Erin Murphy
Barling, AK
I grew up in a mostly African American neighborhood outside Miami, Florida. My friends never made me feel out of place but the other 60% of the students at the schools I attended sure did. My great-grandparents were immigrants -on one side of the family I was third generation American. That didn’t matter because my skin was pale. Automatically I had to have had something to do with slavery in America. To many people that didn’t bother to get to know me I was just “white girl” or even worse,(to a 15 year old kid) mistaken for a teacher. There was always a “cracker day” coming up when light-skinned Hispanic kids and the two or three other Anglo kids at the school would get beaten or attacked. One school administrator told me “if you didn’t want to get your white ass jumped, you should have stayed home.” When kids did shout out slurs and say I was a slave owner I thought it would be great to explain to them that there was no way I could be a slave owner because slavery in the U.S. was abolished over 100 years before I was born. I never said it out loud because I figured a smart-ass comment would just get me into more trouble.
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