Ma Noirceur
W.E.B. Dubois discussed a state of perpetual balance as twoness:
“an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Inspired by the article, Black History Month Isn’t Making Life Better for Black Americans, I have decided to tell my Black History Story. My story of race and finding my Blackness. Perhaps it may be similar to others. I was the only Black girl in my preschool. The only Black girl in Pre-K. The only Black girl in my ballet class. But I didn’t know I was Black until I went to a majority Black kindergarten and was told that I acted White. For most of my life that is what I was told. I wasn’t Black enough. Which I never really understood. If they went to church with me, if they visited my family, if they knew anything at all about my life they wouldn’t say that. I watched BET! I had Black friends. I liked rap and fried chicken and I got my hair pressed weekly. That is how my childhood mind saw Blackness.
I came to brush it off: I liked people for who they were and by 6th grade I was lucky enough to go to a very mixed school. None of my close friends judged my Blackness, plus my barely-older-than-me- sister was in the same boat, so I generally said: “So what”. On I went, being called an OREO (Black on the outside, White on the inside) until the 9th grade. When in PE class, an older White classmate of mine told me I acted White and for the first time I asked why. “Why? Because I talk properly? Because I don’t act ghetto? Because I grew up on your side of town?” For the first time I realized that when a person says someone acts one race or another it usually means that person’s ideas of how the race “should be” is the most stereotypical—dare I say racist—perception of that race. I think I scared that boy that day. He turned beet red and became overly apologetic. Little did I know that was my first instance of being a “mad black woman”.
Throughout middle and high school I was a Thespian, clinging to Black Theatre like a fly on those awkward sticky papers my grandparents had hanging in the carport in the summer time. I loved August Wilson and George C. Wolf. I loved playing those characters. Reading and living through their pain. When I became Rose or Miss Pat, no one questioned my Blackness. I can’t even explain how Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls affected my late childhood development. These stories were the beauty I was searching for in the complicated identity from which I was emerging.
I remembered one of my older fellow “OREO” friends returning from her first semester of college for Winter Break. She gushed about how many Black friends she had in college. How most of her close friends were Black. I couldn’t believe it. In that moment I became excited about how I could finally be accepted when I went to college. I could finally fit in. And perhaps that came to pass.
I attended Wake Forest University. At the time of my enrollment, my freshman class had the largest percentage of students of color in the institution’s history: it was about 20%, and less than 6% Black. [Please do not pass judgment here as it is my opinion that WFU is on the forefront of Diversity and Inclusion practices among its peer institutions and especially among Southern Private Colleges & Universities]. One of my closest friends in college and I love telling the story of how we met during orientation week. Walking back into our dorm with our families the second night on campus we locked eyes. Through a contagious grin she said “Hi Brown person!” I said “Hi, Do you live here too?!” She said “Yes. You know us Brown people have to stick together!” I agreed and so our friendship began. We were connected. We were to experience this institution of privilege together.
As expected, although my friend group was very diverse, I had mostly Black friends in college. I dove into the darkness and let my Blackness envelop me. Why not? It was the time. It was 2008. Blacks were basking in the Obama glow! We were a community again. I joined the Black Student Alliance, found comfort in the Office of Multicultural Affairs, became quite the Slam Poet, fraternized with athletes, understood the Divine Nine. I fell in love with sociology and the science of privilege. I met Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Davis. I was no longer a democrat I was a liberal. I was Black. I was a Student. I was becoming an exceptional Black American.
I read The Souls of Black Folk and it so resonated with me. Dubois spoke of intersectionality before that is what it was called. It stirred an issue I had never considered before college. My life in a lot of ways was a twoness. This 19th century man seemed to capture my own American experience! On campus I often felt like two people. My close White friends, all in sororities, wanted me to join them at frat parties. I didn’t want to go there. It seemed like none of my Black friends wanted to drink.
So I struggled through the first year balancing my two social lives. And then again I found the theatre. It welcomed me home and provided the social life and connections I needed to bridge the gap. My ethnically diverse theatre family mixed it up. We could do it all. We were woven from the same cloth and again I found solace in performance.
My twoness reared its head differently when I studied abroad in Dakar, Senegal. When embarking on my travels I thought to myself, “Wow, for the first time in my life I will be somewhere that I look like everyone else!” I got over all of the scared faces of my family’s privileged friends when I mentioned studying on the “Dark Continent”. I swear people think Africa is only genocide and Feed the Children. [Com’on people it is 2014. I was to be in a homestay with a very upper-middle class Senegalese family who had sons studying in France!]
During our orientation, the study abroad officers shared experiences of White students that had their first moment of “difference” and shared ways to cope with it. They explained how that moment had been so eye-opening and life changing for so many. I rolled my eyes. This was my life. Since the moment I was in Kindergarten and figured out I was Black.
Surprisingly, as it turns out, I was neither Black nor White in Senegal. And again I experienced a different twoness: I was a Negro and an American. And the Senegalese didn’t know what that meant at all. Vous êtes métisse, non? “You are mixed,” they asked. I explained my parents are American. They insisted my mother was American but asked where was my dad from. Mais, votre père, il vien d’ou? “But, your dad, where is he from?” I spoke English so one taxi driver was sure I was Kenyan. They couldn’t conceive that neither of my parents was African like them.
While abroad, I studied the negritude movement. I was inspired and disheartened by the idea that somehow all Black people share something. That the lingering traces of [insert West African Countries here] blood should connect me more with people around the world who share my skin tone. One thing I left knowing was that there is no one like us in the world. We may all be Black. We may all be birthed from the greed of colonialist and the suffering of our ancestors but there is no other species on this planet that is like the Black American.
My time abroad was often isolating. Not experiencing the country with the full freedom my White friends could. Not having the privilege of being perceived as a visitor. Locals not understanding why I didn’t speak the language. But it went on, and got better. And I came to understand something else. There is a twoness from being American and Negro, but the only thing I can be is American.
My White and Asian and Latino friends can trace their entry to this country from a boat or bay or ledger. I cannot. I understand many of their ancestors struggled and arrived broke and half naked. I don’t want to belittle their struggle. But the privilege of knowing where you began is something I will never have. They are allowed to take pride in their motherland’s cultural festivals. They have Family Trees that only have one or two missing leaves. We on the other hand are the lychen of ancestry: no idea where it came from until it showed up. For most that earliest record is from the mid to late 1800s.
Unlike my other friends, I feel nothing towards the continent of Africa except the nostalgia I have from my time abroad. And if I were to take a genealogical test and begin a relationship with my motherland, I feel like it would be like an abandoned child reuniting with their biological mother. Someone who didn’t raise them or provide for them or see them through the struggles of life and love. Nothing more than a strange connection to a stranger. Going to Africa did not make me feel connected to being Black. It made me feel more American. That is all I am. My ancestors are from the port of Charleston. They made it as far north as Wilmington, NC and as far west as Greenville, SC. Some of my ancestors are from the Great Cherokee Nation. Some of my ancestors were undoubtedly slave masters and the sons of slave masters. I am America. So, knowing that I am American, that I can be nothing but American, why is my history not the history of this nation? I,too, am America!
As my interest in race and ethnic relations and gender and privilege continues to grow with my own experience mainly using Facebook as my classroom, I understand that race issues are not problems to be solved in the absence of cultural understanding. I am as optimistic as I am pessimistic. Race is and always will be. We will never be a raceless society. We should strive to be a more inclusive one. Until we all realize that you can offer others a seat at the table without losing your own, we cannot have productive conversations about race. Until a child’s racial identity does not create a struggle that forces self-loathing and confusion we cannot postulate that we are free.
We must all remember that race is something we teach. One of the little boys I babysat had his moment of identifying colors when at age 3 he sat out to draw a portrait of the two of us. He drew himself with “Peach” and drew me with “Brown”. Then he said: “Some people are Peach and some people are Brown”. I said yes. But that was it. He still knew that people were people and his understanding was unshaded by institutionalized racism, and perpetual imagery the media pushes to us. Once, his playmate came over and thought I was this little boy’s mother. He didn’t get that it is impossible for me to birth a child with blonde hair and blue eyes. He perceived the caring nature I showed him and I was the only adult in the house, so why would I have not been his friend’s mom?
I think we are moving slowly but surely towards fulfilling the dream of Martin Luther King. I am sure one day I will only be judged by the content of my character. But the reality is, when I enter the room before I say a word, I am seen as Black and to some that means a threat. I sit on the bus and am perceived as unwelcoming as the seat next to me is always the last to be filled. In my darkest moments I still struggle with being judged against an Aryan form of beauty. In a restaurant, the wait staff gives up on me before I am seated, writing me off as a terrible tipper. These are not complaints: these are true stories. This is my America. This is my living history that is not confined to the month of February.
As the Senegalese Wolof proverb says Ndank Ndank mooy jap golo ci nay “Slowly, slowly, the hunter catches the monkey in the forest.” All great things take time. While I anxiously await a more inclusive America I continue to relish in my own identities. Being prideful of a people so scorned that only beauty could emerge. I cannot dwell on what I can never have. I cannot wish my twoness away.
Instead I quietly sing a line from a song of the Negritude Movement to myself. One I wish I had known as a child:
La noirceur dieu me donner m’a suffit.
“The Blackness god gave me is enough for me”.
