Brynda Jean Smith,
Chapel Hill, NC
Everyone has talked about the casual racism of their childhood, but it took me a while to see how bad it was growing up in Baton Rouge and Lake Charles, Louisiana, and I’d managed to suppress it in my memory when I left at 18 in 1990. Reading your book reminded me of things I heard just casually tossed around as a kid. Every time I hear ‘jury rigged’, I think wait, that’s not right, I grew up hearing ‘N***** rigged’. I remember a classmate asking the one Black girl in our class ‘do Black people shave their arms?’. I remember ‘mixed kids are always so pretty’. ‘She has 4 kids and not one of them is in jail!!’ These and more were uttered by supposedly liberal, white, Unitarians and other not-evangelical Christians. My mom lost a local election because someone found out my dad was a member of the ACLU and her opponent spread it around to trash-talk her. As an atheist, I was treated as a circus freak by other kids all through school. I haven’t even touched on the misogyny or homophobia. It was so embarrassing being from Louisiana for YEARS. I used to call myself an ex-pat to show how different the state was. I’ve finally been away long enough that it’s all a distant memory, but between the Speaker of the House and the 10 Commandments thing I’m having a lot of PTSD-type flashbacks.
