Past Imperfect

- Michelle Sponagle

I COULD HAVE EASILY BECOME A RACIST BASED ON the fact that I grew up in a household where negative comments about other ethnicities were not only tolerated but also normalized. Thankfully, I did not. What saved me from going down that path was a burning curiosity about other cultures that developed early on. It led me to spend my adult life travelling the world and away from the hatefulness that once surrounded me.

I’m not even sure when I became aware that my dad was a bigot, spouting racist comments as regularly as roast beef was served at Sunday dinners. He had something disparaging to say about pretty much every nationality and race, whether Italian, Polish, Asian, East Indian or black. He often presented his views as “jokes.”

As a kid growing up in Hamilton, ON, I clearly remember watching football games on the massive television set in the living room. He’d explain to us that he thought “coloureds” could run faster because the players imagined that they were carrying either a watermelon or a stolen television set. He’d chuckle loudly and then look to me and my mother for validation of his witty humour. And we gave it to him – I didn’t know my father’s comments were wrong and hurtful back then.

I have clear memories of being confused about why he said such nasty things about people. When I was seven or eight years old, my parents nearly hit the roof when I disappeared for a while in a grocery store on the outskirts of Rochester, NY, where we stopped en route to Nova Scotia. After 20 minutes of searching, they found me just a few aisles away. I had met up with an African-American family and chose to join them as they browsed the shelves. In my neighbourhood, there weren’t any people of colour, so I was intrigued. My dad dragged me away by the arm angrily, back to my frantic mother who remembered me saying “But they’re such a nice family!”