What My 5th-Grade Crush Taught Me about Racism
I’ll never forget the first time I experienced blatant racism. It was from the parent of one of my friends. This is the same elementary school in Connecticut that made international news, after one of its teachers cast a fifth-grader as a slave in a play about colonialism. The student was Black.
I arrived to West Woods School in Hamden, Conn. when I was 10 years old. Despite being the only Black person in my class, I loved it there. I had many friends. We celebrated birthdays together, spent time together outside of the classroom, and often had funny conversations about my crush and classmate, “Ralph.” He was cool. He was also white.
Ralph and I became part of the same group of friends. We sat together in art class. We also talked on the phone almost every day after school and all day on snow days.
My crush on Ralph survived summer break and carried into sixth grade. I was now old enough to meet him and our other friends at the movie theater and on Friday nights to the local ice skating rink.
I never explicitly told Ralph that I liked him. I was 11-years-old, and I was shy in that area. I was sure that we would “go out” at some point, but I wouldn’t be the one to initiate it. But, it never happened. Instead, he went out with other girls in my class — even other girls in our friends group. While we still talked on the phone, went ice skating, and sat together in art class, he called another girl his girlfriend, kissed someone else in the cubbies, and talked to another girl on the phone sometimes. His two-week relationships with our classmates did not interfere with the daily routine of our friendship, yet I was disappointed that he never considered asking me out.
At our sixth-grade graduation, I caught a glimpse of his parents. They also caught a glimpse of me. They learned that there were two girls named Stacy in their son’s class.
The next time I called his house, his dad answered the phone.
“Hi, may I speak to Ralph please?”
“Sure,” his dad said. “Who’s this?”
“Stacy,” I replied.
“Hold on,” his dad said.
Ralph picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Is that the black Stacy or the white Stacey,” his dad asked loudly in the background.
I didn’t hear Ralph answer his dad.
I pretended that I didn’t hear what his dad said, and we continued our conversation.
The summer after sixth grade, my friend told me that Ralph said he actually liked me a lot, but his parents told him they would “kill” him if he went out with a Black girl.
I was speechless and disappointed. It was the first time I felt limited by my brown skin. My maternal grandfather often talked about how cruel some white people could be, but I thought it was because he was old and grew up in Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s and saw probably saw lynchings. I was shocked to learn that racism was still real. It hurt to learn that there still white people who didn’t like Black people and “would kill” their sons for liking a Black girl back…even in elementary school.
I wished there had been Black boys in my class, then maybe I could have avoided that whole experience with Ralph. All, but one, of the Black boys in my grade were sent to a segregated special education classroom. I also thought about how the boys in my class ranked the girls in my class. I had an average score and wondered if they would have rated my looks higher if I was white like the other girls on their list.
One of the last times I saw Ralph was during the summer after sixth-grade graduation. One morning, he showed up at my doorstep with two of our other classmates. There were three white boys on my doorstep. My mom woke me up and told me to go outside and to greet my guests. I wonder how Ralph’s father would have reacted if I showed up to his house at 9 a.m. with two other Black girls, unannounced.
Stacy Graham-Hunt is a national-award winning columnist and author, who writes about race and identity. She is passionate about Black people telling their own stories. Email her at stacygrahamhunt@gmail.com or follow her on social media @stacyreports.