“Antiracist Baby is bred, not born… Antiracist Baby is raised to make society transform…” I said, blinking to realize I was standing in front of one of my classes in Mugar Memorial Library. Twenty-one twenty-one year olds stared blankly back at me. I wiped my forehead to find quite the damp spot. I coughed a little. “Excuse me.”
I made my way to the cramped bathroom and splashed water on my face. I didn’t know what was going on, my thoughts weren’t making sense. “Come on, Kendi, you blacked out there. Blacked out,” I thought, thinking of the racism baked into the very foundation of idiomatic English. “Wow, how about that…blacked out—as if to implicitly suggest that black people act without thinking…” I was coming back to myself. I smiled, took a few quick, deep breaths, gave myself a good, firm, wet slap. “Now what was I doing in that classroom… right, yes, for some reason I thought it was last week again, and I was back in that Roxbury preschool classroom, reading my first picture book. That’s never happened before. What’s going on with me?”
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