I Am the Greatest Star
Years ago I watched a CNN special on Caucasian and African American children’s bias to lighter skin tones. Researchers conducted a test with young kids, in which drawings of six or so dolls ranging in that many skin tones were placed infront of the children and they were asked questions like, “Which one is the prettiest?” and “Which one are you?” Unsurprisingly, there was always a more positive association between being lighter.
I was completely heartbroken at the ages of these children and how much the beauty of being light — or white, was ingrained in their minds. More so for the black children. When did we stop telling and showing these young men and women how beautiful they are? And if we never did, what made these children suddenly feel lesser than in their own complexion?
I used to believe this connotation with race and ethnicity develops once a child starts gaining their political pulse. Once they flick on the TV and find out that the predominantly brown town of Flint, Michigan has been without clean water for five years. When they’re doing research for their first civics project and discover that a black person is two times more likely to get pulled over by the police, and subsequently three times more likely to get shot and killed than a white person. While visiting a nice mall in their neighborhood and realizing for the first time that security has been following them from the moment they stepped through the doorframe. Something that screams, “You are black and are being treated significantly less human because of it.”
But I guess it doesn’t really happen like that. The black children pointing to the whitest doll as their standard of beauty aren’t watching CNN, or studying civics, or traveling alone. I don’t think it was naive of me to believe we as black people need something to scream, “YOU ARE NOT EQUAL” to understand we, in fact, are not treated as equals, but some internalized form of false hope I had been holding onto since my own childhood. A hope that black children are somehow shielded from prejudice simply because of a lack of socioeconomic understanding. I guess I had that hope for my younger self too.
This yearning to protect every single one of those black kid’s view of themselves begs me to ask some questions of myself. I want to figure out my relationship with myself, both my internalized hate and inevitable love. How it fueled my hope that black children are shielded from hate until they can understand what creates it, but how I know they aren’t. I can’t speak for every single black child out there, but I can speak for me.
From birth it almost seems, my nickname has been, ‘Sunshine’. As most famously used by my Uncle. I think everyone called me sunshine because of my aura, my smile, bubbly personality, and overall glow. But I, as I’m sure any young child would, took it extremely literal. I got this book called Little Miss Sunshine with matching backpacks and pins, and I was convinced I looked like a walking, talking star.
So if I was included in the skin color doll test I would have looked at Anderson Cooper utterly appalled that he didn’t have proper representation of my fellow star-people in the survey. I’m not sure what my first realization of race was, but I do know that for a while I thought I was the crayola color ‘Dandelion’, due to my absolute submersion into my Little Miss Sunshine persona.
When I was of preschool age my mom sent me to a Montessori school in a cute blue building that resembled a beautiful house. I loved it there. At my oldest I was four years old in a class with students of all different walks of life and it’s too bad I was too young to appreciate that. But this gorgeously diverse group of kids let me continue to believe that I was a star, which in turn allowed me to invest my time in my personality and making friends rather than getting caught up in wanting to change myself (which, believe it or not, can become a top priority to four year olds).
This changed the moment I moved from that microcosm of love and culture that I had once known to a much more alt-white conservative town in New Jersey. Maybe it’s unfair that I pit the two against each other in such a polarizing way. Perhaps I would have faced the same or worse adversity had I not moved to a whiter town regardless. But that is not what happened, and I now have a glossy sugar coated view of where I once lived compared to the cesspool of hate I moved to. This new place was literally White America™.
The difference between where I once was and am currently was immediately clear. I made friends easily but somehow always felt like an outsider, because I couldn’t go to the country club and visit my friends at the pool in the summer. Every other day the girls would ask to pull on my hair in the cafeteria to see if it was real, and I obliged just to fit in. I was called names, picked on, and ostracized often even by my own friends.
One day I told the class my mom is Cuban, that she moved here from Cuba when she was little girl. Somehow the topic was brought up when we were getting our reading levels a few weeks later. My classmates bragged about their levels to me, and simply couldn’t believe that I could read at a level higher than them. I was labeled as a liar because how could the black girl whose Mom’s first language is Spanish understand english better than the white kids?
I quickly realized that being anything other than white is something that separates you. Speaking anything other than English calls you out. In kindergarten I could see that I was the only girl in my class being bullied, and I looked down at myself and I looked across the room to my peers and suddenly I realized I wasn’t yellow. I wasn’t a star. I was black and I was Spanish and I was different and they didn’t like me for it.
Realizing what made me different at five years old broke my heart. And still serves as one of the most heartbreaking memories I have. I don’t think anything hurts more than being ravingly hated for something you can’t control and not being able to understand why. As I’ve gotten older and experienced hate unmatched, I lay easy knowing why some people choose to act the way that they do. But how do you explain such hatred to a five-year-old?
As I grew up it did and didn’t get easier. People’s acts toward me personally got worse. I received death threats, I got called the N-word, and have been completely embarrassed by absolute ignorance. Swastikas became a normal appearance in cafeterias and bathrooms and the people around me got more comfortable using racial slurs as I got more upset. As the American education system taught me that racial inequality died with Jim Crow I saw every single day that, that couldn’t possibly be true.
By the time that I reached eighth grade I had more than a shadow of a doubt that I was being treated poorly because of the color of my skin. Most ironically by the books we read in honors English. As my teacher taught literature that was written with the intention of bringing to light the mistreatment of black people in America, she conducted her own mistreatment of the resident black student in her honors English eight class.
As we discussed the aloof nature of the only black character in Of Mice and Men my teacher tried to convince me to go to the front of the class to give my peers a front row seat of what it’s like to be black. Like I, a 12-year-old, can explain to other 12-year-olds the socioeconomic intricacies of why he was acting the way he was simply because I, too, am black. She called me out every single day for my black input. On one occasion going as far as noting to the class that they were, “lucky to have a fellow black person in [our] midst.”
As if being given the responsibility to talk on behalf of an entire race wasn’t difficult enough for my tiny eighth grade mind, every single day my lovely English teacher would force not only my white peers but I, too, to say the N-word every single time it came up in the texts. For those who don’t know, it’s never appropriate for a white person to say in the N-word ever, especially in the midst of a black person (even in a literary sense) and I feel disgusted that I was ever a part of that normalization and didn’t stand up and say something.
After that class it was abundantly clear that I was black, I was Spanish, and I was and forever will be treated differently because of it. I didn’t need to watch the news, I didn’t need to read an article, I didn’t even need to step into ‘actual society’. Our school system alone teaches black children we are lesser than. We are taught by our peers, by our teachers, by administration. There’s no escaping it. We know our fate before we even turn twelve, and I by the time I was five.
But upon reflection I realize that what I faced between the ages of five and twelve, before I understood racism was not something that I cause, can control, or specifically for me, was the hardest thing I’ll ever go through. Because there is no explaining that kind of hate to a five-year-old, yet regardless five-year-olds across the country have to deal with that very level of hate and worse. It is a burden unlike anything else, and I would not wish that burden on anyone who has the privilege to not experience it.
Sure, I resented myself for a while because of the color of my skin. I knew it wasn’t something I could ever change and I knew people told me that I have to own it and wear it with pride, but sometimes I just didn’t want to. Sometimes I fantasized about how much easier it would be to just be white. Because everything that I do wouldn’t have to be a political statement, I wouldn’t have to worry about driving a little too fast, I wouldn’t have to worry about having a recognizable face, I wouldn’t have to worry about behaving a certain way, I wouldn’t have to worry about making my friends parents uncomfortable as I enter their house, I wouldn’t have to worry about going to West Virginia on a church mission trip, I wouldn’t have to worry about walking past the man in an MAGA hat. I just wouldn’t have to worry so much, worrying is so draining.
Though there is a particular level of fear that I have for my life as a black woman, I will never again wish that I was white. Because there is so much strength, perseverance, character, and rich history of always making it through associated with being black. And I would never not want to be a ethereally tied to that history ever again. And above all I am personally so much more than just the color of my skin. I am a sister, I am a daughter, I am a cousin, I am a student, I am an activist, I am in engineer, I am the future, and I am a star. Never again will I forget that I am a star.
