Tyler The Creator is Different
A few bars that changed my life
“Isaiah, you’re the whitest Black person.
You’re not even Black.”
This joke was commonly directed towards me in high school.
I grew up in Colonia, NJ; a place where the sun always shines and your neighbors ask how your day is going. All in all, it was a great place to grow up. But this kind of environment nurtured ignorance; like the kind of jokes myself and other Black kids had to keep at bay from our classmates.
“Was being Black acting like I’m from the ghetto?” I’d ask myself. “What was their image of being Black, and how the hell did they come up with that image?”
My classmates had a baseline for Blackness. It was what they saw on TV or in the movies. The racist stereotyped ones. They even applied this image to Black kids from poorer neighborhoods who attended our school.
It wasn’t entirely their fault either; an echo chamber is exactly what the suburbs is.
The large majority of my school, especially when it came to identifying Blackness, was misguided.
Then someone pointed it out
One day I was walking home with a group of friends listening to Tyler The Creator.
