How Racism in "A Christmas Story" Relates to My Process to Unlearn Anti-Blackness

(Ed Post note: This article was published in 2019; it has been updated because the topic remains relevant, and Rademacher's points should be read this Christmas.)

Just before winter break, my various timelines were awash with pictures of a young man forced to have his hair cut by a wrestling referee. 

You’ve no doubt read some of the stories and no doubt seen much of the commentary. I don’t see much about it now; it’s been a month, but I don’t want to forget about him. I cannot comprehend what it is to be that boy, to have this awful thing happen with so many people watching, and then to see it amplify and echo across the internet for days after.

Still, I can't stop thinking about him and all the adults in the room with him. I can't imagine why they didn’t do something to stop it. I also, embarrassingly, don't feel sure enough that I would have.

Some want so badly to ignore what it means to cut a young Black boy’s hair like that. Anti-blackness causes us to see his hair before we see him and assumes he’s a problem, a risk, a violation.

Anti-blackness lives in a nasty little part in the back of our brains.

It is the racism that refuses to investigate what sort of lens has been layered just behind our eye, that makes it so easy, too easy, to hold up all these forms of racism while we swear to ourselves and anyone who is listening that we aren’t racist. There’s hardly anything I can do to help the young wrestler, hardly anything any of us can do to make the situation better. However, what we can do, what I can do, is think about the places where this sort of racism, this anti-blackness, has seeped into my practice, my own life, and my community.

I’ve spent a good portion of my winter break thinking about it.

It’s ‘Just’ a Christmas Story, Right?

There’s that scene in “A Christmas Story,” which seems to be so many people’s favorite movie and plays for 24 hours every Christmas.

It’s one of those movies that I feel like I have seen every bit of like 100 times but have never sat through from beginning to end. Still, there’s this scene where the family goes to some racist-ass-named Chinese restaurant where the servers (who are the only other people there) try to sing Christmas Carols and sing “fa-ra-rara-rah” instead of … shit … whatever, you’ve seen it probably, and, if not, you get the point.

It came on while I was with my family. Because I couldn’t tweet about it and was sitting in my in-laws' home for days without my typical distractions, I thought about it a lot—probably too much.

The scene is a moment of supposed humor being broadcast to millions of eyeballs, young and old, year after year because of "tradition" and all that. In most white houses, it is harmless to laugh at but rude to call out. It’s the exact sort of thing that would say, “Don’t take things so seriously,” and “It’s just a joke.”

But it’s also this moment of othering—a message that says there are people not like me, and they wish they were but will only ever be a shallow copy.

Also, (and this is the biggest "also") is that they are simply different, just that different enough from us in how they speak, talk, and eat that the difference makes them funny. But it’s just a joke, right? Surely, it does nothing to the kids when they see the adults laughing at the scene, year after year when we are, we swear, the very last person to be racist, except maybe a little bit when we’re taking a break from all that, and we’re home, it’s Christmas, and we are miles and miles from anyone who looks or sounds like what they’re making fun of. And, "Come on, Tom, it’s just 'A Christmas Story.' Let it go."

Racism is the Water We Swim In

It’s only a moment, but one of a whole mess of moments that have built the nasty bundle in the back of my head and in, I would venture to guess, most of our heads.

The bundle is made of many moments, big and small. It is writers not mentioning race or skin color unless it is something other than white; it's teachers who expect less from Black kids in class while assuming the best about the white kids. It’s all the messages I got growing up that Black people were to be feared and avoided, that they were that much different. 

I’ve been trying to do this reflection better. I’ve kept this piece sitting open on my laptop for a week, mostly written, just waiting for a list of personal and detailed times that I’ve fallen prey to the racism inside of me. I wish it were that easy.

As much as I was taught racism, I was taught not to see it, certainly not in my own actions, my own words, certainly not my own teaching.

The easiest examples were those I’d spent the longest seeing and addressing, and I didn't want it to sound like it was all behind me.

In my classroom, I’m still apt to see Black boys as behavior concerns and Black girls as less capable. Professionally, I am less likely to assume intellectual study of Black colleagues and more likely to assume “natural” talent. Mind you, these are things I know live in my head that happen pre-consciously, and I do my best to recognize and unlearn them (and have only thousands of personal lived experiences to work against them).

But I know that when I’m not doing my work and staying focused, those ideas can easily slide back into place, and I know I have a lot more work to do.

Racism is the water that we swim in, and there’s no way I haven’t swallowed some after years in the "pool." This is why reflecting on racism, on our racism, is not the singular act of a free afternoon. It is a process of unlearning. I can keep trying, I must, because there are kids out there, like the young wrestler, being hurt every day by the adults in their lives who don’t see them through clear eyes.