“The racism which caused the relegation of the Negro to a status of inferiority was to be applied to the overseas possessions of the United States.””
“The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.””
Racial Schooling: Lesson One
Like W.E.B. Du Bois, I learned I was a racial problem during school. But unlike Du Bois, my teacher, not a classmate, taught me this lesson.
While frantically taking notes to ensure I succeeded in my first-ever honors class, my sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Noone rebuked me in front of the entire class for not paying attention. I remember her words:
“This is an honors class, Nathan, not a daycare center.”
“Yes ma’am, I know. But I was paying attention.”
“Enough! You do not belong in this class, Nathan. Do you understand? You are only here for racial diversity numbers.”
Mrs. Noone had racialized the entire class and found me wanting. I alone, as she would later tell my mom, did not have what it took to receive an honors education. I was Puerto Rican. I was inferior.
Racial Schooling: Lesson Two
For reasons I cannot discuss here, my dad never taught me Spanish. And this gift was something he alone could give, for unlike my Anglo Mom, my Dad speaks fluent Spanish with an Aguadillan accent.
My Dad’s omission haunted me throughout my childhood. It haunts me now. But it was during my childhood that other Latin@s most consistently distanced themselves from me: They refused to associate with self-identifying Latin@s who spoke Spanish as poorly as I did. As Augustine said, “difference of language is enough to inhibit society.”
To most of my Latin@ peers, I was adulterated Anglo trash, an assimilated mongrel—a mutt to be shunned.
I acutely felt my double-racialized rejection in the weeks after Mrs. Noone denounced me before my honors-English classmates. I had no racial home in the communal spaces Anglo and Iberian white supremacy forged. Whiteness, the racist reasoning goes, is pure. Those deemed non-White frequently counter by constructing and defending purist, essentialist logics to police their own communities. Blatant white supremacy begets whiteness of a different color.
Policed by biological and linguistic racial border patrols, I felt damned to be people-less. And as Mrs. Noone and Latin@s daily abused me, I started confiding more and more in my African American friends. They listened. They acted mercifully. They knew something of diaspora life—of being foreign but in a domestic sense.
After several weeks of confiding in my friend Thomas, I decided to let it all out.
“Thomas, I don’t know what I am. The Puerto Ricans and other Latin@s don’t want me because my Spanish is shit. And the Whites know I’m not one of them the moment a teacher botches my last name. What the hell am I, man?!”
Thomas looked dumbfounded, but quickly replied.
“Damn Nate, it’s obvious—you’re Black. Everybody knows that Puerto Ricans are Black. What the hell you so worried for? You straight tripp’n, not knowing yo ass is Black.”
I thought long and hard about Thomas’s words and confidence. Could he be right? Was I Black? The suggestion seemed absurd.
But as I kept thinking, I realized Thomas had a point. The Puerto Ricans and African Americans in my schools and neighborhood always hung out. We wore similar clothes, liked the same English-speaking music, found the same people attractive, and received similar treatment from Whites. Indeed, Whites and non-Puerto Rican Latin@s had hurled the N-word at me countless times by this point in my life, with some Latin@s telling me that racist terms like “spic” were too good for me.
I decided to take a survey. I asked students across racialized lines if they thought I was Black because I was Puerto Rican. The overwhelming majority said yes. This sealed the deal. These people thought I was Black and usually treated me accordingly. It was time for me to live into my racial identity. It was time to belong.
Racial Schooling: Lesson Three
My embracing being Black caused enormous family strife. My Anglo mom did not understand it, and we repeatedly fought over my racial identity. Similarly, mi familia in Puerto Rico were flummoxed. For some, my embrace of being Black proved I was a fool. It showed I did not understand the truths imbedded in the “mejorar la raza” rhetoric.
Though this strife hurt, I pressed on. I was Black and no one was going to persuade me otherwise. My Blackness was too precious, too explanatory. I would not be people-less. Not again.
But returning to the State of my birth forced an unexpected racial reckoning.
During a hot, humid day in South Carolina, Mamaw and I decided to go on a walk and, as was our custom, got lost in conversation, meandering around her childhood town. Eventually the heat and humidity conspired and forced us to sit under a shade tree. Thirsty, Mamaw asked if I had water. I did not.
But ever desiring to problem solve, I told Mamaw not to worry: I saw a gas station down the road and was happy to go and buy us some water. Mamaw rejected my proposal.
“Honey, we cannot go down there,” she laughed.
“That’s a Black gas station.”
Here too I had a solution. For though I lacked water, I brought my Blackness with me.
“Don’t worry Mamaw—I’m Black! They’ll let me buy water there. No problem.”
Mamaw became serious; I’d never seen such concern in her eyes.
“Honey, who told you you’re Black?”
I knew my answer mattered, so I carefully choose my words.
“Mamaw, I’m Puerto Rican. And Puerto Ricans are Black. The people in the gas station know this, and they’ll let me shop with other Black people. That’s why I said I’d get the water. You stay here—since you’re not Black.”
Mamaw was livid.
“Who the hell told you—my grandson—that you’re Black?! I’ve never heard such stupidity my whole life. What a bunch of crock. Look here. I’m White; your Mom is White; and your Dad has light skin, light eyes, and speaks good English—he doesn’t even have an accent. And now you’re telling me that you’re Black?! I don’t know what they’re teaching you up North, but down here we know that you ain’t Black. And I’m not gonna let my Grandbaby get beat to a pulp because he’s some dumb delusion about being Black. We’re heading home, ya hear?!”
To her childhood home we went, in silence—a silence forged by what Frantz Fanon calls an “epidermal racial schema.” Jim and Jane Crow had rendered Mamaw incapable of entering into my racial experiences and racial pain. Her socialization trained her to carry the white man’s burden, not a racialized Black blanquito’s. Besides, she had already fended off acquisitions that she sinfully let her daughter marry a Black man. No Northern racial schemes could dislodge her certainty about her family’s whiteness.
Racial Schooling: Lesson Four
Mrs. Noone’s denouncement injected me with internalized racism that still courses through my body. So did my language-based rejection by Latin@s. Mi esposa can testify to the racial trauma that my body exudes when I publicly speak Spanish. Every utterance is an act of resistance that presses on racial scabs and renders me vulnerable to new racial wounds.
Mamaw’s rejection of my Blackness forced me to confront race’s fluidity. In the process, I learned from Rachel F. Moran that Puerto Ricans are the Latin@ group in the US “most apt to identify themselves as Black.” And as they do, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton report, they experience higher degrees of segregation from Whites—even White Presidents. Recall President Richard Nixon’s infamous campaign ad rehearsal in 1968. Having noted the need for school discipline—“Discipline in the classroom is essential if our children are to learn”—he goes off script, apparently speaking to himself: “Yep, this hits it right on the nose, the thing about this whole teacher—it’s all about law order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.” The Negroes and Puerto Rican’s are one racialized menace, a collective whose groupings lawlessly occupy classrooms and street corners.
Mrs. Noone, my Latin@ peers, and Mamaw—each identified me as a racial menace, a problem. And each resorted to disciplinary measures steeped in white supremacy to set me straight. None of their actions promoted intimacy or belonging. They never could; racial reductions ultimately prove impotent.
This impotence testifies to the need for race-conscious formation that acknowledges the fluidity and complexity of racialization and the traumas it produces. Without such formation, teachers, families, and racialized communities will be ill equipped to commune with the multi-racialized among them.
About Nathan Luis Cartagena, PhD
Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy. Cartagena also serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, and is writing a book about critical race theory. You can read his writings at nathancartagena.com, and follow him on Twitter @MeditarMestizo.