The Women Who Raised Me Never Taught Me to Fear White People

From afternoons with her great-grandmother to confronting racism for the first time, Stephanie Chinn, 59, traces the experiences that shaped her understanding of race, family, and belonging.

This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I can go all the way back to when I was 3 years old. That’s my earliest memory, really, being left with my grandmother and my great-grandmother while my mother went to work and my older siblings were already in school. I was too little for school, so I stayed behind, and honestly, looking back, that was a gift.

I didn’t know it then, but I was in the presence of some seriously strong women. My mother came from those women, and I was a 3-year-old just watching them, soaking it all in without understanding what I was seeing. My great-grandmother prided herself on her lawn. That was a big deal, keeping your lawn right. There was a shortcut through her yard that the neighborhood kids would cut through after school every single day. So my great-grandmother would sit out there waiting with her BB gun. I used to live for that. Here they come, Grandma. Get ’em. Those are some of my best early memories.

I was always with these older women, and because of that, I grew up in a kind of bubble where I thought people were loving and kind and everybody got along. I genuinely did not understand racism yet. My first real introduction to it happened in a grocery store here in Gary. It was a Buy Low. I remember it clearly. My mother was trying to ask one of the men working there a question, and he just ignored her. Kept right on ignoring her. I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but I knew it was wrong. So I spoke up. I said, “Excuse me, do you see my mother? My mother is talking to you. You need to answer her.” All the Black people around us were stunned, like, oh my God, this little girl. But I didn’t know any better. I just knew my mother deserved to be answered. That was my first real lesson that some people were going to treat us differently because of the color of our skin. It hit me hard, because I had never seen it before.

Both of my parents came up from the South, but their experiences down there were very different from each other. My father was a very dark-skinned Black man. My mother was fair-skinned with beautiful hair. Their experiences, even starting in the South, were never going to be the same. My father had stories that showed that plainly. He would tell about riding in the car when they were dating, getting stopped by police, being told where he could and couldn’t sit. What made that story even more complicated is that his father, my granddaddy, looked white. He truly looked like a white man. So within my father’s own family you had people ranging from very dark to very light, and the world treated every one of them differently depending on what they looked like. My mother’s experience was shaped by those strong women, a household of women who taught you to have a strong mind. I got something from both of those lines. Thank you, ancestors.

I was different from a lot of the kids I met there, and I knew it. I had been raised by women who didn’t teach fear of white people. I had a Southern perspective on things, and my reaction to these kids was going to be different from kids who had grown up alongside them their whole lives. By the time I got to Wirt High School, I started watching what was happening and understanding it for what it was: white flight. The white families who could afford to pulled their kids out and sent them to Andrean, Bishop Noll, wherever they could.

My aunt was a big part of why we ended up in Miller. She was one of the first women police officers in Gary, one of five total. Of those five, I believe only my aunt and one other woman, a Hispanic woman, are still living. The rest are gone. I’ve talked to my cousin about getting them some kind of recognition during Women’s Police Week, because they deserve it. My aunt had a beautiful home out here in Miller, probably one of the only Black families on her street at the time. Her house sat up on a hill right near the beach. You could just walk down to the water. 

And downtown Gary in those days, catching the bus with my grandma, going to Kresge’s, sitting at the lunch counter and ordering a burger — oh my God. It was the best thing in the world to me. Those were the days.