FamiLee Life has a post up titled “Cross Burnings: Childhood Reflections.” Dr. Lee writes as follows:

When I was around 11 years old, I remember waking up one cold, winter morning on a school day. I opened the door to get the newspaper and saw a black cross stuck in the snow in our front yard. There was snow on the ground, so the cross was a stark contrast to the white lawn. I closed the door and told my dad. He removed the cross, putting it in the garage. I was in elementary school and the school was within walking distance. I recall walking with my neighbor, Pete, to school and seeing in horror that the whole front lawn (which was a small hill) had stamped in snow words like “Go Home” and “Chink”. I was horrified and ashamed. I remember just hoping and praying that Pete and the other neighborhood kids would not see these words, glaring in the morning sun.

He continues:

Then, a couple of years ago, I was having a conversation with my brother Martin and he brought up the subject. I stopped him in mid-conversation and said something like “Wait, you remember the cross burning too?” He did and I told him that I started to think I had imagined it. For so many years, I had kept silent that I started to doubt my own memory.

I’ve written about “forgetting” before. And I think this firmly and thoroughly rebuts the notion that people of color are looking for racism and that they want to cling to playing the victim. But the silence that Dr. Lee mentions is much like the silence that my own family kept for years and years after racist incidents that left family pets dead. My father cleaned up the mess and we just didn’t talk about it. And sometimes I, too, wondered if this event were just some sort of distorted memory that I’d somehow conjured up.

Reading others’ experiences of racism doesn’t make me feel better in one sense, because it is hard to know that people you value have been hurt and will be hurt in such a manner. But on the other hand, reading that such incidents happened to people you know did not deserve abuse (not that anybody deserves abuse) allows me to externalize some of the events in my life. Because in the absence of such knowledge, the belief continues that this is my fault because I am inferior.