My Driving Instructor Is Racist

When I sat through my first class with my driving instructor and watched her only correct the black man in the room on his pronunciation of words, I knew she was racist.

Microaggressions. That is the way my driving instructor is racist and that is the way most people are racist in 2020. Microaggressions are normalized. They are in everyday conversations and, even in this time where everybody is trying to be anti-racist, microaggressions do not just fade overnight. They do not go away because you post #BLM, they do not go away because you have watched 13th one time on Netflix and feel oh so educated, and they do not go away because you read one 2 minute post on how to be an ally on Instagram and shared it on your story.

I learned what a microaggression was when I was 17. To me, that feels like a long time to go without knowing what it is but for some, they never learn to put a word to what they experience their whole lives. I learned about microaggressions in the form of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine in my 11th grade English class. Yet, always I knew what they were because I, and so many of the people I cared about, were experiencing them constantly, I could just now put a word to it.

A Microaggression as explained by Kevin Nadal during an interview on NPR is

the everyday, subtle, intentional — and oftentimes unintentional — interactions or behaviors that communicate some sort of bias toward historically marginalized groups.

Yes, another way in which you can be racist. Oh, but don’t feel bad you didn’t know because most black people do not even fully know. They don’t know how to put a word to that uncomfortable feeling that they get when a white person says or does something they know ain’t right but are scared of calling it racist. It is racist.

We need to stop being scared of calling people racist. The reason that word feels so wrong, so aggressive, is the connotation of what it meant in the past. Being racist in the 50s and 60s is different from what it is today because it has been simmered down to microaggressions to make it tolerable. Just because you are racist, it does not make you evil. It makes you ignorant. What you choose to do after you find out you are racist is what makes the difference. Do you educate yourself and try to unlearn and correct years of normalized behavior, or do you keep going? Do you toss it to the side without looking at yourself because you know you’re not racist and don’t hate black people? Just because you think you don’t hate us doesn’t mean you stand with us either.

Now, in all honesty, I am not here to tell you who is racist but I am not going to tell you who isn’t either. Sure, you can say racist things and not be racist in the traditional way of hating all black people. Yet, you can still be racist in the way of the ideas that you have been learning your whole life that you don’t realize are harmful. Like my driving instructor correcting a black man on his pronunciation because she learned there is one way to speak correctly and black language and slang are not it. Racism, as so many people are now learning, goes beyond what we once thought it was. It is in our everyday systems, our normalized habits and language, and it is embedded in us without our knowing. So now, we need to unlearn it.

Disclaimer: Not an expert. All thoughts presented in this article are the authors’ own thoughts and opinions and not fact.