“When I see hundreds of people wonder aloud about clear acts of intimidation, I think of how much of my writing is haunted by self-doubt. My entire life I have been asked to consider if I might be imagining prejudice I perceive, until any decision I come to becomes shaky.”
“I have been writing about Kentucky my entire life. About being racially ambiguous, so that I get to hear the secret black jokes I was never meant to hear, because my boss at White Castle thinks I am Mexican, not black. About riding the bus to my high school, Dixie Heights, which is a 10-minute drive down the same road as the Covington Boys' school, Cov Cath. They were our rivals, and share our mascot: both our teams were the Colonels. I spent every ride with my face pressed against the glass as the kids on the bus called me "dirty Mexican," and asked why my skin was so dirty. One bus carried middle school and high school students together. The age difference made no difference: the middle school children were more than comfortable staring me in the face. Smirking. I spent three years enduring over an hour of questions each day—questions to which no answer mattered. Nobody ever stopped them, not the bus driver or any other student. There were cameras. There often are. But there is no way to convince an audience dead set on the innocence of their children that a smirk can hold weight. Not with the testimony of those affected, not when it is filmed, not when a crowd of teenagers mock a native elder with a dance that reduces his entire culture to a mascot. And if you can convince someone to listen, pray that you have lived the life of a saint, that nothing you’ve said can be accused of inconsistency or emotion. The barest hint of trouble from a man like Phillips, or a brown teenager sitting on a bus, is seen as justification for retaliation.”
