Privilege: When this white boy asked a black girl to date him in the ‘80s
In 1988, I had just turned 16, had recently started driving, and was attracted to a girl.
Well, I was attracted to several, but there was one in particular. She was relatively new to my sophomore class, and like so many new kids, she found herself testing the waters with different cliques of kids. Like me, she wasn’t exactly a nerd, nor one of the rich kids, nor in with the jocks. At first, in my youthful cluelessness, I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t seem to fit in. But there was one thing that set her apart from nearly every other student in my relatively well-to-do school in the suburbs: she was African American.
Lashanda’s race didn’t matter to me or to my immediate friends as we sat bleary-eyed in the cafeteria before school. With the exception of one Taiwanese pal, we were all white. Having just arrived off the school bus and waiting for First Period bell to jar me awake, my glumness at having to start yet another school day was uplifted a bit when she would wander over to my table each morning to chat. I can’t remember now what all we would talk about, but we quickly grew to be friends. Soon it wasn’t just mornings when we would get together, but during lunchtime as well, or in breaks between classes. My day always got brighter when Lashanda was around me, and the occasional day when we couldn’t find time to get together seemed gloomy. It felt like a privilege to be around her. She was gorgeous, with dark brown skin, matching eyes, a slim figure, and lips that I wanted very much to kiss but couldn’t find the courage to say so.
I was one of those studious and awkward teen boys. Short, smart, and fat, I was used to being bullied and teased by jocks, and I had a bit of social anxiety from it. I feared she would see me the same way. But at last, one spring morning after a couple months of knowing her, I summoned my courage, walked into the cafeteria, and told her how I felt about her.
Lashanda’s eyes lit up and she smiled. “I like you, too,” she said sweetly.
My heart leapt. So I took it a bit further and asked her if she would go out with me on a date. Maybe a movie? I had a car, and this would be the first time I would actually be able to take out a date myself without having to ask my mom to drive me. My heart thumped so hard I could hear it.
She flashed a smile, but then looked off to the side and with a serious voice told me, “I’ll need to ask my parents.”
“Sure,” I said. At our age, in the South — in Arkansas — it wasn’t odd for a 16-year-old girl to have to ask her parents for such things. It still isn’t, I guess.
I didn’t see her for the rest of that day, but that wasn’t unusual. Some days our school activities kept us apart. I went through my classes practically levitating with excitement, blurring through my homework that night, and had trouble falling asleep. Did I ask too much of her?
The next morning I saw Lashanda at our usual table in the cafeteria, hunkered down in her down jacket against the morning chill. I immediately went and sat by her side. “Hi,” I said. I made a conscious effort not to expose my eagerness.
“Hi,” she replied back, and glanced over at me. Sighing, she turned and looked at me fully. “I talked to my dad.”
I gulped. She didn’t seem happy. She averted her eyes again.
“My parents don’t feel comfortable with me dating a white boy.”
I looked away, shocked. I didn’t know what to say. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was the South, after all, and racism was still alive and well, but I was more used to it going the other way. Other white people would say and do things, sometimes blatant, and there was little mixing between races in schools, churches, or socially. You might try to stick up for whomever was being talked down to, but most of the time there was little you could do, particularly as a kid. You had to pick your battles carefully in the South, especially if the person making the racist comment was someone you knew. But I just hadn’t thought about racism going the other way.
That’s how white privilege works, after all. I never had to think about being excluded or being the odd one out. I never had to wonder how someone of another race would think about me as I went about everyday teenage life. I didn’t have to plan my activities around how people would perceive me because of my skin color. Lashanda was one of only a handful of African American kids in the entire high school of probably 500 students. Nothing about me stood out at all. Some might now call her parents’ reaction “reverse racism,” but even that term is one of white privilege, suggesting somehow that it is more aberrant than “normal” racism. This was the first glimmer of an awakening in me.
Then she added, “They told me we can’t be friends, either.”
I was floored. Emotions washed over me like a tsunami: sadness, bewilderment, loneliness, desperation. It wasn’t fair! I implored her to talk to her parents again, or maybe let me meet them and talk to them myself, but it was clear she didn’t feel she had a choice. She just shook her head. There was suddenly this metaphorical wall between us, thick with centuries of racial strife and cultural separation, imprinted with the immovable seal of parental control and disapproval. I had taken it too far and slammed into that wall.
Then she got up and walked away without looking back.
It was the last time we talked. She avoided me thereafter, even when I approached her. Her refusal to defy her parents despite her apparent feelings confused me and angered me. After that school year she moved again. I never got another chance, and I never heard what became of her.
As I write this, our nation is in the midst of wide-scale protests over the deaths of African Americans at the hands of police, bringing attention to racial injustice, systemic racism descending from the earliest days of our great society, and the perceptions of all races toward each other. This time is different, though. This time there are people of all races filling the streets, marching with signs, and facing down policemen with batons, riot gear, and tear gas, and the dwindling population of people who support a heavy-handed approach to keep things the way they are in the name of their version of “law and order.” As a society, we are changing. Laws are changing. The very symbols of the old institutionalized racism are literally being pulled down. I wonder how my small town and that suburban high school have changed, too.
Thirty-two years after Lashanda turned me down, I am now a father myself and living far away from the South, but the legacy of that moment lives on. I am the father of two African American teenagers I adopted and raised from birth, a son and a daughter. My daughter is almost the age Lashanda was.
I sometimes think about Lashanda and how she must have felt. Why her parents told her not to date me or be friends with me. About the societal struggles that led to that. I don’t harbor any hard feelings toward her or her parents, just regret that it was the way it was. My own children go to a more diverse school than I did, in a town that is much more open to diversity. Both of my children have my approval to love whomever they wish.
But I don’t kid myself. Subtle racism is everywhere, even where I live in liberal western Oregon, where “black exclusion laws” prevented African Americans from settling in the state until the last was repealed in 1926, yet still they echo through the decades. White privilege is everywhere here, too, and some days I am certain I take advantage of it without even thinking about the inequalities. I am still learning. I can only try to grow my own awareness as I help my daughter and son navigate life in a town, state, and country that are still mostly white — and mostly unaware of what it felt like to be Lashanda.
