In 1969, I was blind to the extent of my own dorkiness. As a twelve-year-old attending Lamberton Elementary School in rural Minnesota, my straight-leg pants hugged my ankles, and my brown rectangular glasses left a red peanut-sized indentation on each side of my nose. Spears of sun-bleached hair exploded out of the cowlick above my forehead, my long limbs gangled like those of a marionette, and when I smiled, the silver cap on one front tooth glittered in the flash from Mom’s box camera. For my annual birthday photo, I squeezed into the second-hand suit coat I wore for church, the sleeves ending several inches above my pale wrists. Combined with a black clip-on tie and a white shirt, I must have looked like a farm-boy version of Steve Urkel turned Jehovah’s Witness.
But that wasn’t the end of it. One day in school when I sat at the table in the nurse’s office and stared helplessly at the Ishihara color plates she slid in front of me, she announced yet one more credential for my dork resume:
“You’re colorblind,” she said. “Red-green.” And she scribbled something on a chart in a manila folder.
I wondered what she meant. Did I need different glasses? If I did, how much would they cost? And what would Mom and Dad say since the glasses I had were nearly brand new?
When she looked up from her chart and tapped the color plates into a neat stack, I asked her, “So, what do we do?”
She shrugged. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just one of those things.”
And she was right. Absolutely nothing had changed. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see any color. I could (though vivid red letters against an intense green background often pulsed and blurred into illegibility). It’s just that where I grew up, color often seemed irrelevant. The only television I ever knew was a black-and-white connected to the antenna on the roof. Meals, too, aside from peas or whole-kernel corn, were mostly colorless, consisting of white bread, white boiled potatoes, white milk straight from the bulk tank in the barn, and vanilla ice cream. When Dad took off his John Deere cap and sat down at the supper table, he — like nearly every farmer I knew —showed his true color: above his stubbly cheeks and tan nose, his forehead was as pale as a crescent moon. And for eight months out of the year, the Minnesota landscape consisted mostly of white and varying shades of brown and gray, snow filling the air and drifting across fields and gravel roads until the sky and countryside melded into a single blinding sheet of white.
Color wasn’t just atypical. It was foreign and suspect. It was immodest. Color was trouble, self indulgence, and indicative of guilt. Color was other. And, as it applied to people, color was less.
The snow-white adults I grew up around rarely said so in so many words, but slurs slipped into conversations as easily and innocently as sliding into a warm bath:
“Look at those mackerel-snappers baling hay on a Sunday morning.”
“We don’t need them goddam gooks around here. I saw enough of ’em in ’Nam.”
“Gimme that can of mixed nuts. Anybody want the nigger toes?”
“He wanted me to buy that two-wheeled trailer sight unseen for 200 bucks, but I jewed him down to 150.”
Because nearly everyone I knew was a WASP, no one pointed out how bigoted these day-to-day slurs were. White was the norm. “Diversity” applied only to crop rotation. And it wasn’t until years later that I understood the horrendous history that preceded my narrow white life: the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, the mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, the confinement of the Dakota people to small reservations along the Minnesota River, the bounty paid for their scalps, the lynching of three African-American men in Duluth in 1920, routine discrimination against Mexican migrant workers, the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee between the Feds and the American Indian Movement, or AIM, which was founded in Minneapolis in 1968. The selective and sanitized history taught in our schools blinded me then and continues to propagate the illusion that our past provides “liberty and justice for all.”
If you don’t blink when you hear slurs, if you naively think, “That’s just how people talk. It don’t mean nothin’,” then you better wake up because that’s not where racism begins. That’s where racism lives and thrives. Plain and simple. It’s as true of individuals as it is of nations. No complex diagnosis required. No Ishihara color plates necessary to pinpoint the problem. When slurs become a routine and accepted part of thought and public speech — whether labeling Mexican immigrants “killers and rapists,” calling a U.S. senator “Pocohontas,” characterizing professional football players as “sons of bitches,” or calling white nationalists “very fine people” — then racism has taken root and germinated, leaving no doubt about what has again been turned loose on this country.
