10 years later edit (March 24, 2019): I’ve grown as a person in the past ten years. Many of the things I wrote here – about how it doesn’t make sense for it to be okay for black people to use the word nigger, my then-scorn for the guy in Continue Reading
I am 3/8 black, 1/8 Hispanic, 4/8 Caucasian, and 0/8 African-American. How can you be 3/8 black and 0/8 African-American, Lena?
West High School in Anchorage, AK had their 2009 junior prom on January 25th. The embroidery shop at which I work was commissioned to make the sashes for the prom court royalty. Six princes, six princesses, and the sashes to be worn by the crowned 2009 Junior Prom King & Queen. They wanted them done a week beforehand, so that the prom court, elected by their peers, could show off their named sashes in the week leading up to prom. It was a pretty standard arrangement. We had all but the King and Queen sashes done on time. (I failed to sew the king and queen sashes in the right color. Bad me.) We gave them their prince and princess sashes on time and told them we’d get them their other two sashes as soon as they were done.
Well, on Wednesday of that week, we got a call from the activities director at the high school to commission eight more sashes at the last minute. It had turned out that all twelve of the students elected to the prom court were Caucasian. One of the teachers at the school, a black woman, raised a stink about it and singlehandedly forced the school to force the students to add eight minority students to their prom court…