When I was a young girl, I was a tomboy. I hated dresses. Each time my mother made me wear one for Easter, I felt like Ralphie from the movie "A Christmas Story," glumly stuffed into his rabbit costume.
When I role-played as a kid, I pretended I was Indiana Jones, not Princess Leia. I wanted the cool toys geared toward boys, like G.I. Joes and Transformers and guns that shot caps. One year, I dressed up as Dracula for Halloween, Bela Lugosi-style. When my sister got a girl Cabbage Patch Kid, I asked for a boy Cabbage Patch Kid. I had absolutely no interest in playing with a Barbie doll.
In other words, I was gender-nonconforming _ back before that term (and the evolving mindset and acceptance that came with it) came into use. And because I was gender-nonconforming, I experienced hurts and slights that would take a lasting toll.
At that time, I also had short hair. My mother's friend, a hair stylist, repeatedly gave me the same haircut: the Dorothy Hamill wedge. My hair was very fine and prone to tangles, so for convenience's sake, I had short hair for my entire childhood. I didn't have a say in it _ and, admittedly, if I did I wouldn't have known what to ask for.
At the end of eighth grade, I finally grew my hair out.
The reason: For years, I'd been mistaken for a boy _ because of the way I behaved and how my hair was cut. I enjoyed riding my bike and playing with boys instead of girls and getting grass stains in my jeans from sliding on the ground. I did what came naturally.
To clarify, I didn't want to be a boy. I just thought boys' toys and boys' activities were more interesting than girls'. But doing what came naturally came at a cost. I was mistaken for a boy, over and over.
When I would head for the women's restroom, people _ well-intentioned people _ would stop me and say, "The boys' room is over there." And when I would indicate I was going in the right direction, they'd get embarrassed _ but in such a way that I would end up flushed and burning with shame, even more embarrassed than them. I got bullied in school. I was ostracized. I got called names and slurs. One of the worst moments of public embarrassment I have ever suffered in my life was when a speaker in the auditorium of my junior high school called on me after I raised a hand to answer his question. He identified me as a boy, even though I was wearing a pink sweater. There was plenty of laughter. My best friend at the time looked away, as if to distance herself.
Every time I was mistaken for a boy, and every time I got that particular look _ from strangers or my classmates or my parents _ because my not acting like a girl made them uncomfortable, it burned me. Sometimes just a little, sometimes a lot.
Looking back on that time in my life, I think of it as the death from a thousand cuts, figuratively speaking.
No one notices the little cuts, the everyday indignities, that really wear a person down and make her start to hate herself.
I was a tomboy who eventually grew to embrace both her feminine and masculine sides without shame. I love my long, wavy hair. And I curse unabashedly.
I bring all of this up because my own relatively small experience suggests to me that the reason racism (and homophobia and Islamophobia and xenophobia and sexism and fat bias and all forms of bigotry) is so virulent is that it delivers death from a thousand cuts. I can't know the pain all the many kinds of prejudice cause, and of course institutional bias has inflicted deep human suffering, but on a personal level it's all the little cuts that kill. Little cuts that don't necessarily get recorded and don't generate headlines but that happen over and over and over again.
When someone says that a historically persecuted class of people is overreacting to the indignities they deal with because, after all, things really aren't that bad anymore, I think of the thousands of cuts we don't notice, that we will never see. Thousands of little cuts that come from being "different."
Those cuts burn, and they wear people down.
