Divya Ramesh | A solution of a different color

When I was in elementary school, the Crayola box of 96 crayons introduced me to the ugly truth of racism.

“You use sienna. We use peach,” one of my classmates told me as we shared the box.

I met her words with hurt silence, wondering for days if Tide bleach worked on skin as it did on fabric.

When it comes to the racism demon, I have been taught to choose between two courses of action: develop a thick skin or sweep it under the rug whenever it rears its ugly head.

Both of these approaches, both forms of denial, don’t work. If they did, the crayon incident wouldn’t flash as vividly as it does in my memory.

In his recent opinion piece in The Chicago Tribune, columnist Rex Huppke agrees that denial is not a long-term solution. As Huppke writes, “I don’t understand why some of my fellow white people have become racism-deniers.” Instead of wrongly touting that racism is over, Huppke suggests dealing with the issue.

It’s not difficult to deal with the racism issue, either. We have an advantage that has come with time, an advantage that we didn’t have in the 1960s. As Huppke notes in his column, “most rational people … can acknowledge that things are better than they used to be, racism-wise.”

The majority of people aren’t racist, but the few apples that are make the whole barrel sour.

If we can no longer grin and bear it, how can we approach the few intolerant people left?

Comic relief might be the new answer. As a more recent run-in with racial prejudice has shown me, there lies great power in making a joke during such an episode.

Last week, on a train home from Philadelphia, I found myself sitting next to an elderly woman who plastered herself against the window and informed me that I made her uncomfortable a total of 27 times over the course of a 45-minute ride (I kept a tally sheet). According to her, abolishing Jim Crow Laws was a mistake, Civil Rights were an unholy sin and “my kind and I” were pollutants in her “perfect society.”

I wondered if she was either drunk or senile, punctuating her sentences with “You make me uncomfortable” independent clauses rather than periods. The only thing that I didn’t catch was her name.

The people around me were stunned by her raving, and one man who himself was Caucasian kept fruitlessly interrupting her insulting tirade while appealing to the fact that he had no issue with me while being of the same skin color as the elderly woman. His pleas of sense fell on deaf ears, and I felt ashamed for instigating a ruckus as I tried to melt into the floor.

I wanted to resort to sweeping the whole incident under the rug, but I soon realized that I had lost my broom. I tried something else.

“You know, wedgies make a person uncomfortable,” I responded, “but you have to deal with them silently in public. Think of me as a giant wedgie for the rest of the ride, and we can spend the next 30 minutes in peace.”

She was silent, and I was sure that the response was not one that she had anticipated. My fellow passengers laughed as the tension eased, and the uncomfortable situation became an anecdote shared in the compartment. Many around me were appreciative of my handling of the scenario, and they voiced their sentiments.

As I have learned, peppering racial tensions with humor combats an uncomfortable situation because it counteracts a negative vibe with the positive lightness that comes with humor.

To say that the train fiasco hurt me any less than did the crayon incident of thirteen years ago would be a lie. But, to say that I felt like a winner in the train scenario would be the honest truth. I have a story to tell now, a story with a strong protagonist and a particularly paranoid and aged antagonist: a story where the laugh of the majority stunned the minority long enough so that she could stop and think.

While we can’t be in Huppke’s racism-denial mode, we also can’t deny that the majority of people in this country aren’t racist. When we’re confronted with and cornered by that minority that is, remembering to joke gives us strength as we hear the majority laugh on our side.

Divya Ramesh is a rising College sophomore from Princeton Junction, N.J. Her email address is divyaramesh20@gmail.com. You can follow her @DivyaRamesh11. “Through My Eyes” runs biweekly during the summer.

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