About four years ago, I went to the mall with one of my roommates. She is a first-generation African American who grew up in the Bronx.

At Sears – I cannot remember what we were looking for – I noticed a couple of t-shirts on the floor and bent over to pick them up. When I straightened up, an older white woman said to me, “Excuse me. Can you tell me where to…?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I don’t work here,” I said calmly. I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. I had just restored some clothes to a rack. It was a simple mistake, I told myself. But then the woman turned to my roommate, who was standing a short distance away, and started to ask again, “Do you know where…?”

My roommate’s response was less calm. She widened her eyes, leaned forward, and growled, “Are you asking coz I’m black?”

The woman backed away, frightened.

I said nothing to my roommate at the time, but remember thinking something judgmental. Perhaps:

As Black Americans can over-want to cause drama?! Life is not that serious!

I may have even said to a friend later that night, after recounting the incident: “Black Americans are always on the defensive because they have been made to feel inferior their whole lives. That’s why they speak so loud and so fast, like they are competing with somebody. Now, Africans, like me, who have never been minorities – it does not occur to us to take offence. Our whole lives, being ourselves has been enough. That’s why I could just laugh at that white woman and remain civilized. Black Americans tend to blow things out of proportion.”

I was not aware at the time that I was perpetuating a popular belief held by African immigrants: Africans in America are better than African Americans. Those Black – not African – Americans have no morals or manners; they are thieves and gangstas. They give black people a bad name.

~

A few months after the Sears incident, I went to visit some friends who live in the South. They’re Ugandan and when we get together we tend to get really loud and obnoxious. But our volume isn’t a conscious attempt to attract attention; rather, it is a celebration; finding reminders of home in a foreign place is nothing short of exhilarating. Which is why, when we drove to a nearby Kroger to buy a juice whose name we couldn’t remember, we began to broadcast our forgetfulness very loudly.

“Kale, what was that juice called?”

“Ha, I have no idea!”

“Let’s check that juice aisle!”

“Apple, orange, black-currant, tangerine, no, no, no…”

After about five minutes, a sales attendant hovering close by – an eager pink-faced boy who may have been 15 or 16 – stepped up to us and offered to help. “I think I know what you’re looking for,” he said.

We looked at each other, bemused. Even we didn’t know what we wanted. But we toddled along after him.

He led us straight to a shelf full of Kool Aid.

We laughed, of course. Long and hard, and said to each other, after he’d left, “Damn, that was just flat-out racist.”

I may have added, between ha-ha’s, “Mama, if I was a Black American, I would have been very offended!”

Again, here, I articulated a difference, a separation. A “they” versus an “us.” But I must have registered some discomfort; how else could I have called this memory to mind so quickly and easily?

Four years ago, I was oblivious to a simple truth:

To the naked and prejudiced eye, black is black is black. There is no distinction between an African in America and an African American.

~

Four days ago, I had a client come into the Writing Center for help with a paper. We are in the process of training new staff, so I told one of them – let’s call him L – that he could sit in on my session and observe how I handled things. He could also pitch in whenever he felt like he had a suggestion to make.

The three of us sat down in a semi-circle and I began the session by asking the client a few questions to get her comfortable: how was her day going? Did she have any tough classes? What year was she in? Small talk. While she answered, her eyes flitted from my face to L’s, which said to me that she was engaging and willing to talk to both of us.

However, when we began to talk about her paper, and she asked us for advice, I noticed that she kept her eyes trained on L even when I was the one doing the talking. At first I put it down to gender – perhaps she found him attractive? But then halfway through the session, she began to vocalize her bias. When I made a suggestion, a strange look entered into her eyes – a momentary loss of focus – as though she couldn’t quite see or hear me. Always when I finished speaking, she said some variant of, “I don’t like that idea” – which would have been fine if she didn’t immediately turn to L and ask, “What do you think?” Occasionally, he had a new idea to add, but most of the time, he simply repeated what I’d just said – using the exact same words. To my chagrin, when he repeated my suggestions, she picked up her pen and took notes – as though having the advice communicated by L’s mouth magically transformed it or made it legitimate.

How can I explain the feeling of anger, affront, and disbelief? The client’s actions were saying to me that I wasn’t good enough to help her either because I was black or because I was a woman. She was saying to me that as a white girl, she valued what a white male said over what a black female said, no matter what the black female’s background or experience was.

My reaction would have made my freshman roommate happy. Over and over, three angry words played again and again in my mind, “Fuck this bitch.”

It is easy to dismiss or misunderstand people who have been victimized when you haven’t been victimized yourself. Empathy comes from shared experiences – the ability to say, “Hey, I know what that feels like.”

By the same token, open-mindedness stems, in part, from standing along the margins – or being marginalized by race, gender, sexuality or socio-economics – and having to pierce holes in a dominant or core belief.

Every day I learn something new.