Embracing My Blackness

Most of my childhood was spent in small-town eastern Pennsylvania suburbs with my white mother and white-passing older brother. I was one of the only Black people in my community. My experience, although painful, I recognize is minor compared to some injustices often faced by Black people with darker skin color. Growing up, I was often teased, bullied, and treated poorly because I looked different. It has taken me over 20 years and a genetic test proving my Nigerian ancestry to begin to love my blackness and accept myself against the negativity that has been so normalized throughout my life. I finally had some answer to the question I didn’t understand growing up and learned to hate as an adult: “What are you?”

As a child when you get asked this question, you do not know what kind of answer to give. I was a student, a girl, a cheerleader, a sister, a daughter. I learned what they were really asking was “Why do you look different?” And as a child I didn’t have an answer. My dad had a skin color similar to mine, but my parents had been divorced since I was a baby and most kids only knew my mom and my brother. I was constantly explaining my skin color and my curls like I was a museum exhibit with an exotic background. It was not only other children that asked me this question; plenty of adults have asked me what I am, what languages I speak, why I don’t have an accent, and have made random assumptions about my ethnicity. It got to the point in my late teenage years when I would just agree with people’s guesses. Whatever it would take to change the conversation. I never understood why it mattered so much for people to know this information about me or why none of my white peers were ever asked the same questions.

When I was young, I would see random Black families (never in my hometown) and think to myself, What if that is my real family? How different would my life be growing up with them compared to life with my mother? As an adult reflecting on my past memories, I realize this was me recognizing my own white privilege. I was told the town I grew up in was safe and people could trust each other. It was a town where people could leave their front doors open and knew the police officers on a first-name basis. I recognized by the way my mother locked the car doors, or gripped me and my brother closer, that we were to feel more afraid when out in other cities where there were Black people. I would think about the schools and people I would know being totally different from my own and felt lucky in my circumstances. There was such a disconnect and a feeling of “us and them” and an inherent fear along with it that taught me racism is not always just words. I realized someone’s actions can be just as hurtful as their words and sometimes even more so.

I remember I was in elementary school the first time realizing my skin color was a problem for some people or made them uncomfortable. A boy I had a crush on told me that he liked another girl because they looked better together. They were both white, with beautiful blue eyes and shiny blond hair. I remember feeling like I wasn’t good enough for him or any of the other white boys. We were young, but interracial couples were not something many children or adults in that area were familiar or comfortable with. In middle school my hair became the focus of the conversation. It was big, curly, frizzy, unmanageable, and usually wrapped up into a hair tie to control it. It didn’t fit into the tiny squares of the yearbook pictures, and people noticed. “Your hair is bigger than you are!” “Can you even brush it?” “Why is it so frizzy?” Friends would try to get a brush or comb through it when it was dry, even though I begged and told them it would only make things worse. Girls would tell me to straighten my hair or that they would do it for me, as if I should be grateful that they wanted to make my hair “better.” My hair took multiple hours to straighten, and girls would get bored after an hour and then continue to tell me it’s still super frizzy and doesn’t look right. It didn’t help that my boyfriend of the time told me he liked my hair straight better; it felt again like who I was naturally was not good enough.

The feeling of having to monitor my blackness did not just come from strangers or children who did not know any better. During summer months when the Pennsylvania sun was hottest, my mom would say what she thought were compliments, saying she wanted to get as dark as I was, while at the same time telling me not to sit in the sun too long because I would get too dark. It was my own mother who first told me not to wear hoops because they made me look ghetto. She has always told me that she always wanted a little brown baby girl with lots of curls, and as comforting as it is to know my mom loves me, a part of me always felt a little bit like a trophy.

Being a cheerleader was one of my first joys, but somehow my race affected even this aspect of my life. Cheerleading coaches have forced me to straighten my hair in order to perform at the all-star level with the other girls, causing me to miss multiple team bonding events. My senior year of high school, my team all decided to braid our hair. We all had the same braids and uniforms, but I was the only one who was told I looked “ghetto.” Even my physical talents in tumbling or for jumping I was told were only because I was Black and being physically fit was in my genes.

I was always being extra cautious to make sure I was white enough to fit in and not doing anything “too Black” that would make me stand out even more. My whole life of people asking to touch my hair or feel it like I am some sort of exotic animal quickly became exhausting. This self-censoring plagued my childhood and unfortunately followed me to college, which had a negative effect on my experience. My college years were marred by my own previously learned discrimination from what I had grown up around. There were more Black students at the school I went to than I had ever been around before. I felt like I was too white around Black people, and around white people I always felt too Black. At the time I was struggling with my self-identity and was not sure where I fit in with any culture.

I am and have always been nice, generous, and friendly to everyone. This is who I am, but I also believe I behave this way because I’ve always tried to be seen as acceptable according to other people’s standards, and try to get the same level of respect automatically afforded to my white peers. Even so, I was still gas-lighted and told racist treatment was just “kids being kids,” or that they were “just joking” and that I needed to “grow thicker skin.” As I got older and more upset by this disparity, though, my defenses went up. I was defensive, and I became more closed off to people. I preferred a small circle of people who I felt did not judge me. This resulted in my mother and some other friends with whom I was close failing to understand why my demeanor was changing. I was called an “angry Black woman” on more than one occasion.

It took some time, research, and a lot of self-care to finally get to the place I am at now. I am still working on creating healthy boundaries with people who continue to try to break me down mentally, and I am still working on forgiving some of the things that have happened in my past. In recent years, I have been adamant about claiming my identity as a Black woman. It was something I was denied for so long, but now I can say I am Black and I am proud. I am also half white, and I do not denounce that. However, with my past experiences of only being able to celebrate my whiteness, I feel like it is time now to respect and pay tribute to my other half and the ethnicity that I know little about.

I am relearning to love all those things that people tried to say were negative and bad about me. I love my skin color and the way it glows in the sun like honey. I love my frizzy, curly hair and fluffing it up to make it even bigger. I am beautiful, and capable of a lot of things. I am working on putting my energy into things where it is useful and beneficial and to not wasting my time or my emotions on negativity. I am trying to be patient with people who haven’t lived my experiences and have great respect for those who are trying to do better for the future. I am currently in a stage of self-reflecting and admitting to myself and others my own mistakes. I have found my place in southern California and where I feel I can truly be myself free of judgments, and I have found the people who love and support me and have become the best of friends as well as family through tough times.

I hope the future society is more accepting of people’s differences and of other cultures. I wish to see more diversity in classrooms, television, and other media because representation matters. I am hopeful more people recognize the power of voting and will make their voices heard to finally break the systemic racism that has been instilled for centuries. I believe recent events will lead to people listening to each other and having open and honest conversations that then lead to answers and trust. What we need now is justice for those injured or murdered at the hands of police not limited to Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake. What we need now is all races coming together to support the minority in need because Black lives matter today, tomorrow, and every day after that.