A Racial Autobiography

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.

               

                                       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMXzLhbWtmk

                                         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128ao5Xl_VY