Am I Racist?

When I was a small child (roughly 4) I grew up in a predominantly poor, white neighborhood. Looking back, it's easy to see that most of my poor, white neighbors were poor, white racists. I know this because I only had one friend. She lived at the end of the street and she came from a contextually rich family. She happened to be black. I considered this girl my best friend. Every day I would ride my bike to her house and we would sit in her back yard and do whatever it is that little girls do. She was really important to me. Now, I honestly can't remember her name, but she helped shape the kind of person I am from a very young age.

I remember she invited me to her birthday party. I was excited. My parents were social people at the time, and would occasionally have our neighbors babysit me. I mentioned this great news about her birthday party to my neighbor and my neighbor said, "It's nice that you're friends with that little black girl." Her statement confused me. Why was that nice? She's a nice girl, of course I'm going to be her friend. It really never occurred to me, being a four year old, that she was different from me. I knew I was white and that she didn't look like me, but it's like someone had withheld a certain amount of information from me that white people and black people were different. We're all just the same. She's a girl who's four, I am a girl who's four. She likes four year old girl things, I like four year old girl things. What's more to it than that? She is a human, I am a human and we are friends.

So I started paying more attention to these things and came to realize that my parents and other neighbors that I considered my role models would ALSO make snide little comments about "my little black friend". It pissed me off. I was confused for a lot of my childhood on the difference between having a white friend and having a black friend. I never asked. It seemed like something I should have already known and I would have felt stupid for asking, so I never did. Thankfully I grew up, matured and went to school, where my mind developed and I was able to form opinions and realize my own moral standings. I don't know when it exactly happened, but I vowed to myself to never be like my neighbors, my parents and whoever else and to NEVER classify people of color as a "little black girl" and focus more on these people as just "little girls".

So maybe that's why I feel kind of racist when we talk about Black Aesthetic. Throughout high school, when we'd talk about Civil Rights and "African American Writers" I always rolled my eyes, groaned and thought to myself: Why can't we just talk about WRITERS? Why do we have to segregate these writers as BLACK writers. Why don't we mention when a writer happens to be white? WHY IS THIS A THING THAT HAPPENS?
As you can see, I would get pretty angry about it. It sometimes came to the point that I would be so fed up about hearing about "black writers" and "black poets" and "black artists" that I considered to myself that I might be racist. Why did I react in such a negative way when speaking about African Americans? It's not that I didn't care, and I honestly find racism repulsive, but why did I have such hate for a subject that is important to understand?

Thankfully, in college I have found, that I DON'T have to feel racist about ignoring the race of a writer. Ralph Ellison made this apparent to me in Invisible Man (chapter 1) because even though this story is about a black child in a room of disgusting white men who treat him like an animal, that's not what the story is about. The story is about  being oppressed in a general way. An oppressed African American child is the same as an oppressed gay man, the same as an oppressed woman, and the same as me, an oppressed white female who just wants to learn and go to college to make money doing something she loves. We are all the SAME regardless of everything else. We all have hearts and brains and feelings and we can all form thoughts and opinions, therefore nothing separates us.