Quick Hit: The most racist thing that ever happened to me

At The Atlantic, Touré asked a number of prominent African Americans about the most racist thing that ever happened to them. Skip Gates, the Harvard professor whose 2009 arrest led to the famous “beer summit” at the White House, tells a stunning story about how dominant perceptions about a Black person’s “proper place” led to lifelong medical complications:

In 1964, in West Virginia a fourteen-year-old Henry Louis Gates Jr. broke his hip and went to a doctor who x‑rayed his knee, which was also in pain. The doctor saw nothing wrong with his knee and deemed his pain psychosomatic. “He said that I had a nervous breakdown because I was an overachiever,” Gates said. “He said colored people weren’t supposed to do as well as I had done. I had been stressed out and there was nothing wrong with my knee. White guy thought I was imagining things. And that’s why I walk with a cane and I’ve had a dozen operations since I was fourteen.” Gates remains bitter about the whole thing. “I hope that motherfucker’s burning in hell.”

It’s a must-read, and you can read the rest here.

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Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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