Member-only story
Beliefs in the Time of COVID-19
“We don’t think your daughter will fit in here,” the Brownie leader told my mother.
I stared up, clutching the permission slip the leader had just given me for the camp next weekend. What had changed?
As an eight-year-old, I looked like a white girl. My mother is visibly olive-brown. Despite being in a stable western country, in the middle of the Gulf War the Brownies didn’t want “that sort of person” near their group.
I had a privileged upbringing, an excellent education in safe, stable countries. My exposure to racism was secondhand, consisting mainly of watching how people treated my mother.
I knew war and poverty were Very Bad Things because my schoolteachers told me so, but Very Bad Things didn’t happen in my world. That meant they weren’t real. Until, of course, they were.
The broken glass glinted in the sun. The little boy, no more than eight, showed off his English. He described what had happened to the previous occupants of the burned-out house.
“Doesn’t [your religious book] say you’re not supposed to kill people?” I asked, my throat dry.
He shrugged. “They weren’t people, they were [another religion].”
I stared at the little boy, nodding with his friends. What could I say to that?
