My Milk Chocolate Message.
Today was the fourth or maybe seventh day my milk chocolate heart scrambles to sort the thoughts in my head as the most recent shit hits my newsfeeds and floods my dreams. I’ve felt an overwhelming support from White people who I’ve never seen post about race before. At the same time I have been trying to understand why George Floyd’s murder is a turning point after such brutality and racism has been happening since slavery. Why now? Why have you decided to join our fight?
It’s nothing new, you are just now simply seeing it with clarity.
When I was seventeen I wrote my college essay on being “milk chocolate” and unpacked the racist instances when my family or I had been forced into America’s version of two white parents and a child. This was not our version of a family; people staring at you slightly longer in the streets. I found therapy in writing and using my words to find creative ways to explain my identity of being half Black.
I’ve felt a spike of anxiety in the question of whether I am doing enough myself to support my Black community, my culture and the roots that make up the color of my skin that has been assumed by White people that don’t even know me. Or maybe it is more that they never believed my blackness or wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. I’m just speculating while also validating the hurtful remarks that have been said to me over my 23 years as a mixed woman. There’s also been a deep sadness when I rewind through history to the days when my family worked on plantations, in the brutal heat, to the racist faucet that flowed and has suffocated my father leaving behind a kind and loving Black man. He could have been angry and violent yet he taught me there is no victory in giving the oppressor what they want… more hate. His early lesson of “life isn’t fair” resonates in my ears today.
To my early days as a mixed kid in sports where someone would say “well you don’t act Black” or “he’s not your dad” in disbelief that our skins could be so different in their mind.
Trust me, these racist acts have always happened, you’ve just now chosen to listen.
Moving up a steep hill in Oakland to feel my legs want to give out underneath me
Below at the bottom of the hill in chalk is
Ahmaud Arbery
George Floyd
Black Lives Matters in large chalky light colors against the newly paved deep black pavement
A Black man ran up near me past the peaceful chalk support and smiled
I held up my fist first in support of his hill sprint and also the struggle we are in together
A Biracial girl on her morning inclines
A Black man alongside me running through this uphill battle of ours
Running over the names that have been lost and now never forgotten
For as long as I can remember I have been confused in how I look. My skin sits against my father’s looking paler and not as “rich” in blackness but when you put mine up against my mom’s skin, my shading has darker, deeper and more brown tints. This is how the idea of milk chocolate formed. My parents tell me that I first wondered about my race when I was six. I was explaining to my mother’s best friend the shading of my skin in comparison to theirs. “Well see he is brown and she is White…so I must be peach.” To this day my biracial identity as a Black woman has made me feel lost when needed to check boxes — for my race there is no one box or one way of understanding the culture within my Black community.
I exited the womb and people began to judge me off how my dark skin changed as the seasons did. As each winter approaches, I dread the paleness and lack of chocolate that my skin holds, forcing me to feel like I am “losing” my blackness or viewed as anything other than mixed. The truth is this blackness is in my heart and is the ongoing commitment to my community that amplify our voices in poetry, song, protest and power. A commitment to how we use our experiences to connect with those who have not listened before.
My sophomore year of college I decided to change my major from Psychology to African American Studies because of the 2016 election. Also, I desperately wanted to figure out why I felt so shitty about the color of my skin when my parents were no longer around. I knew I needed to tap into how to talk about the Black experience from an academic view. There were selfish reasons for becoming an African American Studies major; to feel safe once we elected Trump as President of the United States is one.
About two years ago I had this dream where I was sitting by the beach with my mom and I could feel that my dad should’ve been there. I walked down to the sand to meet my dad to sob to him. In the dream I wailed “why am I not more Black” and began to dig my nails under my skin to put his Black skin in replace of mine.
Being Black in America should be a guarantee of freedom not heartache and injustice. Being Black in America is when your voice and culture is acknowledged and not just used as Halloween costumes. Being Black in America shouldn’t be made into a spectacle, not another minstrel show or Instagram post, but being Black in America should be the glue that brings us together. I urge you to have conversations and call the people you care about to discuss how you can understand the heartache of being Black in America.
The tears drip down my face as I begin to push the black struggle towards the front of my eyeballs
I’ve been pushing it down the past couple days to try to stay calm
But the overwhelming feeling of what I should be doing is getting to me
Where I am not
What I’m not creating to amplify my black mixed milky voice
The actions I should take every day to help my community
The degree that resembles the fight for freedom against the oppressor I pursued
But there is an underlying sense of guilt that no matter how much you post
It cannot change what has happened
So instead of a hashtag right now
Or silence
I decide to put pen to paper
In honor for all of us who have been struck by such hatred and bias repeatedly
We didn’t deserve those racist remarks
Those looks of discomfort
But instead we deserved love, admiration and ears
To listen to our struggle, to engage in it with us
Learning from what is buried under a darker shade skin than your own,
This is my current black experience, and my milk chocolate message.
