Maleah Harris

Race and Ethnicity

Dr. Taralyn Keese
October 24, 2015
Autobiographical Essay
I am a young Black woman who has had the great fortune to experience the middle-class
quality of life in the United States. Both of my parents are Black and work in white-collar
positions that earn them at least five figures per year, and their combined salaries make a
household income of at least six figures together. However, unlike me, both my parents were
raised poor. My mother was raised in rural Talbotton, Georgia, where she and her family had
experienced notable degrees of racism and hate crimes towards Blacks. My father was raised in
urban Columbus, Georgia, where he and his family also shared similar experiences of racism and
antagonism from the Whites that lived in the area.
Both of my parents' families were descended from African slaves. Slavery and its
associated practices played a significant role in the development of each of my parents' families,
and thus a significant role in determining the quality of my own life as the child of my parents.
The location of plantations in Southern Georgia largely determined the relative location in which
the earlier generations on either side of my family settled down after slavery was abolished in
1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment. My mother and father were both born in the 1950's, and
each of them experienced the height of racial segregation by Jim Crow, the fervour of the Civil
Rights Movement and the consequences of the federally-mandated integration of schools.

My mother was born in the year 1950, and she is the oldest sister of fifteen children. My
mother has personally seen the aftermath of a lynching, where a black man had been hanged,
castrated, and burned, then left in public for the Black community to see. After the Civil War,
lynching was used as a punishment particularly reserved for black offenders and it was also the
only option of punishment for black men who were believed to have sexually solicited white
women (Harris, 1984, p. 5). Lynching was one of the ways that whites in the Southern United
States used to maintain or preserve the racial heirarchy that had been created and enforced during
the era of slavery in the United States (Harris, 1984, p. 5). My mother can recount her father and
mother being pulled over by a police officer due to the complexion of my grandmother, since she
was very light-skinned and could pass for white. In contrast, my grandfather was very darkskinned, and they both attracted negative attention when they were together in public.
My father's family also was shaped by the variety of complexions or skin tones within the
black community. My great grandfather on my father's side was a light-skinned black man who
was disowned by his family for marrying my great grandmother, who was a dark-skinned black
woman. My great grandfather's family believed that his marrying a darker skinned black woman
would lower the status that they believed they had as a family of lighter-skinned blacks.
Colorism, or discrimination based upon the skin tone among people who are often members of
the same ethnic or racial group, also had a hand in contributing to the position that I am in today.
Colorism was viewed as a viable tactic by my great grandfather's family because lighter-skinned
blacks found it was easier for them to accumulate wealth than darker-skinned blacks, since many
of them were freed blacks in the mid-19th century and had far more opportunities for education
and employment than their enslaved counterparts (Norwood, 2013, p. 101).
My father was born in the year 1955, and he can recount instances in his youth where he

and his siblings avoided being in view of the road when they heard a car coming. My father
related to me that "back then, the only people who drove cars were white people, and white
people would try to run over black children" because there would be little to no consequences for
such a crime to be pursued by the local police during that time. When my father was older, he
decided to switch high schools and was able to attend the high school that had originally only
allowed white students to attend. The prevalence of the white student body presented my father
with social difficulties, where he often overheard them referencing to his presence with racial
slurs and jokes. Since he was a young black man, my father often found he was often perceived
as more likely to be engaged in criminal activity or to have poor understanding of academia.
When he was walking down a forested road that had no sidewalk, he was stopped by an officer
and commanded to walk in the heavily wooded area instead of the road, which he perceived as
racial bias on the officer's behalf. In another instance, when he was studying mathematical
equations needed to enter the field of telecommunications, he was told by the white instructor
that he "would never be able to understand the math". Despite the obstacles placed in his path
due to his race, he obtained training and employment in the telecommunications field.
My mother's family and my father's family perceived whites acting on their racist
attitudes as a prevalent and very real threat to their lives. However, the experience of racism as a
middle-class Black American is very different. My economic background is often completely
erased or ignored due to White Americans' prevailing observation of my skin color. If I am
dressed casually or in non-formal clothing, I am often more likely to be subject to the racial
stereotypes that people from any racial background or ethnicity hold about black women,
especially White Americans. Individuals from this group are the ones who express the most
surprise when they discover that I attend college or that I speak what some people believe to be

"proper english". These sorts of interactions lead me to believe that White America does not
really want to acknowledge a "black middle-class", but instead prefers to continue viewing Black
Americans negatively, no matter their economic achievements (Feagin, 1994, p. 35).

References Page
Feagin, J., & Sikes, M. (1994). "Living with racism: The black middle-class experience."
Boston: Beacon Press.
Harris, T. (1984). "Ritual and Ritual Violence in American Life and Culture."

Bloomington,

Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Norwood, K. (2013). "Color matters: Skin tone bias and the myth of a postracial America."
New York, NY: Routledge.