sami...

Samantha Frazier


 In a time where Jim Crow was the law and whites had the power to get away with murder, racism was something that was both taught and experienced first hand by children both black and white. No matter what the race of a child is, in America especially, and in other countries, children become aware of their identity and ethnicity. Some feel that racial profiling comes from a nonstop recycling of old customs and practices that live on dormant in the back of the mind. It is the life lessons of every individual that they pass on to their children. People choose to ignore signs of racism and try to forget the hardships of past civil rights activists and live on. However children of all colors are able to identify and respond to racism at a young age and even question the experiences they’ve had. 



There were about ninety five percent of black and Hispanic children attending my elementary school. I lived in Harlem my entire life, and when I had to leave my school a year early to attend middle school in the sixth grade, I was very upset. My first day of class was one I will never forget. I was afraid of the new school and being around the different kids. I remember that there were no more than about four black kids in the classroom with me. It bothered me to see for the first time that people looked at me differently because of the way that I talked and the things I wore to school. Some of the students thought it was cool, but others gave me funny looks and made me feel almost unaccepted. That was one of the first times I experienced any kind of racism and social disorder.
Because I was young and put in an element that I was very unfamiliar with, I decided to join a group of girls who were more like me and those who I could identify with more so. It was not until my third year at Manhattan East Middle School that I had finally learned how to participate and interact with students from unfamiliar cultures. By the time I was ready to go to high school I was used to being one of the only black girls around in many situations. When in high school I was put in a very similar environment, where the classes were mixed but there was still a very small number of black students in the same classes with me. By this time people had grown so used to being comfortable with stereotypes that they felt it necessary to ask questions that they thought were funny. 

Urban youths tend to grasp the idea that a black student who speaks correct English talks white and an illiterate slang speaker “talks black.” I never paid any attention to this idea but when asked why I do not “talk black” I simply replied by saying, “I do not know much about color languages, I speak purple myself but orange is my native tongue.” Being educated in situations like this one helped me to face the reality of what people realistically think of black people. It also causes people to stop and think about what they have said just like the situation that occurred in The Sky is Gray where the young black man in the story chooses to question the people of the Jim Crow times by saying to a woman, “Don’t you believe the wind is pink?” Later when the woman said, “ And what color is the grass, honey?” the boy replied “Grass? Grass is black.” There is a great significance in the way a young man is able to stand out and draw attention to an idea that should be practiced by more black people. However many young people both now in the twenty first century and then in the Jim Crow age, were unable to stand up against the norm or understand the significance of the racism they encounter. 
Children are taught many things by their parents, but it is the actual experiences that they have that mold them into adults and set the standards for what they chose to pass on to their children. Although the important lessons learned by our parents at a young age stick with us when we grow older, children like Richard from “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” have to have many encounters with racial profiling and discrimination in order to grasp the concept of social order and acceptance. His first thoughts as a child were, “It was alright to throw cinders. The greatest harm a cinder could do was leaving a bruise. But broken bottles were dangerous; they left you cut, bleeding, and helpless.” After about nine life lessons on living Jim Crow and a situation were a white man on an elevator helped Richard, he says, “I evaded having to acknowledge his service, and in spite of adverse circumstances, salvaged a slender shred of personal pride.”
The young Richard, like myself, was unable to identify the seriousness of what he had done. When his mother punished him it was his first lesson in understanding that he had to watch everything that he did very carefully to survive. I too was unable to recognize the difference between myself and the majority of the students in the middle school and what it was that made me fear being like them. When Richard grew older and had more scary encounters with the white men telling him he was “lucky” to have gotten away with minor things, he was forced to learn how to function in his society even if it meant pretending to be happy and turning the other cheek when there was trouble. 

Even though it is up to adults to make sure that children know what they need to know to survive, ultimately it is up to the child to experience certain things and then apply the lessons learned form past mistakes. Eventually children can teach themselves how to function in societies where every thing is not necessarily fair or equal, whether they live in our day or in the 1950’s.