I gritted my teeth as my hands slowly balled into fists. I was the perfect example of an employee, so why was I being treated so unfairly? I sat behind the concessions counter wiping the same stain for ten minutes reflecting on the previous two hours. I had been captaining the last party on a Sunday night at Bounce. I was working there for about a year and a half, and I got along great with all my co-workers. The last party on a Sunday was always a trial to get through due to pure exhaustion, but I plastered a big smile on my face and greeted the party parents right away. While I was talking to the party mom, I could tell that she was not paying attention to anything coming out of my mouth. Instead, she was letting my naturally straight hair and Mignon Faget jewelry speak for me. To her, I was simply a privileged white girl.

After giving her the rundown of how the next two hours would play out, I let her and her guests into the play area. Forty minutes quickly passed, and it was time for me to start setting up the party room. I grabbed her many decorative bags from the back and brought them in. Per her request, I informed the woman and two of her friends that I was about to start setting up. They wanted to be in the room to make sure everything got done right. Mothers like these were common, so I was not phased by her request. However, once I started setting up, problems quickly arose. As soon as I grabbed the plates, they were ripped from my hands by one of the mother’s friends. I tried to laugh it off but again had the cups taken from me. This occurred about three more times with various items before I started to get fed up. Then I tried a new approach; in the nicest way possible, I asked the mother how I could help her set up the room. The only response I got was, “I don’t want you setting up my room.”  My look of confusion must have been clear because she laughed at me. One of her friends snickered and said to their other friend, “Why would we want a white girl touching our stuff?” This sent the message loud and clear: my race made me an unwanted presence in the room.

Shocked and upset, I backed out of the room and walked up to the front counter with tears threatening to spill over. My manager, Jari, looked up and asked what was wrong. These three words were enough to push the tears over the brim and I hurried behind the counter crying silently. Jari pulled me into the back kitchen where my other co-workers, Ralph and Kayla, were joking around and doing their dishes from their previous party. Their smiles slipped away when they saw me, normally the smiling and good-humored friend, looking miserable. As I recounted what had happened in my party room, their sympathy morphed into anger on my behalf. Jari put me behind the counter for the rest of the night and sent one of my other co-workers into the room. I wiped down the counters and helped with concessions, but I could not shake the clear racism I had just experienced. All this left me with one question: is this blatant discrimination what people of color are forced to deal with every day?

While my incident was isolated to an hour, most people of color are put through this treatment repeatedly. During other shifts at  Bounce, I have witnessed multiple mothers grab their children from inflatables because a small Black or Hispanic child was playing “too close for comfort” to their child. These same mothers, maybe feeling a sense of camaraderie with me because of our shared skin color, would look at me while cracking a smile and whispering, “You can never be too careful, right?” I have been told before that I do not have a good poker face, so I will never know how I got through these exchanges without broadcasting my disgust at their actions. All of these events took place in the Bounce warehouse where the small children playing have already experienced more racist encounters than I have in my whole life. My small confrontation with racism is confined to one hour in my eighteen years of life while other people, some even younger and more vulnerable than I, fight this problem every day of their lives. I can only hope that my one hour of being put down for the skin color I was born with will make me a better advocate for equality and justice in my years to come.