I grew up in Livermore, California — a city in the East Bay region of the Bay Area — where the population is less than 2% Black. My mother moved us to this suburban community from the more culturally diverse Oakland when I was a toddler. She, like other Black parents who move their families to affluent, predominantly White neighborhoods, typically do so with the intention to give their children access to better education and more resources.
However, an unintended side effect of this migration is that their children are forced to learn a special set of survival tactics at a very early age. To avoid bringing a backpack into stores to avoid being followed by employees. To accept excuses for why you aren’t invited to certain homes while other friends are. To become an expert in code-switching in order to make White people more comfortable and actually listen to you. To work twice as hard as your non-Black counterparts to reach academic, athletic, or professional goals.
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Throughout my entire life, White and Black people alike have complimented me on my ability to seamlessly fit in with different social groups. At least, they consider it a compliment. But while my chameleonesque skills are a strength in some ways, they’re ultimately a result of how I’ve mastered code-switching to get by.
The way I altered my speech and behavior in certain circles became so second nature that I never realized I did it until one day I accidentally left my Black switch on in class, confusing my White teacher with a phrase she didn’t understand. I had grown up hearing my family refer to powdered laundry soap as washing powder. It never occurred to me that this was not universal terminology, so I was caught off guard when my teacher interrupted a story I was sharing to ask me what washing powder was. When I explained it’s what you use to wash your clothes, she laughed and said, “Oh, you mean detergent!” She was wrong; I actually meant exactly what I said the first time. But for her sake, I continued the rest of the story consciously replacing washing powder with detergent.
Despite closely following the unspoken code of conduct in White spaces, racism still managed to find me, of course. It found me at five years old when a kindergarten classmate took a pair of scissors to my hair. As she was escorted out of the classroom kicking and screaming, she defended her actions by shouting, “It’s not even real!” It found me at seven years old when a group of older White kids accosted my cousin and me, calling us niggers and hurling physical threats at us. It found me at 14 years old as a cheerleader when a teammate declared that the only reason the four Black girls on the team opposed certain unflattering hairstyles was because we couldn’t get our “nappy” hair to cooperate.
Black residents of suburbia are not afforded the same luxury as their White neighbors to ignore the hate that brews behind white picket fences.
Racism found me as a young adult working as a courtesy clerk at a local grocery store when a White customer contacted the store’s corporate office in a calculated attempt to have me fired by falsely claiming I mistreated her. It found me in high school all those times that swastikas and other racial slurs were scrawled across walls and bathroom stalls. It found me when a number of my peers drove to school and around town with Confederate flags flying from their pickup trucks. It found me all of these times and many more.
Growing up in a suburban city was a constant reminder of the racial divide that is alive and well in our society.
To be clear, these instances were not just cases of kids being cruel and not knowing any better. In a recent conversation with my former classmate, Arzoo Nasarabadi, she recalled being called slurs by other students in high school and that their parents were “a thousand times worse.” Many parents of our peers not only allowed intolerant behavior toward non-White kids; they encouraged it.
The blatant acts of racism were loud and clear whereas the systemic racism was not as aggressive but yet still harmful. Racism found me in the classroom. I did not have my first Black teacher until I was a senior in high school. I did not learn about pivotal moments in Black history such as the Harlem Renaissance or the abolitionist movement until college. Lessons about Martin Luther King Jr. were sanitized. Thankfully, my family actively taught me our history at home, but many of my peers are still ignorant of the true history of Black people in this country because our environment and our textbooks are whitewashed.
In Livermore, the people at the top making decisions in our schools and in our city government have always been White or White-passing. This speaks to the fact that while racism finds us easily in suburban communities, justice does not, like in the case of Emmanuel Moseby, a Black 16-year-old who was gunned down outside of a Livermore Taco Bell last year whose killer has yet to be found. If he were White, I have a feeling the process would have moved along much more quickly.
What may be the worst part is that despite these clear lived experiences, many people in my hometown still don’t believe racism exists there. As part of my commitment to supporting Black Lives Matter and the fight against racism, I’ve made attempts to confront my community’s shortcomings on social media recently, only to be met with excuses, justifications, and ridiculous insinuations that Black people who have learned how to navigate White spaces are exempt from becoming victims of police brutality or racially driven violence.
In one instance, a fellow member of a community discussion group on Facebook wrote that my hometown didn’t need to hold a protest against police brutality because she didn’t believe it happened there, which I noted was a reflection of her own privilege as a White woman in suburbia. In another conversation, a woman said that people should just vote instead of yelling in the streets. In response, I offered some insight about voter suppression and its impact on Black people and immigrants, particularly in lower-income communities. Over the course of about a week, I made it my mission to dispel beliefs I felt were founded on ignorance. Despite these efforts, I really don’t think I managed to break through the suburban bubble of oblivion.
Black residents of suburbia are not afforded the same luxury as their White neighbors to ignore the hate that brews behind white picket fences. People who hate us for the color of our skin couldn’t care less where we live or grew up. Our geographical proximity to whiteness will not save us from proud racist vigilantes like George Zimmerman or Dylann Roof nor will it save us from an overzealous cop on a power trip like Derek Chauvin.
And even if growing up in White suburbia was the golden ticket to survival, that would still be a problem rooted in systemic racism. The safety and value of Black lives should not depend on how well we’ve developed the skill to appease White people. It doesn’t matter where we were raised; it doesn’t matter if we have a criminal record; it doesn’t matter how much money we make; it doesn’t matter how many degrees we have. Our lives don’t deserve to be stolen. Our lives matter simply because we are human beings and we are entitled to experience and enjoy the life given to us.
