Guest column: WHS grad tells of growing up brown

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tony Satterfield, a 2005 graduate of Wayland High School, now is an entrepreneur living in Oregon.

by Tony Satterfield

What has growing up black in America been like for me?

I have mixed heritage, my mother is white and my father is black. I have brown skin. I love my skin, my curly and unruly hair and am comfortable in it as a 33-year-old man. But it wasn’t always that way.

My first experiences with being confronted with my own racial differences that I can remember are painful. Being told that being brown made me weird, and that I was different from the other kids.

Regardless of how much my mother taught me and showed me daily, I was learning from a young age that being black meant that I wasn’t the same as other people from the interactions I had with my peers. I would get picked on for my skin tone, called words I didn’t fully understand with hatred I couldn’t recognize, and would be beaten up constantly.

In short, I was learning the assumption that being black in the world meant you were a target for abuse. And that only got worse as time went on.

I was 11 when being told I was a n****r became commonplace for me.

I was 12 the first time I got followed around a store, just looking around and wondering why the clerk was watching me go down every aisle.

I was 13 when I quit the summer football program I had joined because kids would throw rocks at me and trip me while I ran.

I was 14 when three white classmates attacked me and called me a dumb n****r before breaking my arm in two places. That was also the year I was punched in the face right after 9/11 for “looking like an was Afghani.” That same year, my freshman year of high school, was the last time I expected people to listen or believe me when I complained about violence based on race.

When I was 16, I was punched in the chest and had glue dumped over my head in an art class just for ignoring the taunts and slurs being thrown at me. For not rising to the bait of others, still I found myself injured and humiliated.

I was 19 when my nose was broken for the first time, by a group of drunk white kids at a party in a fight that started because I was brown.

And when I was 23, on my way home from college, I was forced to the ground and drawn on by a police officer for having an Afro and walking home from class. My frenzied shouts that I’d done nothing wrong did nothing for me, and I believed fully in that moment that I was about to be shot and killed for nothing more than being the wrong color at the wrong time. For “Matching the description of a suspect” I soiled myself for the first time in my adult life. I cried for hours afterwards and it was years before I could even talk about it with anyone.

And these are just some of the physical actions taken against me. The verbal, mental and emotional abuse was far greater and left deeper scars than any of the ones tracing my skin or bones. It damaged me in ways that have changed my life, and still brings tears to my eyes to recall.

Feeling powerless. Feeling helpless and unheard. Feeling like a victim.

Most of you who have known me don’t know this, because I don’t talk about it. Ever. It’s trauma, and difficult to wrap your mind around how people could do something like that to another person. And for people who know me, it must be shocking and disheartening to hear. Because I’m genuinely a kind and good-hearted person without a cruel bone in my body.

And that is my point entirely with divulging some of the worst experiences of my life. My biggest crime was having brown skin, and my deepest shame is FEELING shame for it. I hated myself for being born black, and it took years of conditioning to teach myself to let go of that loathing and appreciate the lessons I learned from it.

I’m not as dark as other people, but I’m brown enough.

Brown enough to suffer at the hands of other people just for having parents brave enough to love one another at a time when that wasn’t the thing to do.

Brown enough to feel the effects of racism at an early age and learn understanding and forgiveness for the views of others rather than hatred and indifference.

Brown enough to have injustice hit home and not lash out with anger but try to change minds and hearts with compassion and goodwill.

Brown enough to feel my heart drop in my chest when I’m stopped by an officer and see no one else in sight. To feel that sweat spread across my forehead and know that I will never in the rest of my life have to gauge my words and actions more carefully than I do in that moment.

Brown enough to be so tired. So very tired of seeing people hurt and killed like rabid dogs in the street and their murderers not only walk free, but have people jump to defend their actions as justified.

Brown enough to take a stand and say THIS TREATMENT NEEDS TO END. To support opening a dialogue and asking the hard questions of people. To expect answers and not just prevarication. To stand with my brothers and sisters of every race, creed and lifestyle and say that we, as a HUMAN race, have had enough of the way we treat one another.

See things through the eyes of someone else, see that the victims of racism have a face, a heart and are people you know and love. And if you love them, support their safety. To do anything less means this is too difficult for your life. And frankly, you don’t know a DAMN thing about difficult lives until you try being brown in today’s America.

Racism is real, I have felt it. I have seen how overwhelming and brutal those actions can be when someone allows hatred to override their innate compassion for others. Don’t add to that problem, instead be the solution and take care of your neighbors as if they are your own family.

I have brown skin. I love my brown skin, no matter what anyone else says about it. I also have a family, and friends, and a life I want to keep living for as long as I possibly can. I am a person, and it’s long since past time we all started treating each other as such.