Dave DeRose Racial
Autobiography
I was
born in 1986 into a caring and loving house. I am very blessed to have the
family I do. My mom was a teacher then, and when I started third grade, she
became a principal. She instilled in me from a young age the tenets of equity.
The first books I remember reading, besides Clifford
and Curious George, were Teammates and Pink and Say, one a story of Jackie Robinson’s friendship with Pee
Wee Reese and the other a story of a friendship that develops during the Civil
War between black and white union soldiers (if you haven’t read them, I
recommend them highly). Some of my first friends were black. Across the street
were Tony and Brittani. Their mom
was white and father, black. I never
remember thinking anything about it. I knew they looked different than me, but it
was the way it was. It was normal.
When I
started middle school, most of my favorite celebrities didn’t look like me. I watched
Martin, Family Matters, Fresh Prince of Bellaire, The Cosby Show, and loved them all. I listened
to DMX, Notorious BIG, Bone Thugs & Harmony, DMX, Usher, but my favorite
was TuPac. I knew every word to every
song. I watched his videos and interviews
and read his poetry. He had me mesmerized. His energy, captivating. His flow, a
magnetic force. His words, undeniable truth. Thug Life
which was TuPac’s philosophy, didn’t mean criminality. It
meant being a survivor. To me at the
time, it was enticing and provocative. His stories became my stories. I felt in my core the
emotion of the stories in his lyrics. I emulated the culture, I wore FuBu
clothes. I didn’t even think that FuBu was “black people clothes” until a white
student made fun of me. To me, it was simply part of the culture I identified
with. It was the first time I heard the term wigger (which is a white person
who wants to be black). My friend Tony Licon and I didn’t pay too much
attention to it, though. We liked what we liked and didn’t feel threatened, so
we carried on.
I was
baptized in racial divides freshmen year. I walked into Eaglecrest High School
after a few weeks of football and weight lifting, excited to start a new
adventure. I was green as a blade of grass. When I entered the school and
passed the gym, I saw mostly Hispanic students, next the library and Asian
students, lastly as I entered the cafeteria, mostly black students. The thing
was, I loved hip-hop music, so I wanted to hang out in the cafeteria where hip-hop
was blasting from stereos. As I approached with a sheepish grin hoping to find
my place in this new world, I was thrown dirty looks by the upperclassmen. Feeling
outnumbered, uncomfortable, and really small, I found a different place, a gap between
the library and the cafeteria by the theater. Unfortunately, I lost connection
with many of my friends on the football team as they joined groups of
upperclassmen. We would still sing Ludacris songs during practice, but that was
it. I was more or less left with my friend Parker. He is white.
As the
year passed, I joined the wrestling team and made more friends, I joined the tech theater crew,
made more friends, all white. I moved that spring to a new neighborhood to live
in a house where my grandmother could live more comfortably with us. All my
neighbors looked like me. I transferred to Grandview High School, which didn’t
have nearly the diversity of Eaglecrest despite being only two miles away. I
started listening to rock, country, and only some hip hop and R&B. I only
had white friends, besides at football practice.
After graduating,
I couldn’t wait to get out of Aurora, so I ran to Nebraska. My college was seven
hours into a corn field. Being a small private school in a small town, Doane
College was a culture shock. I wasn’t used to being around so many white
people. Out of a school of 1,200, there were only around 20-30 students of
color. They all played sports. Again, I had more in common with the black and
Hispanic students than I did with the white students. The white people all came
from small towns. They talked differently, more slowly, and were huge trash
talkers. Where I was from, if you talk trash, you wanted to fight. I almost got
in a lot of fights.
My best friend freshman year in
college was Mexican. Adam and I jammed out to mariachi music. We enjoyed
speaking Spanish in front of the Nebraska boys; there was even a time when I
was close to fluent, so it was funny to us to see their faces. We ate menudo at
the small family-owned Mexican restaurant in town. In the spring, Adam decided
college wasn’t for him and returned home to Trinidad, CO, to work for a
construction company. When he left, I fell into the same pattern as I had in
high school. I joined a fraternity, which historically was the most diverse in
Doane history, but that is not saying much. In my time we had two members of
color out of thirty, one black and one Mexican.
It was
in a college education class, Intro to Education, where I was prompted to
reflect on race for the first time. My paper explained my experience at
Eaglecrest and started a disagreement with the professor. I explained how I
felt rejected by the black students at my high school because of my race. I
purposed that racism went both ways and, in my experience, was stronger from
black to white. One of the sentences still rings in my memory; “Black students
could go anywhere in the school and feel comfortable, but white students in the
cafeteria were uncomfortable.” She was a black woman who had grown up in
Lincoln, NE. She grew up as one of very few black people in her large high
school. She rejected my position and expressed how there was only white racism.
I was infuriated. I wrote her a three page paper in response explaining how
this was my truth and how she cannot connect her experience growing up to mine.
She gave me an A. I felt empowered.
I felt
drawn to the topic of equity because so many of the students at my college had
lived their whole lives and never seen someone of another race until they came
to Doane. To Doane where there is almost no diversity.
In order to develop deeper
knowledge in this area, I applied for an undergraduate research grant. I
studied the five main world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam). I wrote and presented on moral parallels that were
inter-faith and expressed fundamental differences.
Thanks to my college being small, I
had unique opportunities. My proudest was when I ran the multicultural fair my
senior year. This is an event where students from all over Nebraska come and
rotate through different activities revolving around equity put on by all of the
education majors. I worked closely with that same professor who I had disagreed
with three years earlier, and we became very close. We still email to this day.
December
2008 I moved back to Colorado hoping to get a job in Cherry Creek. I was hired
at Horizon Community Middle School in October, 2009. Horizon has about 60
percent students of color and 51 percent free and reduced lunch. I had many
students who didn’t just have racial identities but national identities--students
from Ethiopia, Sudan, Gambia, Iraq, Vietnam, Russia, Egypt to name a few. There
were language barriers, cultural barriers, and high expectations. I learned
about how second generation Mexicans will ostracize new immigrants. It was an
amazing place to start my career. It taught me a lot about how people from all
walks, circumstances, and places view the world.
At this
point in my life, I would have argued against the idea of white privilege.
Mostly because of my naivety. I truly believed that everyone has equal
opportunities; success just depends on how hard one is willing to work. I would
soon realize that what I believed does not translate to how the world works.
Last spring I went to a training
through Cherry Creek School District called Beyond Diversity that changed my
life. Before, I was a race horse with blinders on. After, it was like someone
removed the blinders and opened my peripheral vision. I was flooded with understanding
and emotion. The homework was to interview a friend of a different race and
give them a survey. I chose a long-time friend Rod, whom I have known for 14
years. The survey culminated in a point score that I
was to compare my score to his. The higher the score, the less a role your race played
in your day to day life. I scored somewhere around 70, and his was something
like a 38. It is important to note that we both grew up in similar
neighborhoods, had the same teachers, and both went to college. This opened
up an amazing conversation between Rod and me that resonates with me to this
day. The survey actually made Rod emotional, despite his 6'4" frame and
full sleeve of tattoos. He started throwing out all things that struck him.
Like Band-Aids. There are no Band-Aids that match his skin. He has to buy a
special brand of magazine to see people of his race regularly shown. He is half
black, and his wife is white; their kids look white. He is concerned how this could
impact their racial identity and life experience. It was an amazing life
changing event that happened in the office of the gym we both trained at.
So here I am in the journey of
understanding, constantly learning, and then this summer I saw a documentary
about TuPac on HBO (it’s called Resurrection
if you want to check it out). It brought me back to the good old days. Watching
it now, as a grown man, I came to see him in a completely
different light. There is a point in the documentary where TuPac explains evolving rhetoric in black music and how gangster rap came to be. He made the analogy between racial equality
and people standing hungry outside a hotel that is full of food. At first they
knock politely and even sing to be let in; then they bang on the door, and
their song gets more intense. After a few weeks, when they are starving, they
are knocking down the door guns blasting. This is an emotional, raw, and real
issue. TuPac helped me realize that time is up. We need to confront these
issues now.
At church one weekend, one of the
pastors (Chad) spoke about Ferguson, MO. He phrased the realities of this issue
perfectly. He explained how white people tend to say, “Hey, we passed the laws.
Do you have to remind me about this?” We attempt to exempt ourselves from
helping, or even facing race, because the laws are there. Unfortunately, this
is not an issue that laws fix, or it would’ve been fixed in 1865, 1870, 1920,
and 1964. We, as white people, need to sit in the uncomfortable chair and talk
about race. To deny that race is an issue is to deny something that is a
reality for so many. To say, “Well I’m not racist” comes across as insensitive and
dismissive. People say, “Well I have friends who are black and Hispanic.” If
that is true, I urge you to see the importance that race plays in their daily
life. In order to make a difference, we need to confront issues instead of
dismissing them as “fixed by laws” and therefore out of our hands. If we are
willing to be exposed to uncomfortable realities, we will expand our
understanding and perspective and in doing so grow. We need to admit there is a
problem.
As of now, we have a pseudo society
of smiling faces, like the movie Pleasantville.
Smiles and nods dot the faces of people in the meeting on equity. Yet, they are
underscored with frustration, assumed guilt, and dismissal of the importance of
the topic. When we (white people) feel backed into a corner we blame the victim. We expect
people of color to tell us what to do to make it better. That is like telling someone who is living by a contaminated river to somehow sanitize it. The problem is not with them, but with those who perpetuate the pollution.
Have you ever noticed
that all the people running equity trainings tend to be people of color? That’s
like saying, "Hey, you, person of color, this is your problem. You fix it."
Only thing is, the problem that exists isn’t a problem for people of color. They live the problem. It’s a problem for white people. It’s the problem of apathy. We need to add
color and contrast to our Pleasantville like
existence. The only way to do that is through confronting the issue, having the bravery to expose
personal bias (we all have them), and by having a growth mindset. Only then will we be able to accept others perspectives. Take our blinders, shaped by personal experience, and begin to look through a lens of empathy rather than apathy.
Lastly, TuPac said in an interview
that he knew he wouldn’t be the one to change the world, but that he wanted to
spark the mind that does. Let him inspire us to listen, to acknowledge the
reality he expresses in his lyrics, and in our own way, make the world a better
place.
“I
know if I keep on talking about how messy it is around here, someday someone
will come clean it up.”
-
TuPac 1994 MTV Interview
Below are two TuPac interviews that I believe are worth watching.
