The Broken Spell

Does this look like a woman obsessed with her hair?

By Randi Skaggs, PSJ Member      

I was more than ready for class that day. My beloved professor, Patrick Kagan-Moore, told me he wanted me to speak up more in my 20th Century Theater class, to not be afraid of sharing my opinions.

And boy, did I have some opinions. The assigned text for class was Spell # 7 by Ntozake Shange. Dr. Kagan-Moore photocopied this for us, seeing as the book we were using in class had almost exclusively white authors. It was totally unlike anything I’d ever read – a series of poetic monologues crying out about the oppression of sexism and racism with honesty and creativity and anger.

It was the anger that bothered me. So much anger. Especially when one of the characters went on a rant about white girls and their hair. I could barely make it through it before tossing the packet across the room.

How dare she? I wasn’t a girl who gave a rat’s ass about my hair. I tossed it up in a messy bun that perfectly matched my 90’s baggy jeans and flannel shirts and makeupless face. I was a feminist, for crying out loud. How dare she stereotype me?

I shared these thoughts out in class, waiting for an approving look from Patrick. Instead, he just put his finger to his lip, and stayed silent for a moment.

“Why do you think this made you so angry, Randi? You know you’re not a girl who obsesses over your  hair. Why are you taking such offense at Shange’s words?”

Hmmm. I hadn’t thought deeper than what I’d just said. I’d only been pleased to finally have ideas that I wanted to share.

“Well, it’s not fair. I’m not racist. I don’t even see color. Everyone’s the same to me. And I know what it’s like to be in the minority. My family took a cruise to the Bahamas once, and there was a moment where I was surrounded by only black people, all asking if they could braid my hair for money. I’m one of the good guys. Maybe she ought to try not to offend people like me.”

How on God’s green earth Patrick didn’t laugh me out of class, I’ll never know. Instead, he just gave me a pensive, kind stare, then asked others if they wanted to share their thoughts with me.

And boy, did they. True, everyone else in the class was white. Almost everybody at my small, liberal arts college was white. But not everyone was quite as sheltered as I’d been. And as my peers spoke, telling me about institutional racism, and trying to help me understand what it must be like to grow up under oppressive systems, and how rage is justified when you’ve lived in such an unfair world, I felt a slight shift in my brain. I realized that that tiny moment of anger I felt while reading a text, that little nugget of unfairness, was but a speck of sand in the sea of oppression and hatred and persecution people of color face in their lifetimes. A crack formed, light poured in, and my perspective hasn’t been the same since.

It’s funny. I never thought I was racist – despite the fact that I grew up in a family where people threw around the n-word and children of interracial marriages were pitied and an incredibly racist poster mocking the Louisville Cardinal basketball team (most of whom were men of color) hung on the wall. But I wasn’t racist. How could I be? I befriended the only black girl at my entire elementary school. I wrote an essay in the 5th grade about how we’re all the same underneath our skin. I did research papers on Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in high school. I had a massive, earth-shattering crush on a ridiculously cute (and kind and smart and funny) African-American guy I met my sophomore year of college. I was a good guy.

Except I still perpetuated all sorts of white supremacy without any recognition that that’s what I was doing. I still bristled when a person of color spoke with anger about racism. I still shook my head with disappointment when I heard about a “riot” that erupted after some overtly racist act. I still walked a little faster when it was a black man who approached me on the sidewalk.

And I felt entitled to an exemption from any anger people might feel toward the white community. As far as I could tell, there were no slave-owners in my family (my HILARIOUS joke was that my ancestors were too poor to own anyone else – ugh). I’d grown up with a dad who went to jail a few times and whose illegitimate business meant that we were certifiably poor (and even on public assistance) a few times. I didn’t have parental funds for college; the only way I was going to get there was if I made excellent grades in school and landed myself a scholarship. How could a person like me have any kind of privilege?

Over time, as if a black light was shone on the crevices of my life, my privilege became increasingly obvious. I was raised in the dominant culture of my surroundings. Teachers looked kindly on me, job interviewers responded well to me, security guards in the mall tipped their hats at me. I once even tried to get detention. It was my senior year in high school and I was bummed that I’d never once experienced it. I stood up in the middle of class, walked out the door, and hid in the library until lunchtime. When I asked a classmate what the teacher said, he said she said, “Well, I guess Randi must have had a good reason to leave.”

When people assume you are good or smart or capable, you tend to live up to their expectations. On the other hand, I’ve had a few jobs with bosses who don’t understand this, people who nit-picked and watched me under a microscope and pointed out my flaws on an endless loop, never stopping to tell me anything good. And, although I’m usually a positive, hard-working person, it’s incredible how disgruntled I became at those jobs, how little I wanted to give, and how down-trodden I felt. But, all the while, I could leave at the end of the day, hop in my car, and drive down the interstate without a cop pulling me over for no reason. I’ve had moments – here and there – where I can almost understand the outrage of oppression, but I’ve always been able to book a flight out of there at some point.

I lived in Newark, NJ for a year. Again, I was in the racial minority, but again, I held a place of privilege. When my visiting friend’s car was broken into, we went down to the police station and spoke to the white cops. They were so kind to us, trying their best to help us, and then they told us never to park a car on the street in Newark again because the people there were “animals.”

I felt sick to my stomach. My neighbors weren’t animals. They were good people who got up early and rode the bus to the train to Manhattan with me to go to their jobs. They lent me sugar and groaned with me about the broken elevator and hung out with me in the laundry room. Like me, they tried to get to sleep at night, despite the gun shots. Like me, they shopped at a grocery store that often had rotten meat on the shelves. Like me, they waded through trash on the street, walking past people selling drugs or their bodies to get by. Unlike me, many of them would be there for years or the rest of their lives, while I knew I was going to bolt the minute my lease was up.

I would always have my whiteness to fall back on, no matter what. I was ashamed by how relieved that made me. And filled with a new resolve to not sit idly by while others lived under a racist regime. I could not stand to live in a world where an innocent man was shot while sitting on the street or where my friend couldn’t get a cab to take her home or where young kids of color were called “thugs,” just for being regular kids. It was deeply uncomfortable to realize this world that I thought was so great was riddled with problems, so exhausting to realize all the work there was still left to do. But, at the same time, it was invigorating to choose to be on the side of justice.

One bright summer day at my job in an off-Broadway theater in New York, my boss told me to expect an important call.

“From whom?” I asked, ready to write down the name.

“Ntozake Shange – do you need me to spell it for you?”

​No, I didn’t. I was thrilled to speak to this woman, a woman I’d grown to revere as a writer and artist, a woman who once pissed me off so much I threw her work across the room.

Spell # 7 helped break my own very strong spell of ignorance and blind privilege that prevented me from being a true ally to people of color. Thank you, Ms. Shange. Getting to speak to you that day was one of the highlights of my life.

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Bio: Randi Skaggs is a storyteller, playwright, middle school language arts teacher, and mother of two wonderful kids. She keeps a parenting blog (Bluegrass Baby Momma) and is addicted to performing in the Moth StorySLAM. She now lives in Louisville, KY after spending twelve lovely post-college years in New York. You can follow her storytelling adventures on Facebook.