Member-only story
Growing Up Black in the South Scarred Me for Life
But what didn’t kill me made me stronger
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I learned about the N-word in the most unusual way. It was 1974, and I was on the monkey bars in the kindergarten playground at Highlands Elementary School in Kissimmee, Florida, when I heard it for the first time. (Yes, Kissimmee, Florida, in the ’70s was as Deep South as Georgia.) I instinctively knew the person was talking to me. I turned around to see who had called me that strange word. It was a black classmate.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s another word for a tall person,” he replied.
He laughed and so did the white kids on the monkey bars. I laughed, too, although I didn’t think it was funny. Clearly they all knew something I didn’t. I was born in the Virgin Islands, where pretty much everyone was black, and had been living on the U.S. mainland for only a year. Racial tension was still a foreign concept to me. I accepted his explanation and went on with my day.
I was growing up black and gay. Other black kids bullied me because I threw like a girl. White kids ostracized me because I was darker than they were. I spoke with an accent, and since I was from…