Author: A. Martinez

Containers; Objects Used to Control or Restrain

My last name is Martinez, but I’m a “White” girl. I can check off the Hispanic box, yes, and I am Hispanic in ancestry, sure, but it wouldn’t be fair to call me a Latina. Having a last name that screams Hispanic, but growing up in a 99% White community and not speaking a lick of Spanish myself, I used to feel like the container they built for me needed to be two containers really. I couldn’t fit neatly into one container, at least according to the kids at school with last names like Smith and Tobin who used to ask nine-year-old me: 1) Where is your sombrero? 2) Does your dad mow lawns for a living? 3) Are you related to Tino Martinez?

I focused on this a lot in my youth and it’s probably why I have been so interested in race for so long. Those stereotypical comments really only happened when I was in elementary and middle school and in reality, I always passed as White (although I didn’t realize this was a thing until reading Nella Larsen’s Passing in 2010). However, I’ll admit I focused so much on my own struggles with race that I never actually considered the privilege I was cloaked in, my White body. Reflecting now, my two warring selves were nothing compared to the “two warring ideals in one dark body” that DuBois writes of. I always recognized my privilege – my middle class suburban family and upbringing, but I never thought about my White privilege – that is the privilege that comes with White bodies. It probably wasn’t until my first session at the Adelphi University Diversity Training in September 2019 and the awareness activity that the session began with that I truly began to grapple with the idea of how our different colored bodies are perceived in society – and it’s so much deeper than the “bad is Black” effect. 

The awareness activity asked the group of Sewanhaka teachers: When was the first time that you realized that you were White? Immediately, I was brought back to second grade when I moved from Huntington (mixture of races) to Commack (predominantly White) schools. In second grade, yes, I learned having that -ez on your last name makes you different. But, years later, through this book club run by Mr. Dougherty, and through one particular text, I have begun to understand so much more about race and perception and physical presence in American society – and about the safety and security my own White body has given me throughout my life.

Of all of the texts that we’ve encountered in our Book Club, Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste is the text that stuck with me the most. We tackled this piece through Oprah’s Book Club Podcast, which in eight different episodes highlights the “pillars” that Wilkerson aptly surmises as the strengths that have fortified and upheld the American caste system. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the discussions between Oprah Winfrey and Isabelle Wilkerson, but I knew that I needed to read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent myself. I am grateful I did because it taught me so much about American society, the caste system that our society continues to uphold, and demonstrated to me how the oftentimes unintentional instances of racism that we see throughout our days are actually the root issues that keep people of color oppressed in this country. 

The chapter which served as my personal a-ha moment, in which I felt like so much that was like wet cement in my mind – cement that had imprints, ideas, markings, and unfinished mixings – finally became solidified cement I could stand on, was “The Container We Have Built for You.” Wilkerson writes: “A White porcelain sugar bowl sat between us on the table. She swept her hand over the top of the bowl. “I find that White people are fine with me,” she said, “as long as I stay in my place. As long as I stay in the container we have built for you.” She tapped the side of the sugar bowl, gentle insistent taps. “As soon as I get out of the container,” she said, lifting the lid from its bowl, “It’s a problem.” She held the lid up to the light and then closed it back in its place.”

It is here where Wilkerson recounts the story of an elder and begins to solidify for me the idea that so much of everyday racism is making assumptions about where people should and should not be. And when we allow those assumptions to drive our beliefs about people and where they do and don’t belong, we cause varying degrees of harm, from derogation to murder. Then, Wilkerson details her own experience early on in her career as a national correspondent for the New York Times. In short, a retail shop owner in Manhattan refused her when she showed up with pen and pad in hand for their 4:30 PM interview because she was Black and he did not believe her to be the reporter working for the famed paper. Wilkerson recounts of her experience: “His caste notions of who should be doing what in society had so blinded him that he dismissed the idea that the reporter that he was anxiously awaiting and excited to talk to, was standing right in front of him. It seemed not to occur to him that a New York TImes national correspondent could come in a container such as mine, despite every indication that I was she.” Wilkerson wouldn’t tell us what retail store in Manhattan denied her the interview and she shared her reasoning: “…because of our cultural tendency to believe that if we just identify the presumed to be rare offending outlier, we will have rooted out the problem. The problem could have happened anywhere. Because the problem is, in fact, at the root.”

This, along with her story about being harassed through an airport by D.E.A. agents genuinely made me reflect: was there a time when my physical presence was so unaccepted in a space? And in all honesty, those moments in second grade didn’t even surface. What surfaced was the time when I was a college freshman in New York City having to take the subway to Harlem for the first time and having absolutely no idea what I was doing (and only having my NYPD father’s preconceived notions about Harlem in my mind). Somehow, I figured out how to take the subway line uptown and I got off at the 125th Street stop because that was closest to the school where I was going to do my first student observation hours. I got up the stairs and there were what seemed like thirty Black men at the top of the stairs. I noticed the cross streets were Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Malcolm X Boulevard and I realized that I have never been around that many Black people before in my life. One of the men came up to me, told me I didn’t look like I was from around here, asked me if I was lost, and safely walked me to the school destination. In that moment, I was welcomed and embraced by a complete stranger in a neighborhood that was not my own. The moment after reading “The Container We Have Built For You,” I cried when that memory surfaced. Considering the deaths of young Black men and women that has seemed episodic since Trayvon Martin in 2012, I realized that my White body also brought with me the privilege of safety that September 2006 day, and on many other days. So, so many times, Black bodies don’t make it home to their families whether it’s because they weren’t “supposed to be” taking the shortcut that way after getting a candy bar or because they weren’t “supposed to be” jogging through that neighborhood.

Because of the way my body is perceived in American society, I wasn’t seen as a threat in that moment – or usually ever. An outsider, yes. A person out of place, yes. But not that I didn’t belong. It wasn’t that I wasn’t welcome. There weren’t any negative assumptions about me being there. My privilege allowed me to enter and take up that space and leave and return safely. I know that cannot be said for so many young Black men and women. I began to realize how much of perception is based on assumption and how much those assumptions can influence the experiences of people of color in American society. 

Wilkerson discusses this idea with regards to the workforce in her chapter “Occupational Hierarchy.” This, compounded with “The Container We Have Built for You,” clearly explains the “delineation of occupations… on the basis of what one looked like” from generations ago that are so subconscious in people’s minds in this country today. Wilkerson writes that “people who looked a certain way were restricted – often by law – as to what they could do in society… people were essentially tied to the land as sharecroppers or in what we would call the ‘servant class.’” Making clear the ramifications of being sequestered to the labor industry for decades, Wilkerson explains how this established the occupational hierarchy in the American caste system we have in 2022. 

Then, I began to see instances of this occupational hierarchy everywhere I looked or upon reflection. A photographer from the Yearbook company was at Elmont to photograph senior athletes. One of our Black teachers walked into the Library and the photographer asked, “Sweetie, are you ready for your photo?” Did she assume a Black person could only be a student, not a teacher? I didn’t know if I was reading into it, but it felt like a subconscious example of occupational hierarchy.

All summer long my fiance would tell me about the new hires at his job as a utilities locator. Consistently, the Black locators were harassed about being on the properties of homeowners, questioned to the ninth degree about their qualifications and identification, all while using company equipment and driving a marked company car. Did these homeowners think these guys were creating an excessive ploy to rob their homes or did they just assume they couldn’t be utility workers because of the container they had built for them?

All summer long, a man at the farm that I volunteered at assumed that the Black man he was meeting in a Manhattan bakery to pick up pies bi-weekly at 5AM was the custodian of the facility. He comes to find out on his last pie pickup that the man is the owner of the Little Pie Company. Yet another example of someone’s ingrained enforcement of occupational hierarchy.

An acquaintance of mine asked if my school would want to participate in this letter writing program that pairs kids at schools like Northport with kids at schools “like Elmont.” He proceeded to say the program was for the neediest, toughest schools, and made assumptions about Elmont because it is a “Black school.” This educator didn’t realize his assumptions about my student’s and their parent’s socioeconomic status based on their race was reinforcing ancient beliefs related to occupational hierarchy.

Working on an “Encyclopedia of African American Women” project with one of our English classes, I showed a clip from the film Hidden Figures. I wanted the students to know about Hidden Figures because it’s a perfect example of what we had been discussing all week – those names we should have known for years, but most of us only learned recently when someone finally chose to honor them. In the scene, Dorothy Vaughan is looking at the computer, fills it with some paper, presses a couple of buttons, and it starts printing out numbers. Two White men come into the room and one aggressively asks her, “Hey, what the hell are you doing? You can’t be here. Who are you?” as if because she was Black and a woman, she had no business working with the NASA computers. We discussed this while watching, but it wasn’t until putting this post together a week later that I realized that this was an on-screen example of reinforcing occupational hierarchy – and one that systemically kept women from succeeding in this field, or when they did, prohibited us from learning their names and allowing us to praise them for decades.

My point with all of this is that I learned a great deal through the reading of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. I wholeheartedly agree with Wilkerson; there is a caste system in the United States. The caste system is being upheld by systemic racism that has occurred in this country for centuries. And currently, with what seems like a war on Black bodies in America, it took reading this text to realize that the scenarios that end fatally for our young Black men often begin with assumptions that those men just don’t belong there, aren’t from this neighborhood, couldn’t possibly work here, etc. It’s going to take a huge mindset shift – an overhaul of perspectives and a shattering of subconscious ideas we have like imprints in the wet cement of our minds that was solidified years ago. 

We need to work harder to show our scholars that they too should see themselves, their skin color, reflected in leadership positions – they’re not subject to the servant class and no one should ever perceive them as such. One would hope that with the first Black woman Vice President elected that the ingrained beliefs about occupational hierarchy can begin to be invalidated. We need to lay down a new foundation and let it be untouched by society’s stereotypes, beliefs, and generational trauma put on the Black community. We need a sturdy foundation before we allow any one group within this country to build higher. We need new pillars to be erected – not the pillars of heritability, occupational hierarchy, inherent superiority, etc. – that creates a solid foundation for the American caste system. We need to stop putting people into containers other people built for them centuries ago.