We don’t like to speak of the R word, yet its impact is undeniable.
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He stands under the head of the shower for a few moments sobbing uncontrollably. Trembling, he turns the knob to hot and the small wallpapered bathroom quickly fills with steam and screams. On his face, you can’t tell the tears apart from the scalding water, but his feet are equally treated to both. Snatching a full bar of soap from its dish, he aggressively scrubs his body for more than an hour, the bar of soap nearly gone before he comes up for air. His quest for purity is insatiable, so much so that long after the soap has dissolved he continues to scrub.
Mumbling profanity, he sits down slowly in the tub, the water still running, but at this point most of the hot water is gone and so is the steam.
“You stupid bastard,” he says, shouting at himself, “You deserve what happened to you, leaving the fucking house looking like that, you know better; god dammit!”
The blaming is unnecessary, he certainly doesn’t deserve that level of abuse; no one does. But for him, because it happens so frequently, he has no other choice but to think maybe he’s inviting this negative attention. With calls from the friends he was suppose to meet at the movies coming in back-to-back, the stock ringtone from his iPhone awkwardly accompanies the melody of melancholy that seems to be on repeat.
The toes that once drank from his tears are now wrinkled like prunes, as if they are dying of thirst. He wants nothing more than to be out of his skin; every time he looks at himself he screams the word the attacker had hurled at him. The trauma is painfully obvious and it doesn’t help that the person who victimized him had laughed during the encounter. You would think that the unfortunate regularities of these types of assaults would make him immune, give him a thicker skin if you will. On the contrary, every attack seems to soften the skin, making it almost paper thin and easy to tear.
With the water ice cold and his teeth chattering as a result, he stands up and exits the tubs. Not reaching for a towel, he walks to over to the sink dripping wet and stands gazing at his reflection. Suddenly he screams and punches the mirror; shattering the glass and maybe his hand in the process. He doesn’t react to the blood dripping from his knuckles; instead he lets it form a puddle and then uses it to write the word the attacker had yelled at him.
He dips his finger in the blood and slowly writes the letter N on the rim of the sink. He continues with the letter I, two G’s an E and an R. “NIGGER,” he screams before running out of the bathroom.
He was a victim of the R word. RACISM. And yes, racism is abuse, too.
Read more on the topic of Racism by Chris Norris here.
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Photo: mcvickerphotog/Flickr