion of information about my family had absolutely nothing to do with the assault on my racial background that occurred so long ago in college. None of us should have to defend our beginnings, anyway. No one’s background is better than anyone else’s. Instead, the purpose of my family genealogy effort is to provide information, that would otherwise be lost, to future generations of my family.

But I do know that my own family’s history is filled with extraordinary trials and incredible twists as well as remarkable triumphs. It’s just as valuable as the background of my classmate, the one who attacked something of mine that he knew nothing about.

My ancestors are amazing and no one can take that away. But the encounter long ago with my classmates, as well as my origins, are a (personal) race lesson, where ugly was ultimately overwhelmed by beauty.

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