My Childhood on Creepy Santa’s Lap
He was my version of clowns, a symbol of jolly that scared the hell out of me.
Santa Claus and I have a weird history. I’m not sure I ever actually believed in him, but he didn’t need to be real to leave me feeling some kind of way.
As a kid, I spent a bit of time on the laps of White men who were pretending to be him, and although I usually smiled for the camera, I was never altogether comfortable sitting there. When I look at pics of me with those White Santas, I often wonder what they were thinking about the chubby little Black boy perched on their lap.
A lifetime of racism has ruined a lot of things for me, including my early memories of those real-life Santas. I now reconsider them through the prism of my grown-up racial awareness. Kissimmee, Florida, was not a bastion of racial harmony in the ’70s, and it’s not a given that race ceased to matter when those White men put on the Santa suit. Despite Megyn Kelly’s insistence that Santa Claus was a White man, a few Black Santas might have made all the difference in the world to me then — and probably would now, too.
Even without race coloring my view of Santa as a child, I still was somewhat unsettled by the way he was portrayed both in the media and by real-life men. He was my version of the clown, a…
