I'm going to tell three stories in these pages. All of them are difficult for me. They highlight ways that I am directly connected and implicated in processes of racism. I can't alter these events through the kind of selective memory that would seek to mitigate their pain. Some of the other people in these stories might also like to forget these events -- they might follow the logic that says that it it best to leave painful events in the past.

The first story

A large group of people from my hometown (all white) were gathered after a softball game. My friend Mike -- a college friend also from my hometown -- had come home to visit. Jeff, another college friend who was African American had come home along with Mike. One member of the group, a working class guy who had recently become a mail carrier, was telling stories about his experiences. He had been assigned to a route in East St. Louis, which is an economically depressed area, almost 100% African American, and the source and focus for much of the racist conversations of the whites in surrounding communities. Someone, I can't remember who, asked,

"Do you have much trouble with dogs?"
And the mail carrier answered, "Shit no, dogs hate niggers."

Everyone at the table froze for a split second. And then the table erupted into talk. The mail carrier apologized over and over again for his use of the word. My friend Jeff shook his head and said that it was all right. There was laughter. Neither my friend Mike or I said anything, and after a moment I excused myself to go to the bathroom. It is hard to remember exactly what I did or said, or even how well I understood all of the complex systems for racial inequality which were being played out in that moment. I do remember that I knew that I was just as guilty, even though I would never have said such a thing myself.

Let's pause for a moment though, to make this situation more complicated, richer.

• This was a group of guys, all under 25. I was the only female, which was common for this group.

• The guy who said this was probably the only one in the group who would have said such a thing, but I am not sure of this.

• I know that people were uncomfortable about what was said. They felt it was wrong, but it is unclear whether they felt it was wrong as a statement or wrong only because an African American was sitting at the table.

• Most members of that hometown crowd did not have interracial friendships like the one that existed for Mike, Jeff , and me.

• Everyone in that crowd liked Jeff.

I can see this situation as one which exposes the thin veneer of anti-racist sentiment that allows relationships across racial boundaries. I remember it as a moment of shame and confusion and secret complicity in a group (white racists) to whom I did not want to belong. I wonder still what my friend Jeff felt about that moment...we have never discussed it once...I can't even remember if I said I was sorry, and I am not sure what, exactly, I am sorry about. That these people were my friends? That I lived in a world, represented a group of people who felt him to be other, lesser than they? That I could move into groups where people could talk about niggers freely and without embarrassment?

A second story

This is not so much a new story as it is a continuation of a story about my relationship to the attitudes held by my white friends and family about the issue of interracial dating. When I was in college, my main group friends included several different racial backgrounds. At one point I became aware that my friend Jeff and I might be moving towards a dating relationship.

[These words are so difficult to find. I think it is important to remember and mark the pain of this telling. Perhaps it could be connected to the efforts that Frankenberg relates--the multiple ways that the white women she interviewed attempted to hide from and smooth over incidents of racial inequality in their lives.]

There was more than one reason why I was worried about a possible change in our relationship. I didn't want the friendship of the group to be affected by our relationship, as I knew it would; and I wasn't at all sure that we were compatible enough to make a relationship work. If our dating relationship didn't work out, then everyone would be hurt. But I know at least part of the reason for objecting to a romance was that I knew that our dating would mean a battle with my family (by which I mostly mean my mother). While I could casually date people from different backgrounds and different racial groups I knew that my relationship with Jeff would be serious (rather than just a casual short-term experience) and that my family/mother would object that such relationships were too hard on everyone involved. I was afraid of the battles that might come. I knew that stories like the first one I've related would be common and I would have to deal with them and I felt that I didn't know how to deal with them. The fact was that  interracial dating relationships were not as easy as interracial non-sexual friendships. I was afraid of being thrust into spaces where I became marked, separate in ways that would create lines between me and the white community that had created my sense of self.

A third story

When I lived in Washington, D.C. my employer and many of my friends (and my boyfriend) were Jewish. I didn't normally think too much about this. The people I worked with in a downtown nightclub didn't make religion an important part of their lives.

Just after my boyfriend and I broke up I began a short-term relationship with another Jewish man. [The attempt to tell these stories makes me realize how complicated they always are -- how to say certain things and not to say others. ] The important moment in this story was when he told me, after we'd been seeing each other for a week or two, that he could never marry a non-Jewish woman. He said that he would consider it a betrayal of his family and their faith. That a woman who was not Jewish could never really "belong" to his family.

I remember thinking, "then what was the point of getting started with me?"

I remember the casual way he said this, as if he had no idea that such a statement might hurt me.

Connections

I won't even attempt to make explicit connections between these two relationships. For one thing, my friend Jeff is worth much more to me than I ever was to the man who rejected me for my non-Jewishness. Surely there are connections there, and the two stories placed next to one another are useful for the ways they highlight the complexity of such relationships; but I don't have any calm reflections to offer. The process of revealing these stories is too painful.