Coming to Terms with My Otherness
Vince Bacote
April 1, 1999
My mother and my uncle brought my brothers and me, then three years old, to the tracks near our home to watch the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy's body. I can still remember the train passing by, and my uncle crying, though I had no awareness of its significance at the time. They were aware of something I wasn't: the harsh realities of racial prejudice and discrimination. They knew how hard it had been for blacks to gain any acceptance as fully human, at least in legislation. Now, they watched an iron horse carry what seemed to them their brightest hope away to the grave. My world, on the other hand, has been vastly different. I always assumed that most of America's race problem had been solved by legislation. Born in 1965, I came of age when busing and other civil rights measures were already in place. My experience was one of racial harmony (or indifference). My world was free from the scars of racism. I am a true child of integration. It's not that I have never been aware of my race—my early years were full of curiosity about whether our family was black or white, and what that meant. All of this curiosity, however, faded significantly by the middle of elementary school, when my classes were nearly half-black and half-white. From that time on, while I was aware that there were people of different races, I had also internalized the rhetoric of integration. (Some, I know now, would call it "assimilation" or "cultural self-suppression.") I was on the path toward living a color-blind life. In my world, ethnic and racial differences were incidental. This view made me quite different from some of my African-American friends, who were far more race-conscious. From elementary school through college, I ambled along as though people ...
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