It was a crystal-clear day in early September, one day before my first day of another school year, this time at a brand-new school. I was playing in our newly sodden back yard while other children started classes. Daydreams flooded my expectant mind. What will it be like, who will my new friends be? These encompassing questions spanned the imagination with lofty hopes and childish make-belief. Those daydreams melted into the late summer sunset while later vividly lighting the tossings and turnings of my nighttime dreams.

Sunrise couldn’t arrive soon enough. With my lunch packed I brazenly scarfed down my breakfast and quickly headed out the door just behind my older sister to start second grade at my new school. I arrived to eyes seemingly everywhere, some blue, others green like mine and then many others brown like my sister’s eyes. Except they were peering out of curious ruddy white faces. My sister had already journeyed to her classes as the school day began. The atmosphere was placid and tempered. By the time lunchtime arrived my stomach was tossing with an expectant flutter of unease and hunger merged into one.  There I was sitting at the lunch table and then life forever changed as I felt a sensation upon the top of my head followed by a chorus of laughter. A child was standing behind me swirling my course quarter inch freshly brushed locks, as he and others joined into the tune of “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a Bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy Had No Hair.” My obvious astonishment quickly sank to embarrassment and shame. I grabbed the boy’s hand and forced it off of my scalp. That day started a calamitous couple of years, to put it mildly.

There was no Crown Act in those days albeit childlike cruelty wouldn’t be affected by that anyway. This is the day when the innocence of my world was changed and began the Roots of understanding that there was a difference, call it My Nappy Roots.  After that, many of the days at school I was targeted with hazing, racial slurs and conflict, much of it physical. Being outnumbered I was usually on the losing side. 

It is amazing how much things changed later once I won a few of those physical encounters. Friendships would blossom out of the chaotic start. In all of that, two important lessons were gleaned.

First, I identified in a personal way with the famous 1857 Frederick Douglass quote.

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”  

Second, those classmates learned beauty comes in all ethnicities, complexions, hair textures, and phenotypes. Being keenly aware of the continuing moral struggle, the balance of my life has been spent as a agent of change to build equity and unity regardless of those differences.

Scripture reminds us:

“ This God made us in all our diversity from one original person, allowing each culture to have its own time to develop, giving each its own place to live and thrive in its distinct ways.”

Acts 17:26-28 The Voice Translation

In 2020, America came to the face-to-face reality of ethnic/racial differences in how people are treated based on those differences. Many where shocked, because this kind of hatred was supposed to be a thing of the past. In a half of a century we had the Civil Rights Movement, saw Apartheid End in South Africa, and elected a black president. However, we were reminded by the book Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby’s words, and how they rang true, when he said

“Racism never goes away. It just adapts.”

Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby

After a Sunday worship service in a conversation with a sweet, retired teacher from a majority white, affluent school district, she exclaimed “children seem so open, loving and accepting. However, when they get into the third or fourth grade, as many of the biases that are found in the greater society begin appearing in these children.” The great question is, why? Many parents are replacing the innocence of these children with the same biases that they were taught, no matter how subtle.

What we have in America is a legacy of players trapped in a game of lost innocence.

The innocence of believing the words “All Men are Created Equal” become only words when not practiced. The old saying says “Hurt people, hurt people,” America’s brief 55-year span of relative freedom for melanated populations (1968-2023) serves as an aberration. BIPOC populations have been hurt by systemic racial oppression and white populations have been manipulated and lied to about the real enemies of the American ideal. Some in the current majority population, have been hurt by a false sense of security, being led to believe the lie of trusting in their whiteness. This lie along with the bodies, souls, hopes and dreams destroyed and left in its wake are being challenged like never before. The racial reckoning which began in 2020 is still leaving many of the dissolving ethnic majority, hurting, confused, and losing their bearings in this changing American landscape, we all must return to the place where we lost that childlike innocence and reimagine our diversity and not censor it burn it or deny true history. Let’s teach and repair our roots even the Nappy ones.

By Kevin Robinson, Founder/Editor, Publisher of Three-Fifths Magazine