Creative Nonfiction

Disproportionate by Morgan Mayo

Before I was born, and even before the birth of my brother, my mother feared his due
date purely out of nervousness and anticipation. It was not her first and it had been three years
since the birth of my sister, but each time is different and this time it was a boy and not a girl. At 9:29a.m. she awoke wondering if my brother would come today or sometime later; eleven hours away on the East Coast, the first plane crashed into one of two identical slabs of concrete and steel. By 10:28a.m. she was in the drive thru getting my sister a treat for breakfast while the
second tower fell. 11:00a.m. fear settles over the nation like the thick blanket of dust in New
York City, and my mother is crying on the couch praying her son is not born today.

Every September the 2,977 lives lost are reproduced like an incessant droning and the
world feels like it is grieving over again. It feels like the dust was never cleared, until eight days
later when my brother blows it away with his birthday candles. Each year, my teachers shared
the event with impressive care as to not share the more complicated issues that spread with the
debris or the sound of the bodies hitting the pavement. When they decided I was old enough to
be told, I pondered the courage and the debilitating grief of coming to terms with realizing
suicide is the best option. I watched videos of the firefighters paralyzed with shock as they
watched shapeless forms fall from the sky and land like wingless angels, too intrigued to turn
around. Either way, those they did not see, they heard, as the sixth loudest city in the nation fell
silent along with its citizens.

I was fifteen when I was introduced to the fact that on that day, people grieved for more
than the loss of life. Turning to face the rubble, they turned their backs on how every Muslim
was blamed for the actions of a few. I could finally recognize how color is the only distinction
here; unless you are white, you are a group that pays for the actions of its individuals. My
teachers preferred sharing death more than racism because death has no privilege, no
preferences; death comes for everyone. Despite the recurring topic, my teachers always prefaced
by telling us the purpose of not forgetting what occurred. We cannot forget because we are
American, but how many Americans forget about people like me?

Sitting in the desks of my private school, I thumbed through a history book as void of
color as my classroom. Not in the sense of black and white, but even pictures printed in color did
not display people of color. Like a recipe, every history book consisted of the same
disproportions except they were measured in pages not cups or teaspoons. Two pages to
summarize four hundred years of slavery; one whole page for a day in September. One page for
Christopher Columbus; half a page for the Native Americans he erased. One whole timeline of
US Presidents but hold the racism and misogyny. Bake at 400 degrees and frost it in red, white,
and blue; this is what feeds a good citizen.

Carefully curated like a for you page, the textbooks tiptoed around controversy and
sensitive parents. They won’t include the assassination of Malcolm X because he was too
violent, but yes Martin Luther King Jr. because he was peaceful enough. Not Emmett Till
because there is no way to spin that, but yes Brown v. Board of Education and Little Rock Nine,
because it was so generous of them to let everyone be able to learn. Not the War on Drugs,
because it disproportionately targeted a certain community, yes, the NAACP because not only
black people helped found it. Not Hurricane Katrina because Louisiana is 67% black, yes
President Obama because it looks like America tolerates other races. Yes, 9/11 because it united the nation, unless you were Muslim. It takes only a skim of the pages to realize “for you” meant
for whites.

For a high school girl to not see herself in the pages of a textbook causes her to wonder
why her past is not worth recording, while her teacher reads the curriculum in silent gratitude
that she is too shy to ask about what is missing in the middle of a classroom where she already
stands out a bit too much. She listens as people choose to make presentations on slavery and
pretend to love her race for fifteen minutes. They get extra points for their outside research on
how braids were used to create escape routes, then sit down and go back to whispering about her
hair.

Junior year, our teacher talks about the first responders and how brave they were for
going into collapsing buildings, unsure if they would make it back out. We discuss the
firefighters who climbed stories weighted down by gear and smoke. A girl in my class raises her
hand. My teacher calls on her and she tells us her father is a policeman; she likes to remind us of
this every once in awhile, God forbid we are allowed to forget. She compares the smoke from the
fallen buildings to the gas used to break up the protesters after the murder of George Floyd, and
the firemen’s bravery to her father’s presence amidst broken windows and angry mobs. I lock my
jaw and stare straight ahead before I am tempted to tell her why there was a protest in the first
place, that an entire race of people fears for their lives; she rambles on about her father and some badge he earned while I think about how brave I am for even sitting here.

This time I sit in Spanish class and realize my emotions transcend classrooms. I have
been learning the language for years now and formed relationships along the way with a culture vastly different from mine. Already certain I want to continue to study the language after I
graduate, and incorporate it into my life and career, I speak with my teacher before class about
which countries he has been to. At this point English and Spanish are the only two classes I feel
confident enough in to sit in the front; my college majors are foreshadowed in that very moment.
We spend a week unpacking racism, and it is fascinating to me to discover yet another culture
left out of our textbooks. I am fascinated by the Cuban connection to Africans, and how some of
them even look like me; I feel seen through seeing them. The lesson on deportation shrivels my
fascination into fury. A classmate talks about the legality of it, how it is justified if they are
illegal. Once again, I bite my tongue and wonder if she knows how her family got here and if she
even knows where they are from. I pack my things as the bell disrupts my anger and the illusion
of belonging that I found here, but I carry with me, to history class, the possibility of being seen.

I am encouraged that other cultures know what it’s like to have curly hair, not for reasons
of vanity but of visibility; I wonder what is wrong with our side of the globe for trying to
convince me I am an anomaly. I digest that what is left untaught does not have to determine what I know and spit out the illusion that my narrative is not valuable. What I have been shown is not what is true, it is simply a reflection of what they want me to believe.

I split my attention equally between what is missing and what is over emphasized; I
choose to benefit from being overlooked. Nobody will notice I am digging at the cracks, and I
am happy to be left unattended. While everyone zones out as the same information is shared in
September, I listen for the pauses and see that each one is a narrative removed. If they will be
intentional, so will I, and my knowledge has become disproportionate to what I was taught. I know other pictures deserve to be printed in color; alongside blazing towers, ought to be pictures
of people with my hair and skin that lived before me and even before the birth of my brother.