Thread by @GeeDee215

A few things jump out in these "first time i was called 'nigger'" responses:

~ the # of times this involved random white dudes in trucks driving by + shouting it

~most respondents were school-aged

~ being the "The Only One" in class/on a team/whatever when it happened

https://twitter.com/GeeDee215/status/1045775858013810689

re: these, my first time being called it was at a church function, by some white boy from "the pocket." if you're from South Philly, you know where that is.

my "truckload of white boys" incident came a few years later — again, in the pocket, which i had to cross to get back from the basketball courts at Taney Playground: "GO HOME, COTTONPICKER!"

funnily enough, Taney Playground is named for Roger Brooke Taney, which would be a little too on the nose if you were writing a movie script but a detail that goes unnoticed in actual everyday American life:

bit.ly/2jmKTSn

but re: "The Only One" thing...it's come up a lot in our convos, re: a generation of Black parents who moved their families to white suburbs, and even though they weren't oblivious, their kids were having these experiences that they themselves had not and weren't anticipating.

an ex told me how her mom and dad — moms was from North Philly, pops was from TN; both HBCU grads — were grown before they had to deal with white people's shit in an everyday way. She said they didn't get what it was like for her to steel herself for it in *kindergarten.*

and her parents weren't oblivious. but...yeah, they had basically signed her
up to 'The Only One' until she was 18. And i don't she didn't stop walking around with that sense that some wild shit might happen at any moment until she went to @FAMU_1887.

but yeah. white people really sending their second-graders to school with that shit already in their arsenals. smh.