I haven’t been called racial slurs very often in my life; when you’re a middle class white girl from the South, it’s just not something that happens on a regular basis. The only time I distinctly remember being called a cracker, actually, was when I was in the fifth grade: a little boy declared that I was a cracker and he was a black-eyed pea, and that made him better than me. I recall being vaguely hurt by this, in the way that you tend to be vaguely hurt when someone you’ve just met takes an immediate dislike to you. Mostly, though, I was just puzzled. “Why did he say that to me?” I asked one of his friends after he’d run off.
“He has a bad home life,” she shrugged, and that was the end of that. My great experience with racism ended with me playing with the kid’s friends while he went home and sulked.
I understand that not every white person has my experiences; I understand that there are, in fact, white people who grow up being the only white kid at school, and that that’s usually not much fun. I’m not saying it’s okay when those white people ignore hundreds of years of American history and claim that they’re the ones who are really oppressed, but I get it. I understand taking an extremely traumatic personal experience and making it into a universal one. What I do not understand are the white people who grew up in situations like mine who try to claim that having individual black people dislike them or mistreat them is the same thing as being systematically oppressed. And I have a really ugly reason for not understanding that. Because my reaction has always been, “Why the fuck do you care if someone calls you a cracker?”
