The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” – James Baldwin

In November of 2021 10-year-old Isabella Faith Tichenor, a Black middle schooler enrolled in the Davis school district, in Salt Lake City, Utah, took her own life after repeated racial harassment by her classmates. Davis schools, have a history of documented discriminatory practice. The most recent being called out in a Justice Department report in October of the same year. Yet nothing was done. No effort was made to address the concerns of her family and other black families in the district.

Because too many white people still believe that blackness is a curse.

I remember being told this in grade school by a white teacher. He didn’t necessarily support it, but he offered that there was a theory that blackness was “The Mark of Cain”. All of this ignores what we knew even then from the fossil record about human origins, but let’s just stay with the theological/literary aspects of the discussion for the moment.

I don’t recall mentioning it to my parents, or if I did, what they said.

Frankly, I don’t remember much of a fuss. I’d internalized so much anti-black orthodoxy by that age, it was just another data point.

But I was also a kid that did the reading. Genesis 4:14-15 reads:
“But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.”

I suggested later to this same teacher that blackness wasn’t a curse, but a warning against harm to Cain and his descendants. If this was true, what were we to make of slavery? To his credit, he allowed that America might be in trouble.

There have been some well-meaning white people who, through the years, have attempted to dispel my characterization of the “cursedness” of my skin tone. This is a mistake, because they are operating from the premise that I want to be like them or that I’m “just as good as them” or that my skin color is “equal” to theirs.

As if whiteness is the gold standard.

They are making the same mistake as my aforementioned schoolteacher. Whatever “curse” mentioned in the story of Cain had nothing to do with his appearance, rather it was on those that would do him harm. So it is with the curse of American Blackness. It has nothing to do with me or anyone who looks like me. Rather it is the sense of false superiority that white people hold over me and, most importantly, the way the embrace of white supremacy dehumanizes them to the point that white children could torment a Black child into committing suicide with the apparent tacit approval of all of the adults in their lives.

The curse of blackness does infinitely more harm to white people than it does to Black people.

Link to 2021 article:
Family mourns loss of 10-year-old Utah girl who died following reported bullying https://kutv.com/amp/news/local/family-mourns-loss-of-1