Educated

“Sure I do,” he said. “You’ve got black all over your face, like a nigger!”
For the rest of the afternoon—for the rest of the summer—I was Nigger.
I’d answered to it a thousand times before with indifference. If anything, I’d
been amused and thought Shawn was clever. Now it made me want to gag
him. Or sit him down with a history book, as long as it wasn’t the one Dad
still kept in the living room, under the framed copy of the Constitution.
I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to
humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from
fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he said it—“Hey
Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I returned to the
university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and
wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and
Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted,
“Nigger, move to the next row.” I saw their faces superimposed on every
purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had
finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately
apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality;
someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.
I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him
that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of
awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father,
myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a
tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully
or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our
voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize
others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power
always feels like the way forward.
I could not have articulated this, not as I sweated through those searing
afternoons in the forklift. I did not have the language I have now. But I
understood this one fact: that a thousand times I had been called Nigger, and
laughed, and now I could not laugh. The word and the way Shawn said it
hadn’t changed; only my ears were different. They no longer heard the jingle
of a joke in it. What they heard was a signal, a call through time, which was
answered with a mounting conviction: that never again would I allow myself
to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.