When cut off from the tribe

Have you ever had people gang up on you? When times get hard, the veneer of civilization often wears thin. We’ll be tribes again and tribes often war. I think middle school anecdotes, especially if you’re different in some way, show damn near perfect microcosms of tribal survival. Let me share this recollection of an Asian girl in an American middle school from Racialicious.

Then one day, the three black girls cornered me during PE. I was at my usual post by the side of the field in the shade around the corner from the water fountain. They saw me and came over. I was sitting up against a wall with nowhere to go. They leaned over me. I covered my head with my arms to try to block out the sound, but they were very loud.

Ching chong ching chong ching chong ching chong ching chong ching chong ching chong.

I’d seen this behavior before coming from packs of white kids. When they see a wounded animal, the pack instinct is to circle, to make probing attacks, to see exactly how weak the prey is. I knew I had to get up, I had to move, or they would keep closing in. But I was paralyzed. I could feel my blood pounding through my veins. I’d gone beyond the point of breaking down in tears; in a few more seconds, I was going to start hyperventilating or vomiting. I had to try something. I used my last coherent breath to choke out a sentence… “Calling me ching chong is the same as me calling you a nigger.”

There was a pause. Then they spoke again, over each other. “What did she say?” “She say what I think?” “She said it! She said it!” “Did she call me a NIGGER?” “Oh yeah… I’m gonna CLIMB on her ASS and SHOW her what THIS NIGGER can DO!”

I didn’t know what an ass-climbing was, but it sounded painful. Physical pain was never what scared me, though. I had to finish what I started. I caught another breath, and said again, a little louder, “Calling me ching chong is the same as me calling you a nigger.”

Another silence, this time much longer.

“We’re sorry.” “Yeah, sorry.” “Are you OK? You need some water.”

They helped me to my feet and walked me over to the water fountain. They patted me on the back, repeated apologies, then melted away as I drank some water, recovered and stood up straight again.

If this was a made-for-TV movie about racist abuse, we would have all become best buddies. In reality, given the social environment of the school, they did the best they could, and the best I ever expected of them. From that point on, they did me the courtesy of ignoring my existence, and I ignored theirs. They had their own battles to fight. Our paths never crossed again.

The experience was traumatic, but it also gave me a sense of cautious optimism for the future. Nothing I’d said to the white kids had ever made them stop. No appeals to empathy, appeals to logic, even ones I’d practiced for days. But that one sentence that came to me on the spur of the moment worked. I’d found the right words, spoke them from the heart and mind, and someone actually heard.

When I was alone with no black cohorts in an all white middle school–it was literally hell. I was tortured everyday. When I was eleven and alone, I didn’t have the background or chops for physical violence. But the next years when I went to a school with even a few blacks–we banded together and acted black (even the nerdiest and quietest of us would labor to exhibit the racist stereotypes–being loud etc). That enough was enough to scare the white kids into leaving us alone. The quick threat of violence works best against gang or mob persecution and if we acted black, they were scared we’d be violent.

The lone Asian girl discovered the efficacy of this eventually too (violence, not acting black).

The one clear tactic that did mitigate the abuse was violent physical retaliation. After I discovered that, the kids gave me a lot more space. Check this piece from The Republic of T (“Sticks and Stones”) for a wider range of advice, but for what was within my power, violence was the only thing that worked.

Asians don’t have the rep for violence as blacks do, nor did she have anybody else to stick with, so it took actual violent acts on her part to build the reputation.

There is always a reason why people act the way they do. I notice groups of young blacks tend to get loud around whites. This is because they feel threatened. They use the other’s perceived racism to feel safer.

This blog is about survival and minority survival in particular, just ’cause I am one. Remember a bad rep is a powerful thing, not always a negative one, and there’s more safety in numbers.

Read the entire account. It’s good. GETTING PAST THE BEARS: RACIST ABUSE IN MIDDLE SCHOOL AND THE FORMATION OF PEOPLE OF COLOR CONSCIOUSNESS

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