"I Think of You as White"

Hello friends,

I'm grateful to Shanti Joy Gold for bringing this story back to light. Although I've shared it a few times, I've never done so here.

It was the late 80s and I was living in the South of France. I was spending a year as a teaching assistant in two secondary schools, and at the gathering for all of those assigned to the region, I met LG who was also going to be in Nîmes. Since neither of us fancied dorm-style living in the schools, we opted to share a flat. It's the kind of thing you do at 21 when it doesn't seem to matter that you barely know someone. But as it turns out, it did matter. A lot!

The Red Flags I Missed

LG was from the Midwest in the USA and our early conversations were littered with phrases I'd now think of as serious red flags.

The look on her face as if saying the word "Black" was uncomfortable.

The fact that she didn't know any Black people, not an issue in itself except that she seemed to think of us as an alien species.

Her surprise that I was fluent in French at the end of my degree when she could barely string two sentences together. (Thank you, Queen's College and UWI Cave Hill for ensuring that between the ages of 14 and 21 I spoke French daily during term time.)

The fact that I was very well read and pretty knowledgeable about a lot of things, especially because she wasn't. I'm not being mean here, just stating facts.

If we had had some of those conversations before signing a lease together, then perhaps I would have thought twice. But we didn't, and I was left to discover her ingrained acceptance of white dominant culture norms bit by bit.

The Sentence That Flummoxed Me