The First Time I Can Remember Becoming Aware of Race
A Cultural Autobiography Part 1
What do you call the black stuff between elephants’ toes? Slow natives.
How do the Chinese name their children? By throwing pots and pans down the stairs.
What is this (pulling out sides of neck)? An Ethiopian with a piece of rice caught in his throat.
I sometimes wish I could point to a single profound moment when I first became aware of race like a history lesson, a conversation, a dramatic scene in a movie. But the truth is far more ordinary, and far more troubling. My first lessons in racial difference arrived in the form of jokes. I believe taught to me by family members.
Not clever jokes. Not innocent jokes. Jokes that relied on stereotypes so old and ugly that I can still feel their residue all these years later. The earliest racial awareness I can remember involved jokes about Africans, about Asians, about poverty, about “foreignness,” about bodies and cultures and languages we knew nothing about. Jokes that portrayed Africans as “jungle people” running from elephants. Jokes that reduced entire cultures to caricatures. Jokes I remember telling loudly in the back of a friend’s van.
Most of us have moments like this buried in our early memories. We weren’t conscious of the structures around us. We didn’t yet understand power or privilege. But something was forming us. Something was taking shape.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the way humor shaped what Tamice Spencer-Helms calls “a diseased imagination.” I didn’t yet know what “inculturation” meant—the way culture plants values in us before we’re old enough to notice. But looking back, I now see that these jokes were teaching me something long before any adult or institution did. They were teaching me who was “normal” and who wasn’t. Who was superior and who was not.
I didn’t know it then. But I know it now.
Our First Encounters With Race Are Never Neutral
When I was recently asked to reflect on my earliest memory of racial difference, I listened as others shared their stories. One friend told me about riding quietly through the white projects on the way to and from home in the Black projects, her whole family told to stay silent because safety depended on it. Another recalled being on a mostly white and Hispanic football team from a rural town yelling “cracker” at the mostly white suburban other team, not realizing he was internalizing a script about who belonged where and why.
We all had different stories. But the pattern was the same, culture had been teaching us long before we had language for it. We know race is a social construct, but those constructs don’t float in the air. They embed themselves through stories, practices, norms, and unfortunately jokes.
When I laughed at jokes about Africans “running from elephants,” I wasn’t just participating in playground humor. I was absorbing an old logic, one rooted in the long history of white exceptionalism. Dolores S. Williams traces this story back to England, where English culture viewed itself as superior to others. This attitude paved the way for colonialism. When that worldview migrated to the United States, it fused with emerging ideas of citizenship, land rights, and federal benefits. “White” became more than a category; it became the entryway to power. My own heritage as British and Irish is an interesting one historically. This exceptionalism is largely handed down from the British but there was also a period in history then the Irish were not considered white at all due to economic concerns with their immigration.
Whiteness was constructed and then passed down; through laws, norms, and jokes whispered, shouted, or giggled in the backseat of a van.
What I Carried Without Knowing It
There is no biological hierarchy within the human family. No genetic superiority. No divine sorting of groups into those meant to rule and those meant to be ruled. The hierarchy we inherited is cultural. It’s systemic. It’s historical.
But that doesn’t mean I didn’t internalize it.
I did and I do.
And I carry that in my psyche still.
This is the part that’s hard to admit: not that I believed these jokes consciously, but that they shaped me unconsciously. They formed my default diseased imagination about the world and my place in it. I don’t want to live from that formation. But I can’t pretend it never formed me. Honesty is always the starting point of growth.
The work for me now is not shame but awareness. It’s telling the truth about what shaped me so I can participate in reshaping myself. It’s ardently trying to examine the superiority, even the subtle kind that hides behind “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Enculturation happens to all of us. Growing from it is the work of becoming different people. It is a choice.
What are your earliest memories of racial awareness?
How do you think they might have shaped you?
What have you been enculturated to think about race and culture in a certain way?
Fear Was the Next Layer
The jokes were the beginning. The belief in superiority was the middle. But underneath it all, even then, was a quiet lesson about fear. Fear of “others.” Fear of difference. Fear that the world beyond whiteness was dangerous or strange or something to be mocked.
That fear didn’t come from data. It didn’t come from experience. It came from culture, passed along laugh by laugh.
And that’s where the story will pick up next.
Check back in for the next article (2 of 11), where we explore how subtle, inherited, and often unnamed fear became the natural next layer of that early racial formation.