By Bill Bradberry
Sticks and stones may break my bones ... but words will never hurt me. Remember that rhyme? Well forget about it — it’s not true.
Most of us remember the first time someone called us a name intended to belittle our race, culture or ethnicity. It seems today that in spite of the lessons we should have learned long ago, we need to be reminded again, that, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King tried to teach us, we are one human race, not to be judged by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.
I was reminded not long ago by a friend that she and her family had been terribly hurt by the derogatory remarks spewed from the mouth of an otherwise highly regarded elected official, and that no one seemed to care about it.
It happened again last year when another elected official in the heat of a drunken rage fired off a barrage of racial bullets with no apparent rebuke, apology or explanation, and it is happening again this time in the highest offices. Rather than ignore it, this time we need to confront it head-on.
I went back into my archives and pulled out a piece I wrote a long time ago and I decided to address the matter again because it needs to be addressed again.
I recalled the pain a childish prank inflicted on my family when a school mate called my little sister the “N” word.
Someone had sent her a very cruel and mean spirited card. It said, “To the darkie “N.” It was on one of those bright multicolored cards with a big heart saying “Be My Valentine” and he signed it.
Of course, it’s not as if the word had never been uttered around us before.
In fact it’s most likely that someone dear to us or a close member of the family, called us names many times, but somehow, we thought it did not sound as mean and hurtful as when some unknown, hateful person was doing it for the sole purpose of inflicting pain.
We were wrong. It is always wrong.
It’s not something you easily forget. Repress, maybe, but never really forget. I remember when it happened to me and to my family just like it was yesterday.
I remember how the incident changed my perceptions of my friends and how their perceptions of my sisters and me were changed by the simple mean-spirited expression of that deadly word.
Of all the similar racially charged arguments and name-calling events I have witnessed or heard in my lifetime, this is the one that rises to the top: The one that hurt my little sister, my family, and made me realize that words can and do hurt.
More than her anguish was the witnessing of my own mother’s pain that I so sadly recall.
Even as she tried to comfort us, it was the hurt in her eyes that betrayed her own suffering. I remember feeling that I had somehow failed to protect my sister and at the same time, had failed my mother. It was so intense that I still remember it and still feel it all these years later.
I care deeply about my family. As much as I can, I protect them. But on that Valentine’s Day card in 1958, I failed to stop the hurt.
On that particular day, as I recall, the entire school, teachers and students alike, all partied together. Italian, Polish, Yugoslavian, all little Catholics, we were having innocent fun, not at all aware or not really caring about our cultural and racial differences.
As was usual, we took our cards and some candy home. Try as we might, we just could not eat it all at school. We traveled in little groups on the way home, dropping off classmates at their houses along the way, playing games, laughing and running amok just like everyone else.
At the time, we did not know that we were any different from anyone else, but on that Feb. 14, when we got home and read our cards, we realized that we were in fact, quite different.
That’s when we found the card.
Let me be clear — we already knew we were black. We were then, and we remain today very proud of that fact. We share a long and proud multi-cultural heritage on both my parents’ sides of our family. I grew up with cousins as black as coal and others as white as snow.
We were fed a healthy serving of our multi-cultural ancestry. We celebrated our cultures in every way we knew how to do it — in dance and music and literature. Mom kept our heads full of stories about her childhood and the challenges she and her brothers and sisters faced as little black kids growing up in Auburn and Lockport always proud and determined.
So the card did not serve as the revelation of our “coloredness” to us, it served as the revelation that someone we knew and went to school with seemed to hate my sister just because she was different.
That was the problem, but we quickly got over it.
The way mom explained it, the boy who had sent my sister the card was not necessarily evil, just ignorant. She told us to be proud that we were her beautiful children; that we were not what he thought we were and that we should never ever use that word even among ourselves because the people who use those kinds of words were the problem, not the people that they are aimed at.
We were directed to pray for him and to ask God to forgive him. Mom went to the school and spoke the principal about it. That resulted in a meeting with my sister and the good nuns. The next day, the whole school was told that we had to try harder to get along with each other in spite of our differences.
We tried, but we all need to keep trying ... harder.
Contact Bill at bill.bradberry@yahoo.com
