Rebecca Carroll | Growing Up Black in New England

Interview by Joe Keohane

For a time, Rebecca Carroll had a quintessential New England childhood. Adopted into a family where, a friend once exclaimed, “kids are king,” she grew up in the small town of Warner, New Hampshire, in the ’70s and ’80s. Her bohemian parents had left behind the turmoil of urban life intending to establish a utopian one in the country. And by Carroll’s reckoning, they succeeded. Among her earliest memories: climbing apple trees, making mud pies amid the scent of milkweed, eating dinner outside under radiant sunsets, and running around the property at her family’s rented farmhouse in a place called Pumpkin Hill. “Look how lucky we all are,” she remembers her father saying. “Can you believe this?”

There was just one thing: Carroll was Black, and her family was white. And her classmates were all white. And her town was all white. And her state was almost all white. When Carroll was little, the only Black people she saw were on TV, like Easy Reader, the character played by Morgan Freeman on the kids’ show The Electric Company. It wasn’t until later in her childhood that she even met another black person.

Today, at 51, Carroll is a celebrated writer and producer in Brooklyn, New York, serving as cultural critic for the public radio station WNYC and host of the podcast Come Through.* She’s also the author of the forthcoming memoir Surviving the White Gaze, a timely, empathetic, at times shocking, and ultimately hopeful account of her upbringing. The book looks at not only the overt racism she experienced, but also the more insidious effects of good New England liberals—her parents included—failing to understand what it meant for her to be who she was in the place where she lived.

Carroll’s work was particularly interesting to me—a white, Brooklyn-based, New England–bred writer—because I’ve spent the past few years working on a book called The Power of Strangers, which looks at how talking to strangers, especially those who are different from us, can both enhance our own individual sense of well-being and help address some of the thorniest issues facing American society. To my mind, Carroll’s experiences are an example of what happens when we don’t talk, and don’t meet, and don’t try to understand the lives of the other people with whom we share a town, a state, or a country. And her book is a call to try harder.

We spoke on the phone this past September. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

———

Joe Keohane: For starters, tell me a little bit about your parents.

Rebecca Carroll: My parents are artists. They met at the Museum School in Boston, and they were married very, very young and started a family right away. They were idealistic. They were hippies, really. Not in a traditional sense—they didn’t sort of wear their hippiness in a way that would be immediately identifiable—but they were very much leaning toward, you know, Let’s all just love each other, and We can work it out, and Love is the way.

J.K.: They had two biological kids before thinking about adoption. How did you become a Carroll?

R.C.: My father was a high school art teacher and had two students, a [white] sister-brother pair who came from Boston, from a volatile situation in their own family. The sister got pregnant with her boyfriend back in Boston, who was Black, and she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t really have a plan. And my dad said, “Well, we’ve been trying to adopt. What do you think?”

J.K.: He told you that before that happened, he had also considered adopting a Native American child. What was the appeal of adopting a kid who wasn’t white?

R.C.: I don’t know what it was, but my father thought the idea of a child of another race, there was something romantic about it. As an artist and certainly as a white male artist very much of his time, there was an exotification that happened, I think, a sort of otherness that was intriguing. It was a way that he could sort of paint a portrait of his life that included something other that he choreographed, that he pieced together. It feels like the family was curated with my adoption, in a way.

J.K.: Do you think your father’s desire to adopt a Black child was partly about validating his own self-image?

R.C.: Oh, for sure. I think he wanted his life to look a certain way, and he pulled it off. I don’t think it was Machiavellian. I don’t believe it was evil. They’re not the kind of people who were like, We’re doing a good thing for the world. They weren’t white saviors—they didn’t have that complex at all. But they did think of it as lovely, and beautiful, and open, and Look what this could be. And it was really that, for a time. It was truly idyllic.

J.K.: When you were a kid, how early on did your parents address the fact that you were Black?

R.C.: Address it? No. But, I mean, I guess by addressing it, there was my dance teacher. I had a neighbor who was taking ballet lessons in New London, and the teacher happened to be Black. So the neighbor suggested to my mom that I start taking ballet lessons with this woman, without saying to me anything about her being Black. I went to the first class, and I was seeing a Black person for the first time—at 6.

J.K.: You walk in the door, you lay eyes on her—what did that feel like?

R.C.: Well, I was an extremely social child. Just very, very down and game for people. I was always like, Ooh, what’s happening? So little me comes onto the scene, looking around, looking at the other girls. And then I looked over across the room, and there is this statuesque, beautiful, muscular, brown-skinned beauty. And I kept thinking over and over about Easy Reader from The Electric Company. He was my reference point. It was almost like a confluence in my mind, of like, Wait:Is she related?Is he related?Am I related? I just couldn’t process it. But I do remember feeling thrilled, and somehow moved in a way I couldn’t possibly articulate.

That experience, when I reflected on it, prompted me to write a little essay, which I still have on yellowed lined paper: “My name is Rebecca Anne Carroll. I am a black child.” Because I don’t remember anybody ever telling me that.

J.K.: It’s interesting, because your parents had this very old-school liberal idea that we don’t see color, that race is cosmetic, but the experience with your teacher shows that you had a real, pent-up need to encounter people who looked like you. That never seemed to occur to your parents.

R.C.: It never occurred to them. Their intention in adopting was just to bring me into the family, as a member of the family. They were unable to begin to understand not only what an experience like that would feel like, but also what it would prompt in me—this yearning that I couldn’t even put words to. It was so visceral.

J.K.: At the same time I was reading your book I was also reading some essays by James Baldwin, and two of his lines jumped out at me: “Blacks in this country are schooled in adversity long before white people are” and “The children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb.” And I think they stood out to me because your parents, in failing to understand how important race is in America, were not able to protect you from what was coming. You just rolled completely unprepared into being Black in America.

R.C.: Exactly. Did you read the story I wrote in The Atlantic about a near-drowning experience I had?

J.K.: No, what happened?

R.C.: I was about 7. There was this lake that we would go to, a local lake with lots of families. And one day an older girl who was a friend of my sister’s—she would have been about 11—asked me if I wanted to go out to the deep water. I couldn’t swim; I just mostly played around. And I knew that young kids weren’t supposed to go out to the deep end. But I thought it was very cool that she was interested in me. I thought it was exciting, the idea of going out to the deep water. So she had me on her hip, and she carried me out, and when we got to the deep water she dropped me and I almost drowned.

What I did not know until about six months ago was that when she came out of the water, leaving me to drown, she called me a n—-r.

My sister heard it, but she never told me. It didn’t even make it into the memoir because I’d already written it when I found out. That is a testament to living an entire life, and writing an entire memoir, and then discovering that a childhood incident that I thought was just a near-drowning was actually a hate crime. A racist attack.

J.K.: It’s astonishing that no one would have told you about this.

R.C.: It’s pretty mind-blowing. But then I think about all these stories and the knee-jerk response from other people in my family, which is like, Are you sure you remember that correctly?Maybe you’re exaggerating? And how many times I heard that with things that I experienced firsthand.

J.K.: What’s behind that? What are people trying to spare themselves?

R.C.: I think that living in isolation, in small towns—even with beautiful farmland, and nature, and antique shops, and organic things—stunts your growth. It stunts your thinking. It puts you in a kind of cultural holding pattern. That ends up a lot of the time sounding to my siblings like I’m being an intellectual snob. And I’ve really struggled with that, with the value I placed on reading, and conversations, and understanding the way this country works. I just can’t imagine being satisfied in another way. If that makes me a snob, which I’m sure on some levels it does, then so be it.

J.K.: You were the only Black kid in your middle school and high school. What else stuck with you?

R.C.: Um, well. [Laughs.] Notably, Slave Day.

J.K.: Really? Slave Day?

R.C.: It was a time-honored tradition [in seventh grade]. Slave Day was when boys bid on girls, and girls bid on boys, and whoever bid the highest got to make that person their slave for the day—which usually involved some kind of costume or onerous thing to wear—and then also carry their books all day. The boy who bought me was a skier. He put me in a neoprene suit and ski boots and goggles, and I carried his books around. And what really stands out for me in that memory was that I was really pleased that I was bought. Because that was a sign of being popular. If you hadn’t been bought, it was because you were a nerd, or you were unpopular, or nobody cared. I didn’t even take issue with it—but that none of the adults did either is so egregious. [Laughs.] I can’t even believe that that was just fine. It was just: Ah! Slave Day! We love it!

J.K.: In your book there’s a story about your fifth-grade teacher that’s even worse than that.

R.C.: So, my friend Leah was my best friend from birth. And one afternoon at recess, my teacher was on duty, and we went to ask her how much more time we had to play. And she said, “You’ve got a few more minutes. You should be fine.” And then it just—it happened so quickly. She looked at Leah and she said, “You’re a very pretty girl, Leah.” I remember looking at Leah and just thinking, She is. And then the teacher looked at me and she said, “And you’re very pretty, too, for a Black girl.” And then there was this pause. And then she said, “Because most Black girls—ick—very unattractive,” and she scrunched up her face. And I remember thinking, Ooooh, wow, this is not good. Leah and I looked at each other. We didn’t really even know what to make of it. So we just turned around and ran back down to play.

But that was the moment. That was the turning point for me, for sure. It felt like coming out and seeing the tires slashed on your car. Like everything I know about my mobility and my agency has been slashed.

J.K.: You were a popular kid, and you worked to get in with that crowd. But when you even acknowledged your own race, things got weird.

R.C.: That’s right. I was really ambitious. I didn’t want to just be in Warner, New Hampshire, my whole life. I wanted agency. I wanted to taste self-confidence. I wanted to know what that felt like. And because I didn’t have a Black parent to say, “You have to work twice as hard”—which you do—I ended up just doing that, and feeling really resentful about it, but also knowing that it was the only way.

And that also meant if a Black boy came and performed break dancing, and he was so cute and was looking at me, I was risking everything by indicating any kind of alliance with him at all.

J.K.: Tell us about that story.

R.C.:So in the early ’80s, break dancing was the coolest thing. And we had an assembly for this break-dancing crew. The boys were probably 15 or 16, and I was just dazzled. I mean, absolutely dazzled. I was a dancer. I always loved dancing, but I also just felt this connection—very much like I felt when I met my dance teacher. This visceral pull. Like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It was almost like being in a trance.

They hung around afterward, and I was in my little clique with my friends, and this boy I had a very big crush on caught me looking at this cute Black dancer. And he was like, “Ooh, it looks like somebody has a crush.” And I felt like I had been caught doing something criminal, like I had been caught in an act of betrayal, and that this white boy could take everything away from me in one sentence.

So I immediately said, “What are you talking about? I’m not looking at that.” And then I sort of pushed myself against this white boy to make him understand that I would never be interested in a Black boy, and thereby you can continue to not see me as Black.

J.K.: It’s like in that one glance you had violated the terms of the deal.

R.C.: That’s right.

J.K.: And the dancer saw you turn away.

R.C.: He definitely did. We locked eyes for sure. But to me it was like, Where did you even come from? It was like these boys dropped in from somewhere where Black people lived, where I’ve never been, or seen. It was like the gamble wasn’t worth it on many levels. When I was caught looking at him, I knew that I wouldn’t give up the popularity that I had acquired. Because this guy was just going to go away again, and I would continue to be the only one. If there had been a sense of support—even one or two other Black kids who might have rallied around that effort—it would have been so different.

J.K.: After a school trip to D.C. where you spent time with some Black students from another school, one of your white friends snapped at you, “Oh, what? You’re Black now?” Which suggests: What did he think you were before that?

R.C.: These popular white kids decided how they would see me. And that’s the white gaze. Not only did they decide how to see me, but when I decided that I was going to see myself as Black, and asked them to see me as Black, I was met with disdain. It wasn’t even like, “Oh, OK, Beck. You’re Black. Whatever.” It was like, “Why would you want to be Black?”

J.K.: What do you think was behind that reaction?

R.C.:I think they felt betrayal. But I think they also felt threatened, because what does it mean, then, for me to be Black? They have to think about what that means, and all they know, all they can conjure up, are stereotypes. All they can conjure up is what their parents have told them. So if I am Black then I am dumb, or I am likely to steal something from the store, or I am all of these things. Their pool of resources was so limited that it couldn’t possibly be a good thing for me to be Black.

J.K.: When I read that chapter of the book, I started thinking about the idea of tolerance. It seemed as though some of the students you went to school with—even if they were well intentioned—were still like, We’re being tolerant. We’re accepting you. It struck me that tolerance is an expression of power. Like, they can decide to tolerate you. But you, as the one Black student in school, didn’t have that same luxury.

R.C.: No. It’s one of the things I say a lot in conversations with white people, especially white women, and in conversations about feminism, which is: You can choose to not have this conversation. You can choose to not have this kind of awareness at any moment. Even if you spend weeks upon weeks raising your fist in solidarity with Black women and women of color, the next day you can pretend that never happened and go on about your business.

J.K.: Did you gain a special wisdom from existing in two worlds for such a long time? Was it formative in a positive way?

R.C.: Uh [laughs], I am well positioned to deal with white people. I’ve spent a lot of time with white people, as you know. And so I do feel well positioned, so long as I’m able to do it on my own terms, and that there isn’t an expectation that I am like a “white-people whisperer.” [Laughs.]

But to my mind, I survived without being a victim. I survived and was able to emerge with a much stronger voice. And who I am has everything to do with that experience. I’ve had countless white adoptive parents say to me, “Well, what do you want? Do you think they shouldn’t have adopted you?” How could I possibly even begin to contemplate that answer? My parents really loved me, and love me. My mom is all heart. I don’t fault her for that; I fault her for not being a little more “mind.” But her love has been incredibly pure and absolutely unconditional.

J.K.: New England states are among the whitest in the country—particularly New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—but they’re also losing population at a pretty good clip. I’ve been reading the work of UNH demographer Kenneth Johnson, who’s basically said if these states want to sustain their population levels, they’re going to have to attract non-white people. And a lot of institutions are trying to do this, but it’s a struggle. What are your thoughts on that?

R.C.: I mean, good luck. There’s no way to sustain a kind of cultural inclusion if you don’t take down the original tentpoles and really examine what it is that would appeal to Black and brown folks. I feel like with diversity and inclusion initiatives—in education, corporations, whatever it maybe—that you’re still using the managerial tools of a systemically racist culture. The folks in office, the folks who have power, the folks who can make decisions—that has to change first. Which is not to say if New Hampshire suddenly had a Black mayor, I’d be like, “Oh, let’s move back to New Hampshire.” But that’s somebody who can start to address and speak from another vantage point.

J.K.: If there’s one thing that you want New Englanders to take from your book, what is it?

R.C.: Have conversations, unsolicited. Be that person in your family who’s like, There’s a bigger world outside this dinner table. You don’t even have to have Black folks in your life to have these conversations. And really push yourself outside of yourself, and rethink the language that you use, even if you’re watching the news. My mom says a lot, “We watch the news and we see what’s happening and we see these protests.” But it’s not enough to just see it or bear witness. You’ve got to then have some movement in your perspective; there has to be some accountability to yourself and to the people who are in your immediate life.

It really is like, If you see something, say something. I think the trickiest thing for folks in New England is that they don’t see anything. So even if you don’t see the gross injustice, if you don’t see another Black man being killed by police, even if you’re not on social media—this is happening all around you. And you need to sort of examine why it’s just occurring to you now to think about it, and how you’re going to keep thinking about it, and how that’s going to contribute to the betterment of all of us as a society.