I've been thinking a LOT about race lately. So much so that it's overwhelming every other thought in my head. I guess that means I have to write it out, so I'm thinking of doing a little mini-series on the things that pop into my head. As with most things I write about, this is an incredibly personal topic for me and one that I've struggled with for as long as I've been on this earth. I shall begin at the beginning and hopefully I'll end up somewhere by the end of this series.
I'm black. I thought everyone reading this knew that fact, but I've gotten comments from readers who were like, "holy shit! I didn't know you were black," which makes me laugh, cry, shake my head and look quizzical at the same time because I'm not quite sure how I feel about the fact that one of the most important parts of my personality isn't readily apparent in my writing. Besides that, it makes me wonder what people think 'blackness' is.
Growing up, I had a strange relationship with race. I was raised in a two-parent home - both my parents were extremely present and involved in all of our lives. I never wanted for anything. Even though my parents weren't wealthy (my mom was in finance and my dad was and still is a telephone repairman), they made sure that my three brothers and I had everything we could ever want. My family wasn't like other families I interacted with, though, mostly because of the fact that my father isn't black. He's Puerto Rican and an extremely light-skinned one at that. Most people have told me my dad looks Jewish or white. My mother, on the other hand, is dark. Very dark. I'm adopted, though, so technically I'm not half-black/half-Hispanic, but I always identified as such because it was how I was raised. My skin tone is pretty much exactly between my two parents, which helped me avoid awkward 'are you adopted?' questions. I don't want to get into the fuckery that is the black obsession with light skin vs. dark skin, but my best friend (also black) likes to say that when it comes to the
brown paper bag test, I am the paper bag.
Please note that I'm not co-signing this practice, which is disgusting and awful and as the child of a dark-skinned woman, I learned from the jump that all shades of brown and black are beautiful, but I'm trying to give you an idea of my skin tone. Based on this, I was able to "get away" with not disclosing my adopted status.
Despite having a loving family that cherished and nurtured me, I was ashamed of my father. I never wanted him to take me anywhere because I hated dealing with the stares, the clerks thinking we were separate parties, and the taunts of the local neighborhood kids. Because my dad looked white, I caught hell from a lot of black people at school. As a result, I stopped asking him to come to things and would always prefer to be out with my mom. The funny thing is, my mother and I look nothing alike (for starters chick is 5' and I'm 5'9" and like I mentioned our complexions are nothing alike, nor are our body types), but because she was black and I was black, it was all good. At the same time that I denied my father, I also struggled with being black. As a kid, all I wanted was shiny, long straight hair. I know I'm not the only little black girl that would put my head through a shirt and let all the extra cloth hang down and pretend it was hair. I thought it would make me beautiful and more like the other kids I went to school with. As a proud natural-haired black chick (19 months!!!), I'm happy I got over that shit, but it still makes me burn with shame to think about how much I hated myself in those days. On the one hand, I felt like I had to dissociate myself from my non-black father to prove my blackness and on the other hand, I didn't think that blackness was beautiful or desirable. Quite the conundrum.
My mother was your typical black mother. A guy I once dated (The Intellectual, actually) asked me if I would call my mom was culturally black and I would have to say that she is. My mom grew up middle class on Long Island and was bused to a white school where she was the only black female. I think because of that, she has an acute distrust of white people and has held onto her blackness in a way that used to annoy me as a child, but that I'm coming to understand more and more. She went to an HBCU, pledged a black sorority, and has mostly black friends. She was a harsh disciplinarian, by which I mean she beat the shit out of us when we were kids. With a belt. I always laugh when people tell me they were spanked as children because usually they mean a light tap with some kind of wooden spoon or a hand. My mother would have to change into her sweatsuit and take off her jewelry before she spanked us because it was a huge physical effort. She once told me that as painful as the beating was for us, it was exhausting for her, too.
The one thing we never talked about in my house was my father's race. At least not explicitly. I don't ever remember asking why they were different colors or thinking it was strange - it was just how it was. I never viewed interracial relationships as being odd or different because I'd grown up with one and it didn't seem like a big deal to me. Plus, the fact that my father wasn't white took away all of the uncomfortable references to slavery. They were just two minorities that happened to fall in love. One thing I do remember was that my mother was adamant about us being black children (all of us, even the biological children my parents had) and we were never referred to as being mixed in any way. My mother always told me that I had to be the best at everything because the world was always going to want me to fail. She told me I had three strikes against me - I was black, I was female, and I had a Hispanic last name - so there was no place for mediocrity. I think that's kind of how she viewed all of us - black children with Hispanic last names. So I learned pretty early on the reality of the One Drop Rule, since basically my mother's race erased all of the Latino heritage of my father.
Leaving you with my background, I'll save some of the implications of my childhood for a later post.
