So I pretty much almost had a nigga moment during tutoring today.
You know what I mean--wait, maybe you don't.
So I'm in an adjustment period--you see, last year while I was tutoring I was pretty much the only brown kid in the room. Like...literally some days I was the only speck of color if we didn't have the other two brown kids--Hispanic I'm pretty sure.
But since my group has....um, embiggened much since last year and merged with Coalition for Kids (after school program for kids struggling with homework/after care) I've seen more diversity than...shit, this one group is probably more diverse than my whole school career up until my first year of college. This isn't fair.
Anyway, so we're totally integrated--all kinds of kids now. The thing is, when I was alone with the younger white kids...our old favorite topic race just never came up. I was just a tutor.
Somehow, suddenly this year my blackness has been coming up an awful lot--I'm not really uncomfortable with it but honestly I've been having so much racefail on the internet/real life I'm really having a hard time keeping my cool around these kids. The main difference is that most of them are so young they actually don't know any better and are just inundated with racial stereotypes & what not like we are when we're younger. It's never anything really blatant, but I hear it & see it and in my mind I'm thinking, "And since the world caters to your whiteness anyway if you don't learn any better here you probably never will."
...
So yeah on to my nigga moment--did I say I was having a hard time? I mean I'm having a real hard time. Understand that the days I tutor are also the days I have my infamous philosophy class, so by the time I actually get to work I'm usually calm. Today however I was really tired and my...well my filter might have been off.
So cut to school. I'm waiting on the young ones to finish up their snacks and this adorable little white boy with curly hair looks at me and recoils. I pretend to display claws at him (well, fine my nails are long) and he shouts, "Auugh a witch with claws!"
I...laugh. Then the girl across from me, with whom I've worked before, declared that the little boy was "scared of black people."
The boy recoils from me again and howls with laughter. My eye twitches a little.
Then...because I was dressed mostly in blue, the boy proceeds to call me "Blue's Clues" and does as much burning as a 6-8 year old can do. In my head, the situation is going like this:
WHAT DID YOU SAY NYUCKA?!
I'll have you know I kept my cool pretty completely (although I did get a few jabs in there...really really soft jabs okay?) and soon the boy actually got in trouble for
Another racial moment came up briefly when a girl asked me what I meant by black people being behind. I had said, "Where I'm from we're a little behind" in regards to hippity hop slang and what not. When she asked what I meant about black people being behind, I'd had no idea how she got that assumption unless she just guessed that by my head dress or something I was from where all the other black people were at...? (keep in mind as far as I can tell this girl is biracial herself). I guess I interpreted her question right, she asked me how black people could be behind in anything...which I guess could also mean that black folks are so cool we're ahead of the trend and shit.
In any case what I meant by "back where I'm from", I obviously meant my hometown Nashville.
So, in conclusion, I've learned that I:
-Need to work on my temper
-I'm apparently not afraid to drop kick a child of all people
-I have no idea how to handle race with young kids...and I kinda want to because this has been happening a lot for a couple months.
Huh. Any ideas for the last point?
