MY SEAT AT A TABLE PART 2

Sometimes I spent weekends in the homes of my white classmates, those

day students who lived in and around the town. It was always a treat to
get away from campus, to sleep in a cozy bed and eat a home-cooked
meal.

At the time, my family and I lived in a crowded two-bedroom

apartment. The kitchen was tiny, leaving little space for a dining table
large enough to accommodate a family of six. So, we children ate our
meals in the kitchen while my parents ate in the living room, on the
couch, plates in their laps.

My father believed that children should be seen and not heard, especially
at the dining table, so talking was not permitted during meals. In
contrast, the parents of my white friends encouraged and participated in
mealtime discussions.

It was at one of those family dinners that I remember how my BFF’s

father, a tall, slim, kind man with glasses, responded aloud to a question
that I had not heard posed:

“Of course, the white race is the superior race.”

To this day, I do not know who asked the question or if in fact a question
was actually asked. Perhaps, this man, who had always been nothing but
kind and welcoming to me, found it necessary to remind me that even
though I was in his Victorian home, sitting at his dinner table, eating the
food that had been lovingly prepared by his Filipino wife — I was
inferior to him.

I cannot recall if my friend and her siblings fell silent, or if my friend, her
siblings, or her mother looked at me for a reaction or in consolation. I
remember that I kept my eyes lowered to my plate, that the grip on my
fork tightened, and the leisurely pace of my heart launched into a sprint.
I was 15 years old and the situation my family had warned and prepped
me for as a Black person living in white America had arrived yet again.

Before that incident, another incident took place in Brooklyn in the

waning days of autumn when I was on my way home from middle
school. On that day, I exited the subway on the south side of Prospect
Park, in a neighborhood where very few Black people lived at the time.
There, I was followed by two white teenage boys who pelted rocks at me,
shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!”

A year or two before, my younger brother and I were walking down

Rockaway Boulevard in South Ozone Park, Queens, a neighborhood that
in the ‘70s was still majority Italian. As we made our way to our
grandparents’ home, a group of white teenage boys and girls stalked us
for blocks, hurling soda cans, bottles, and racial slurs.

The fact that my BFF’s father chose that moment to express his deepest
held beliefs about his racial superiority is not beyond me. Indeed, my
presence at his table was conditional — permitted only because I made
his daughter happy and he enjoyed seeing his daughter happy because
his love for her was unconditional.

Do I believe his declaration was meant to wound and degrade me?

Yes, I do.

Not only was I hurt, but being an empath, I also absorbed the
humiliation on behalf of his Filipino wife who had not batted an eye at
the insult.

Do I think that my friend’s mother believed that she, a Filipino person of

color, was less than her husband because he was white, and she was not?

Yes, I do.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian anti-colonial nationalist and

spiritual leader, believed that Europeans were the most civilized of the
races and that Indians were almost as civilized as Europeans and
Africans were wholly uncivilized.

Perhaps my friend’s mother held similar beliefs.

Nevertheless, I would return to that house and eat at that table again and
again, without further incident. But I would never forget the shot fired
because the wound it left would not allow me to forget. The memory is
lodged in me like the bullet it was intended to be.