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My Dad Taught Me to Never Trust White People
He wasn’t right, but he wasn’t wrong either. I’ve been wrestling with the good and bad of his lessons ever since.
It was one of those father and son interactions that never leave you. Sometime in the late ’80s, when I was around 10 years old, I was sitting inside the TV room of my grandmother’s brownstone on Decatur Street in Brooklyn. My face was a few feet away from her 13-inch black-and-white screen. I was immersed in a syndicated episode of Tarzan, the 1960s television show, when my father appeared and snapped me out of my trance, like a hypnotist. He gave me two options: Change the channel or turn off the tube.
I was confused. What was the issue? Had I forgotten a chore? Did Tarzan’s enemy use a bad word? Though I was young, I understood already that any program starring a hobo who swung from trees wearing ragged Daisy Dukes shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Then Dad explained: Not only was Tarzan ridiculous and inaccurate, it was disrespectful and, most crucially, it was racist.
At the time, my father was a fourth-grade teacher and a priest of the West African Akan religion. He had been raised in the same crowded, Brooklyn home where I was watching Tarzan by a single and very Christian mother originally from North Carolina. At 19, a year…
