When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Race Fatigue

© Dallas Morning News 207 Race Fatigue Ira J. Hadnot I am tired of race. Bone-weary of thoughts about race. Fatigued by our society’s silence about race. Too broken down in spirit to shoulder the mantle of race. As Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, “We wear the mask that grins and lies . . . ” More than four decades after the sixties, we are still wearing race on our sleeves. There is the pretense of understanding and of tolerance. Yet we have a black man chained and dragged to death on the Texas road where he once played as a child. The spines of my white colleagues stiffen with the slightest reference to race. Black Americans are either “too sensitive” or “too angry” to sustain an intelligent debate. It seems, affirmative action and O. J. Simpson aside, race still is about us and them. It will always be about black and white. 208 I r a J . H a d n o t I want you to know that once it was not this way for me. I never wore a mask—not until being perceived as a threat myself, my frustration mistaken for anger and my impatience to succeed for not being a team player. This skin I am in first experienced blackness from the front porch of a white family in a community that was 98 percent white. I was younger, and it was elastic enough to absorb the hopes and beliefs of the VISTA and Peace Corps workers my parents invited into our home. A VISTA program that paired inner-city kids with suburban or small-town white kids was my introduction to the color line. It was less emotionally damaging because the Foxgrovers were truly kind and compassionate people. It wasn’t them or their little girl I played with who made me uncomfortable in my own skin. It was their neighbors who lined an Appleton, Wisconsin, street that summer in 1968 to watch and point at me as I walked to the Piggly Wiggly for a soda. That sidewalk felt like a long conveyor belt. I felt as though I would never get to the end of the block and off display. Some days, that experience comes racing back. It finds me here in Dallas, Texas, and reminds me that it’s not me they see but my color. My race is recognized before I am. I will always be on display or out of context. My husband and I were shopping in one of those huge home construction and remodeling warehouses when I saw a colleague from work. I called him by name and he looked at me blankly. I moved closer and called him by name again. When my husband and I got right up on him, he blinked and asked, “Ira? Ira? Hey, I didn’t recognize you.” It still baffles me that someone I have worked closely with for fiftytwo weeks, someone who gets just about as much face time as my bathroom mirror, would not recognize me with a shopping cart in my hands. I am standing at my local grocery store at the end of the cash register in the checkout line. I am waiting for my grocery receipt when an older woman tells me that she wants “paper, not plastic.” I am wearing a business suit, but she hasn’t seen that. I am at the station where a bagger is supposed to be. But I am not wearing a uniform. R a c e F at i g u e 209 Again, she says more emphatically, “I don’t want my groceries in plastic.” “Well, I do want plastic for mine,” I replied. Only then did her eyes connect first with my clothes and then rise to my face. She realized I wasn’t her bagger. I was seething inside, smiling on the outside. Is this the station for persons of my race? One evening, I was on my way to the opera and I left home without my earrings. Feeling naked, I rushed into Neiman Marcus to the jewelry counter. I stood by a carousel of pearl necklaces, bracelets, and earrings in a black velvet evening gown. I was undecided about changing all my jewelry. After a few minutes, a woman walked up and shoved some clothes into my arms. “Would you ring these up for me?” she asked. Incredulous, I said, “What are you talking about...