22

DEAR MOUTH

On occasion, you’ve gotten me into real trouble. Sometimes you’ve spit out utterly the wrong words. But I am not racist. Never have been, or will be.

The first time I ever heard the N-word was my first day of school in America. I was in second grade. As per usual, I didn’t fit in with anyone, and as I bumbled through my day, overwhelmed by being a new kid in a new school in an entirely new country, someone called me the N-word.

Though I could tell it was supposed to be an insult, I didn’t actually know what it meant. Not only had I never heard the word before, I had never even been exposed to the concept. I decided to ask Mum about it as soon as I got home. I remember it so clearly. We were moving into our house in the Pacific Palisades, and Mum was decorating the house, so everything was MacKenzie-Childs. There were checkerboard teacups and decorative fish adorning the headrests of our dining room chairs. She and I were standing on the steps outside, when I said, “Mum, I have a question. What does n— mean?” The word wasn’t even out of my mouth before her hand whipped up and slapped me on the arm.

“Don’t you ever say that word again,” she said. My cheeks turned as red as her hair. The look on her face at that moment was one of total shock, and she was looking at me like she didn’t even know me. I burst into tears and immediately ran upstairs to my room. I had no idea what I’d done, but I knew I’d rarely ever seen Mum that mad before.

Shortly thereafter, I think she realized that I must not have known what I was saying, because she drew me a bath and knocked on the door of my room to apologize. “Where did you learn that word?” she asked. I told her that was what someone at school had called me.

The more she explained what it meant, the more confused I got. Why had they called me that, and furthermore, why would they call anyone that? It didn’t make sense to me that someone could dislike someone else for something that they were born as and couldn’t change about themselves. Not liking someone because they acted like a total cunt—that I understood. Not liking someone for the color of their skin was ridiculous to me. I’d never heard of it before. The whole idea made me sad and filled me with questions and confusion.

Mum must have realized that, because she spent the rest of the day talking about it with me and trying to explain to the best of her abilities. We finally got to the point where Mum couldn’t answer my questions anymore, and later that week, she had me watch Roots. If that miniseries was supposed to clarify anything, it didn’t. “Why did Kunta Kinte get put on a ship and taken away from his home and his family to go be with people who didn’t like him?” was what I wanted to know. This very quickly became an obsession for me. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Martin Luther King Jr. and did my first report at this same new school on him. This was the only way I knew how to tell the other kids in my class that I thought what they were saying was wrong, without fighting.

America is an advanced country in so many ways, but I think it still has a long way to go when it comes to treating people equally and recognizing racial differences and equality. When I see so many white people who don’t check their privilege and open their eyes to the fact that the world is rapidly shifting to one that no longer revolves around them, it actually makes me feel embarrassed to be white.

No one has any control over where or how they grow up. It’s not like we ask to be born in a certain place or at a certain time. I realize that skin doesn’t get any whiter than mine, and I was lucky to come from a privileged background. It sickens me to even say that something like my background is lucky, because what I am truly lucky for is that I have always had the ability to see people for people. When you meet a new person, don’t think, Oh, this is a black person or a white person or a Hispanic person or an Asian person. Instead, think, This is a person. I wonder what I have in common with them. If you approach any interaction from that point of view and treat people as individuals, then you will probably be surprised at how easy it is to find common ground with every single person you meet.

One of the lowest points in my career, and a time when my mouth got me in trouble in a real way, was when I was on The View and something I said got misconstrued.

I was very comfortable around the other women on The View. Raven-Symoné is one of my best friends, I’ve known Whoopi for years, and Rosie has been a good friend to me for a long time. I was very used to having frank, real conversations with them about race. This particular time, we were in the midst of discussing then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s appalling views on immigration. This was right after he’d called undocumented Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, and in trying to defend the Latino community, my first mistake was to do what I always do, and fall back on sarcastic humor. I began: “If you take all the Mexican people out of America, then who is going to clean your toilet . . .” Before I could finish the comment, Rosie was instantly and rightfully offended. As the only Latina on the panel, it is her right and responsibility to defend her community. She reacted badly to the comment, as she should, but she also realized that in the heat of the moment—brought on partially by the severity of the topic and partially because of the way The View segments are meant to be conversational and rapid-fire (otherwise, no one would get a word in edgewise) I didn’t mean what I had said in the way that it came out.

By that time, the racist ship had already sailed and I alone was to blame for that. I don’t blame people for how they reacted to me, because I know what I meant and what I wanted to say, but all they heard was a sliver of my intentions that, taken out of context, was completely and utterly offensive.

This incident resulted in an outcry of people calling me racist, and I don’t think that I have ever felt worse. It hurt my soul to the core of my being more than words can describe. Call me fat, call me ugly, call me a bitch and I could truly not give a fuck, but a racist is the furthest thing from who I actually am. The sensationalizing of my comment not only hurt me but hurt an entire community of people. To be misunderstood in this way hurt so much, mostly because in reality, a lot of my friends are Latino and in fact, the reason we became friends is because their households and the traditions therein are more similar to mine than any of the white friends I grew up hanging out with in America. It’s been a year since that appearance on The View, and I still find myself apologizing.

In the end, I learned an important lesson about exercising more caution on live TV. More important, the silver lining is that my offensive comment sparked conversation and educated people on the hardships of immigrant life in the United States.

Britain may have invented colonialism, but America invented racism, and it’s still shocking to me that a country that was built by immigrants is now so intent on keeping them out. I know firsthand that the joy you experience when you get your green card is almost indescribable. I cried when I got mine, because it’s a symbol of acceptance and belonging. You finally know you can work, and that you no longer have to worry about being taken away from your family. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing, and America should be honored, not scared, that so many people want to move here and build their lives. Immigration is the true American dream, and now it’s being turned into an American nightmare.

I grew up in a country with a lot of Muslims, and one of my best friends, Omar, is Muslim. We met at a time in our lives when we were both starving for knowledge and ready to suck up as much of it as we could. Omar taught me a lot about the customs and culture of Islam, and now I get so angry about the way people talk about Muslims. While ISIS is busy chopping people’s heads off, the rest of the Muslim community around the world is spreading peace and harmony.

I’m grateful that I was exposed to so many different cultures and types of people when I was growing up and throughout the different stages of my life. I was taught that ethnicity, religion, and sexuality were all beautiful things. It’s 2017—racism doesn’t have a place in our society anymore. Prejudiced beliefs don’t serve a purpose and only hold people back. If you’re racist, then I actually feel sorry for you, because your worldview is warped in a way that will always cut you off from new people, new cultures, and new experiences. If you judge someone by the color of their skin—or by any other facet that they have no control over—then you’re not hurting them, you’re only hurting yourself.

If you’re not a racist, good for you, but that’s not enough. You still have to stand up against discrimination. That means calling out people who make stupid comments (or idiots like me who make them accidentally) even when it doesn’t affect you personally.

One time I was on a flight when one of the attendants came up to me right as I was settling in. “Before I get too crazy busy,” he said, “I want to say that what you did and why you left Fashion Police says so much about you, and I’m so proud of the person you are, because not many people would do that.” (For those of you who don’t know what he is referring to, I’ll first say that enough chaos has already been stirred up and more than sufficiently publicized about this incident. The important thing to note is that he was referring to a time that I didn’t put my foot in my mouth and stood up for my beliefs against what I had perceived as a racist comment.)

Deep down, I always knew what that situation was about—not me fighting with a particular person but me standing up for what I believed in—but I often felt as though that got lost in the media spin. Speaking to this flight attendant let me know that people were paying attention, and I knew that even if this man was the only person in the whole world who felt like that, it was still worth all the shit I had to put up with.

I pray every day that the next generation and those to come will never know from racism. I truly believe that discrimination is fading in our generation, however slowly, and this makes me optimistic. Still, it doesn’t hurt to hurry it along. And maybe even kick it in the ass on its way out the door.

Love,

Kelly O