Earlier this year, I was invited to join my then-boyfriend's family for dinner. Now, dinner at the boy's house, especially when it involves grandparents and siblings, is a scary prospect to a girl trying to make a good impression, especially when one is trying to make that impression on tenth-generation Vermonters. I went to that dinner looking forward to learning about the state I was growing to love. I left the table ashamed that I'd ever sat down.
Halfway through dinner, his mother turned to her middle child and asked him to regale the family with his plan on how he was going to make money in the future. He replied: "I'm going to adopt a black kid and train it to play in the NFL." With the 'IT' still bouncing around my skull and every one's laughter ringing in my ears, his mother said, 'Tell them what you're going to name 'IT'.'
He made two clicking sounds with his tongue, mocking African dialects with no knowledge of the vocal control it takes to actually speak in a series of sounds. The table cracked up.
The youngest child, still laughing into her food, said, "Black people look funny. They're like monkeys!!" You would have thought she'd just pulled off a one-liner on par with the men of Monty Python, the way the entire table practically collapsed under pounding fists and repetitions of her killer work: monkey.
With the rest of the family practically falling off their seats, I sat, stone-faced. My ex turned to me and said I was embarrassing him by not laughing; the fact that I wasn't joining in his family's clearly racist banter made him look bad. Silly rabbit, I thought. It's not me who looks bad here.
I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I looked in the mirror, shaking. How could I be among people like this?
I never thought I would use the term 'racist' in Vermont, especially not when referring to the people who live here. But it's a hidden side to the state that natives are very protective of and flatlanders (people not born here) learn to ignore, are the subject of, or both.
Vermont seems to exist as an American Hypocrite, and perhaps people are so relaxed up here because it's culturally homogenized. But people in Vermont are intrinsically good; they help their neighbors, they tow them out of the snow when they're stuck.
And yet, they're stuck. Backed against a frozen snowdrift of people they don't know, but have only seen on 'Cops.' They cling to racist ideology, mostly obtained by intergenerational discourse, or just pure speculation.
In the 2006 Census, blacks comprised 0.7 percent of Vermont's 623,908 citizens, whites: 96.7. Vermont also has the distinction of being one of only two states in the country where police don't collect data on racial profiling. The other? Mississippi.
An "Uncommon Alliance," comprised of black community leaders, police chiefs from four departments and other high-profile law makers, was formed to put a stop to that problem. While it's still in the preliminary stages, one member said that, "the problem can not be solved until we have actual proof that it's happening. Unfortunately, if you ask any person of color if they've experienced some manner of racial profiling, they'll probably have a bunch of stories to tell you. But that isn't proof enough."
Case in point: two of my friends came over to help me jump my car. Due to the odd shape of my driveway, we had to back it out into the street to do it. While we struggled with my defunct battery, I noticed my neighbors beginning to come out of their houses, open their windows or doors and just stand there, watching us. We kept trying to get my car to start, to no avail. So my friends left to get another pair of cables, and one of the people living across the street, with whom I had never spoken before, came over to ask me if I needed help or if she needed to call the police. I was puzzled for a minute, thinking she wanted to help me with my car...and then it all came together. Two young black men were doing something to a white girl's car. I almost burst out laughing; I can't really recall any auto theft in which the car's owner not only watches it happen, but HELPS the thieves try and get the car to move. Had the lady never seen jumper cables before? Or had she never seen a black man?
The series I'm about to begin, “Driving While Black,” is in no way intended to reprimand the people of Vermont. Community leaders, community members and regular Vermonters will tell you their stories and experiences with racism in a state that has the reputation of being one of the most liberal in the country. But racists exist everywhere, and it wouldn't matter which state I was writing from, I would (albeit sadly) be able to tell the same stories.
Rachel Feldman, 8/5/08