Free Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Jane Gilman Page B

the
real
reason why black and Spanish kids beat us up. They’re pissed off. We white people are the biggest assholes in history.”
    I suppose he thought he was enlightening us, but all he really managed to do was to give me a massive stomachache. If I’d wanted to be black or Hispanic before, by now I was pretty much ready to tear off my skin, then run away from it as quickly as possible yelling, “I call ‘Not it’!”
    “Dad, did we own slaves?” I asked my father that evening.
    “Did we own what?” he said.
    “Jerome said that over a hundred years ago, white people owned black people as slaves. Did we?”
    My father shook his head. “A hundred years ago, our ancestors were living in Russia, eating rancid potatoes, and getting chased by Cossacks.”
    “Oh, that’s good,” I said. “What a relief.”
    “Why? What did Jerome tell you?”
    “He said that the black and Puerto Rican kids on the street beat up white kids as historical payback.”
    My father sighed and shook his head. “Sweetie. The reason that black and Puerto Rican kids on the street beat up white kids is because you’re all kids on the street. And that’s what kids on streets do.”
    He folded his newspaper and tossed it aside. “Listen, when I was growing up, the Italians would beat the shit out of the Poles, then the Poles would beat the shit out of the Irish, and then the Irish would beat the shit out of the Jews.” He said this almost nostalgically. “In fact, if there weren’t any Jews around, the Irish just beat the shit out of each other. That’s street life. Come to think of it, that’s history. Someone’s always beating the shit out of someone else. It’s not right, but it happens.”
    “But what about slavery?” I said. Personally, it seemed to me that if someone had made me be a slave, I’d want to beat the shit out of them, too.
    “What about it?” said my dad. “Black people have absolutely no reason to like or trust white people. That’s a fact.
That’s
historical payback. But the world is full of horror and cruelty and distrust. The Irish were starved and treated like dogs by the British for eight hundred years. The Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks. The Jews … Loads of people can make the case. If you start thinking that the kids in this neighborhood are beating the shit out of you
only
because they’re black or Puerto Rican,
that’s
when you have a problem,” said my dad. “Because then you’re not seeing them as human beings. You think that they behave the way they do because of their group, not because of their humanity.”
    “So the girls who poked me at the movies and the older boys who threaten John do so because we’re all human?”
    “Of course,” said my father. “Only humans do crazy stupid shit like that. The day a cow or a Chihuahua hits you in the ass with an umbrella or threatens you with an ice pick, you let me know.”
    That spring, a brand-new playground opened near 100th Street in Central Park. Soft wooden jungle gyms were linked by rope ladders and jute bridges that led to malleable plastic slides. Fat, cushy tire swings hung from redwood frames, and every single structure was set in an enormous sandbox, so that you could swing, dangle, slide, jump, and fall wherever you wanted to and still keep your teeth in your head. It seemed to have been designed precisely as an antidote to the cement proving grounds of our own backyard.
    The day it opened, a whole group of kids from our building went there with our parents. We’d never seen anything like it before—it was a paradise for little maniacs like us—and every other kid living in a two-mile radius of West 100th Street seemed to be there, too. It was the newest, best thing in the neighborhood, and a sign that maybe we mattered.
    One Saturday afternoon, when the playground was filled to bursting, all the tire swings were occupied. There was no time limit, of course, to how long you could be on the swings, and since they