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Growing Up Black in the South Scarred Me for Life

But what didn’t kill me made me stronger

Jeremy Helligar
An Injustice!
7 min readJun 12, 2020

The author in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1991 (Photo from his personal collection)

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…

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Published in An Injustice!

A new intersectional publication, geared towards voices, values, and identities!

Written by Jeremy Helligar

Brother Son Husband Friend Loner Minimalist World Traveler. Author of “Is It True What They Say About Black Men?” and “Storms in Africa” https://rb.gy/3mthoj

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