Cah-Cah!

On a wintery Lake Tahoe New Year’s Eve, a few months after two planes hit the World Trade Center and the country was experiencing a particularly heightened moment of unity, the kind of commrodery that made my very dark skinned brother announce, “Suddenly I’m not so Black, we are all just Americans, people are looking at me in the eye and nodding at me like I am one of them,” I was standing outside a bar freezing my mittens off when a group of three 20-something white men smoking a short distance across the parking lot started crowing at me.  I knew what it was because some guys in a convertible did it to my mother and me as we walked into our Brentwood home in Los Angeles one afternoon after school.  “Cah-cah!”  As if there weren’t enough insults a person of the lightest hue could hurl at a person of a darker hue, here was another.  My mother explained that it was something “stupid white boys like to do to Black people.”  Upon witnessing the men “cah” in our direction, my friends, all white, were confused but oblivious.  I explained.  “That’s not a real thing,” they said.  “You're being too sensitive.” So much for unity. Happy Black History Month.