When I Was A Little Girl I Was Racist Toward Myself And Others

When I was a little girl, I learned racism before I learned what RACISM even meant.

The racism I participated in didn’t come because of an evil lecture or a propaganda warning or a hateful manifesto. It arrived the way racism honestly so often does: in jokes that weren’t corrected, in silences that weren’t questioned, in the small everyday signals that told a child which kinds of bodies were “normal” and which were “different.” And difference ( at  least in the world I grew up in ) was rarely painted as beautiful.

I was a little girl with tan skin, a quarter Mexican, the rest a patchwork of ancestries. My brothers and sister were lighter. Most of my family was white and white passing. When people within the family teased me for being darker, they called it “funny” or “odd,” and I absorbed that message long before I absorbed anything about heritage, history, or pride. Children notice racial differences by six months old… by age three they begin absorbing whatever biases surround them. I was no exception.

So I learned early that the world had a hierarchy, and that I sat somewhere in the middle of it… neither “dark” enough to defend, nor “light” enough to escape ridicule. A child in limbo, internalizing colorism from both sides. No real heritage to cling to for identity or fullness.

When I was a little girl, I sat next to an Indian boy in elementary school. His skin was as rich and deep as the Oreos he loved to chew with his mouth open. I let myself believe the color made him “gross.” Not because anyone told me that explicitly, but because I had already accepted the quiet rules of the world: that darker skin was somehow less worthy. Looking back, I can see the innocence and tragedy of it… I was a child policing another child, in my mind,  repeating a script handed to me without my consent and without my understanding. He offered me an Oreo and I refused because I was somehow forcing myself to be disgusted with him. 

Racism doesn’t always start with a slur.

Sometimes it starts with a child’s unchallenged assumption.

And sometimes it ends with harm.

When I was a little girl, my sister and I did the worst thing I’ve ever done… we hurled racist insults at two Black girls walking home from school. They teased us first (normal kid behavior) but we escalated it into cruelty. We let the generational poison inside us spill out onto children who deserved none of it. The memory has never left me. It shouldn’t.

What hurts most is this: I was not born hateful. I was shaped.

And if I could be shaped, then so could any child.

Parents often believe that if they don’t “teach racism,” their kids will grow up without it. But neutrality is a myth. Research consistently shows that silence does not make children unbiased… silence simply lets the world do the teaching. And the world, historically and presently, has never been neutral.

My grandmother (abusive in nearly every other way) forced us to apologize to those girls. It may have been the only act of moral clarity she ever offered me. Whether she felt it too or not. But we were too young, too ashamed, and too uninformed to repair the damage. The friendship we could have had never took root. Something good was lost before it had a chance to exist.

When I look at my stepchildren now… especially the ones who toss the N-word around like it’s harmless with their bros, I see the same pattern trying to repeat itself. Another generation learning through jokes and silence. Another generation believing “it’s just funny.” Another generation inheriting a wound they do not understand.

When I was a little girl, I learned racism.

When I was a grown woman, I began unlearning it.

I began to see my own skin with softer eyes… the mossy olive green undertones around my veins, the warm flush across my cheeks, the honey and cocoa  in my eyes. I began to see other people’s skin as art, as history, as survival. I began to see how easily beauty can be erased when a society teaches children to fear difference rather than honor it.

To those two girls… if you ever read this, if you remember me at all… I offer the apology I never had the vocabulary to give as a child. You deserved better than my ignorance. You deserved friendship, not harm.

I used to be a racist little girl, toward myself and toward others.

But I am not that child anymore.

And this is the truth I’ve learned as an adult…

Racism is not innate, but healing can be.

Racism is taught, but compassion can be taught and re-taught.

Racism is inherited, but it does not have to be passed on.

I am not fully white.

I am not fully anything.

But I am proof that unlearning is possible, that internalized racism can be uprooted, that a child’s early script does not have to become her lifelong story.

And I am still rewriting mine.