How My White Mother Helped Me Find My Blackness

By Ijeoma Oluo

The author as a child with her mother and brother

“Hold still.”

“Mom, you’re hurting me!”

“I am not. Hold still or your headwrap won’t look right.”

“I don’t want to wear the headwrap. It looks weird. Everyone will laugh at me!”

“What kind of African are you??”

I looked up at my white mom as she tugged on the gele around my head, and tried very hard not to roll my eyes.

We had the same arguments throughout my childhood, my mother and I, whether it was about geles to school, the black power afro pick she was hoping I’d wear in my hair, the afro that I wouldn’t wear to hold the pick, or the locs that I wouldn’t grow instead. While technically mixed race, my brother and I did not have the light beige skin and loose curls of the few other mixed race kids in town who passed as mildly exotic with their golden eyes and permanent suntans. We were black kids — lighter-skinned, yes, but black kids with black colored Nigerian hair and dark eyes. We had names that prevented any fantasy of passing — Ijeoma and Ahamefule. We were black kids. In our poor suburb of Seattle, we were the only black kids throughout all of elementary school.

And so, the last thing I wanted to do was show up in a gele to “Heritage Day.” But I had to, and my…