When White Supremacists Invade Black Neighborhoods
Tacoma was where I learned to be Black in the middle of a hostile environment. Then the sanctuary became infested.
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
I thought racism couldn’t break me. Then I saw the poster.
When I started busing in 1987, my grandparents schooled me in the history of racism in the Pacific Northwest. How the Chinook and Coast Salish tribes had been decimated, along with their history. How White people shipped the entire Chinese population out of the city on trains in 1885. The internment camps that stored the Japanese in World War II; the long arc of housing discrimination and the Mother’s Day race riots in 1969.
Growing up with a poor, working-class White mother, I quickly saw within my own family that many White people felt they could get away with being racist. I remember Black folks in my family being beaten, harassed, and called “nigger” on a weekly, and at times daily, basis. Early on, I learned that racism in the Northwest was simply something you had to deal with; to expect White people to change was to expect the rain to stop because you wanted it to.
