Personal Essay: The Instinct

I feel obliged to state the obvious with the following disclaimer: Every black person in the African diaspora will experience white people and racism differently based on geographic location, economic status, education, personality, and overall upbringing. The ideas and connections that follow stem from my own life experiences as a black girl growing up in southern California, who received an excellent education, lived in neighborhoods free of gangs and violent crime, and who has white relatives. I’d like to add though, that regardless of an individual’s awareness or lack thereof, racism does exist, and it can and will affect black people whether they’re aware of it or not.

I hope the following essay will be a springboard for open and thoughtful discussion.

                       *                                                *                                             *

            My experience with white people has been this: they either

1.     Openly welcome you, treating you like any other human being, maybe because they’ve had interactions with people of color before or,

2.     Politely pretend you don’t exist, not necessarily because they don’t like you, but possibly because you make them uncomfortable, or

3.     Have a stiff, forced interaction in which you can tell that they have some aversion to your presence, but they are unable to escape the situation without overtly expressing their dislike.

In my life, the majority of white people I’ve encountered have fallen into the first two groups listed above. So when I run into those of the third group, it stands out in my mind.

I’ll elaborate with a story.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not the type of person to purposefully, willfully, and intentionally socialize, especially not with strangers. However, in January of 2020, shortly after making the move from Los Angeles, California to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I endeavored to put myself in situations where I could get to know people in my new city with interests similar to mine. For this purpose, I googled writing groups in Albuquerque and quickly discovered the website called Meetup, which would enable me to do exactly what I had set out to accomplish. All I had to do was select the things I was interested in and the site would show me groups that matched my interests. My primary purpose was to meet writers and I signed up for a few groups, but there were other things that interested me too and so I joined meditation groups as well an international travel group.

            This whole joining-Meetup-groups was and is totally out of character. But, I didn’t know anyone in the city besides my mother and my sister and I decided that wasn’t going to be enough of a social life for me and that I really wanted to have some writer friends. Thus, the writing Meetups, as well as other Meetups unrelated to writing.

            An international travel Meetup would be taking place at the local Total Wine. I was very excited about this prospect, my love for Total Wine being deep and infinite in nature due to my abiding love of Bourbon—I’d have a grand old time accompanying someone else through the store, even if I wasn’t buying anything. The event was a wine tasting, where we would talk about international travel. What could be better than free wine and reliving the glories of your travels to lands afar? Nothing I could think of.

            So, I pull up to the Total Wine in the old-but-still-going-strong, blue Toyota Corolla I inherited from my uncle. As instructed on the Meetup website, I go down aisle 3, all the way to the back, to the wine tasting room.

            When I step inside, I’m immediately self-conscious of my t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. I feel suddenly underdressed, even though everyone else is also dressed casually. I wonder briefly how these people perceive me. Tension immediately grips my muscles, but I force a smile, look around awkwardly and ask, “Is this the international travel Meetup?”

            The entire sea of white faces turns toward me. They all sit at long, raised tables—about seven rows of them. There’s a collection of smaller, round tables as well, but they’re all empty except for one, which is occupied by two white women.

            Did I mention everyone in the room was old? I was in a room full of old, white people. The only brown person for miles.

            One of the white ladies at the small table, let’s call her Janice, rises, confirms that I’m in the right place and briskly says, “I think there’s an empty chair somewhere.” She tries to help me find a place to sit among the tall tables, but there’s nothing available, so I’m directed to take a seat at one of the shorter tables. She and her companion don’t offer me a seat at their table, which has an empty chair. I notice this slight, but assure myself with the thought that they’re saving the seat for a friend. Don’t over think it, I tell myself.

I soon learn that Janice is the organizer of this Meetup and the wine tasting proceeds, me sitting alone at the short, round table, feeling very much isolated, looking over at the white people on their tall chairs. I have the distinct feeling of being forced to sit alone at the kiddie table.

            A few minutes later, another group shows up—a little late, like me. These too, are older white folks—two white women—except for the one younger woman who’s with them who may or may not be Indian. She’s brown, at least.

            Janice rises again. There’s a certain clip to her voice that reveals to me that she doesn’t like that people have showed up late, even if it is just a few minutes. She gestures to the kiddie tables. Tells them they can sit there. They choose a table next to mine and one of the white ladies smiles at me and says, “Would you like to join our table?”

            Instant relief. I accept the offer, join their table with a sense of victory over Janice— “See,” I think, “someone wants me to sit with them.” Like some weird rendition of Mean Girls, I had felt that Janice had positively shouted, “You can’t sit with us!” But now, I had my revenge—a sense of comfort that I was welcomed by someone.

They’re a cool group of people and seem just as subtly uncomfortable here as I, despite fitting rather neatly into the larger demographic. We sip our wine, chat a little, and I begin to relax.

            After the wine tasting part is over, Janice comes around and, in that same clipped tone with a look of snobbery on her face (perhaps imagined, perhaps not), tells us to talk about where we’ve been and where we want to go. Something about her manner, I think, betrays her. Something in the way she looks at everyone else at the table first, and for longer periods, her eyes only landing on me for a split second at a time before moving on. I feel unwanted. And I feel discomfort in the unwantedness. And in the discomfort, I feel slightly resentful. I pull into an inner shell of protection, the outside of which is coated in a calm demeanor and a smile.

            At the end of the Meetup, Janice and her companion come around again. They ask us to write down the top 5 places we want to go so they can better organize for the next meeting. Janice begins to talk to people, ask their names. Eventually she comes to sit at our table. Again, I have the distinct impression that she will not quite meet my eye, as if I’m some sort of Medusa that will turn her to stone right there in her chair. After asking my name, Janice moves on quickly from me, as if she only spoke to me out of obligation in the first place. She spends a little more time talking to the others, then leaves our table. I don’t interact with her again after that.

            This incident seems rather unremarkable on the surface, yet I thought about it for weeks and weeks after it occurred. That distinct feeling of discomfort stuck with me. I turned it over and over in my mind, wondering what on earth had really happened in that Total Wine. Was I imagining things? Making things up? I had never encountered any overt racism in my life. Why the sudden sensitivity? Why the suspicion?  

            An idea floated up into my awareness from the recesses of my mind. Hadn’t I heard or read somewhere once, that trauma can be passed down through generations? What if this was ancestral trauma speaking? Something in my biology, in my blood, that told me I wasn’t welcome in that space, not by Janice anyway. So I turn to the internet.

Via a BBC article by Martha Henriques titled, “Can the Legacy of Trauma be Passed Down the Generations?” I discover that scientists are now in the very beginning stages of researching how trauma is passed from parent to child, from child to grandchild. The results of these early experiments confirm to me that maybe I’m not as crazy as I thought. In one study, survivors of the POW camps of the confederate army, who suffered starvation and cramped living conditions, had sons who had a shortened mortality rate compared to sons born to other soldiers. This happened through epigenetics, a process in which the expressions of genes are modified without actually changing the code of DNA.

“Tiny chemical tags are added to or removed from our DNA in response to changes in the environment in which we are living. These tags turn genes on or off, offering a way of adapting to changing conditions without inflicting a more permanent shift in our genomes.”

In another study, scientists paired the scent of cherry blossoms with pain in adult male mice by repeatedly blowing the scent through their cages while administering an electric shock at the same time. These males bred with female mice and their offspring became “more jumpy and nervous” in the presence of cherry blossom scent “than pups whose fathers hadn’t been conditioned to fear it.” Further, the next generation of pups also showed a heightened sensitivity to the smell of cherry blossoms.

It was noted that “the second and third generation appeared to have not a fear of the scent itself, but a heightened sensitivity to it. The finding brings to light an often-missed subtlety of epigenetic inheritance—that the next generation doesn’t always show exactly the same trait that their parents developed.” It wasn’t “that fear [was] being passed down the generations—it [was] that fear in one generation leads to sensitivity in the next.”

Notably, this “inheritance” of trauma was only tracked in the male offspring. The research “focus(es) on sperm and epigenetic inheritance down the male line. This isn’t because scientists think it only happens in males. It’s just a lot harder to study eggs than it is to study sperm. But efforts to decipher epigenetic inheritance down the female line is the next step.”

So maybe the passing down of trauma hasn’t been concretely shown, whether in males or females, at least not to the point of having a widely agreed upon scientific theory. But the initial research is showing a link, however thin, between the generations when it comes to traumatic experiences.

When thinking of my own bloodline, I find the situation to be strangely similar to that of the mice discussed above. My great grandmother on my father’s side, born in the 1920s, had a deep dislike for white people, to put it mildly. She had grown up in the south, where she had seen black people suffer horrible atrocities and injustices. I believe her dislike for white people stemmed from a fear of them—a fear of the power they had over her life. Did her fear and dislike pass down to me? No. Just like the mice, I didn’t inherit a fear or dislike of white people (my grandmother on my mother’s side was white and I’ve had great mentors and friends who are white), but I do believe I inherited a sensitivity.    

I think back to the incident at Total Wine. Who knows what was going on in Janice’s head? Maybe she just didn’t interact much with black people and that’s what made her behave so awkwardly, so stiffly. Maybe my presence woke something in her that made her uncomfortable. Maybe she was astounded by my captivating beauty and couldn’t bear to look at me for too long. I’ll never know for sure. But I find it odd that despite never having experienced any overt racism in my entire life, despite never being personally harassed by the police, or by a white person in general, I had a distinct instinct bordering on certainty, that my mere presence had made Janice uncomfortable. It was a 6^th sense, if you will—I knew something was off, that the way she related to me was different from how she related to everyone else, whatever her reasons might have been.

            I think where this instinct would have come from and it seems obvious. When your ancestors have been enslaved, raped, beaten, separated from their families, forced to work sun up to sun down; when they’ve lived in a world in which their survival often rests on reading the intentions of white people accurately; when realizing they aren’t welcome saves them from a beating or worse, a lynching; when seeing that look in a white person’s eye told them they’d better respectfully tip their hat and avert their eyes or be in mortal danger—well, those are traumas the generations won’t soon forget. 

When I think back on the incident with Janice, I wonder if my ancestors’ traumas were passed down in a heightened sensitivity to the body language, tone, and speech of white people that signals to me whether or not they want me around, whether or not I’m making them uncomfortable. Sure, it could be that the instinct is, at times, inaccurate—reading the displeasure on a white person’s face as displeasure at my own presence rather than displeasure with their son who just got his third DUI. But my biology, my ancestors’ experiences would tell me, better inaccurate, better wrong, than dead.

This hypothetical instinct showed itself on another occasion—on my hunt for purple pens with which I now, superstitiously, must write my young adult fantasy novels. I go to a stationery store. The shop proprietor welcomes me inside. Let’s call her Tina. Well, Tina doesn’t ask if I need any help or if I’m looking for anything in particular. I wander around the store, looking for purple pens. At the very back of the shop, I finally find some, but they have little plastic nubs on their ends that prevent you from writing on the scratch paper provided. So I ask Tina as she’s passing if there’s a sample pen. She tells me I can take the plastic nubs off, does so herself, scribbles on the scratch paper, and leaves me alone. Now that I think about it, did she find herself going to the storeroom in the back of the shop because I was in the back of the shop? Maybe. She smiles when she rings me up. I pay and leave. On the surface, it was a rather innocent exchange.

            Yet, I felt it in the way her smile seemed bland, in the way her eyes glossed over just the tiniest bit when she looked at me. In the way she chattered in a friendly manner with the other patrons of the shop, but gave me only short responses when I tried to make friendly conversation with her as she rang me up.

I felt it. Though I wasn’t so bothered in the moment—I was feeling so victorious over my purchase—a 20 minute drive to buy three individual purple pens because pens aren’t sold individually at Walmart or Target, especially not purple ones.

            But later, as the flush of my victory faded, I found myself pondering the subtly cold, or rather sterile, way in which she dealt with me. I knew somehow, that she didn’t welcome my presence in her shop, even if she did take my money with a smile.

Months later, I still find myself wondering if any of it really mattered, these interactions I’d had. So what if they made me feel uncomfortable, unwelcome? It didn’t matter. They didn’t try to beat me, kill me. No one called the cops on me. No one pointed a gun in my face or threatened to hang me from a tree. 

It’s true, I was (probably) never in any immediate physical danger. But despite this, the instinct, if it truly exists at all, seems like an automatic mechanism that runs in the background of my brain, honed through the lives of those that came before me. I was left with such an uncomfortable feeling that I know I won’t be attending the international Meetup again, nor returning to that stationery store a second time.

At first, I debated about making this decision. Shouldn’t I show up anyway? Force Janice to see the black girl as intelligent, well-traveled, well-educated, articulate? Then I had to check myself—it wasn’t my job to convince anyone of my humanity, of my goodness. It wasn’t my job to do the emotional and mental labor of putting myself in situations that made me uncomfortable just so I could convince some white woman that I was an okay human being. The fact that I had to debate about it speaks to a compulsion in many black people to be a representative of their entire race, to prove something that should not need proving, but that’s a subject for another time.   

I’ll get back to the topic at hand. In the studies of trauma in mice, the scientist conducting the experiment wondered what would happen if the mice that were once conditioned to fear cherry blossom scent were desensitized to the smell. So they exposed the mice to the smell without the electric shock. The result?

“When [the scientist] looked at their sperm, they had lost their characteristic “fearful” epigenetic signature after the desensitisation process. The pups of these mice also no longer showed the heightened sensitivity to the scent. So, if a mouse ‘unlearns’ the association of a scent and pain, then the next generation may escape the effects.”

If humans and mice pass down trauma in a similar manner, these epigenetic markers could be eliminated or lessened via unlearning certain fears, going to therapy, or otherwise resolving the issues around the trauma.

So it’s possible, in theory, to stop the passing of these traumas. Maybe I or my parents or grandparents need therapy. And while therapy may be extremely helpful in improving the mental health of black people the world over, I wonder if we’re quite ready to resolve this particular trauma, if it’s likely that it will only reoccur. I may have been very fortunate in life to never experience hateful acts against me, nor any abuses of my rights or body due to racism, but that doesn’t mean that I never could. In a world where Trayvon Martin doesn’t make it home from buying sweets, in which Tamir Rice is gunned down in a park in broad daylight, in which Philando Castile is murdered in front of his girlfriend and four-year-old child, in which Kalief Browder is picked up off the street for matching a description and thrown in jail for years despite never having been convicted of a crime, perhaps this instinct is still very much necessary.