When I started this piece, it was with the intention of sharing my perspective. As I have been writing some changes have begun to take place. I wanted to share my truth. Striving to be genuine as an author is important to me and I do not like to write about things I am not willing to apply to myself. As I began to circle this issue, viewing it from all sides, what I have observed has shocked me to the core.
I could not figure out why I have stuffed this issue down. Why have I looked away sweeping it under the rug? What was at the root of my anger towards this being shoved in my face? Privilege.
Granted I have had my own dealings with racism as a multi-race person. In my early years I lived with my black father surrounded by the black community who considered me black and accepted me into the community. My family was heavily involved in the community and I was able to listen to my father and uncles discuss important social issues amongst themselves. My grandmother encouraged me to make something of myself as a woman to combat the systemic oppression.
I am able to pass for white. In my life I have passed for white. There was a period living in the rich white suburbs that I learned how to pass for white when I was seven years old. After that, I stopped passing when I moved to a predominantly black community in the northern United States. The catalyst for me returning to the practice of passing for 15 years was moving to the south. In this town you were considered less than human by most if you were black. It was perfectly acceptable for students to make blatantly racist remarks. If you spoke out there was retaliation from the school. I changed myself completely finding ways to get along with the white people in my school by passing.
I entertained their racism. I stifled my urge to tell them how racist they were being and allowed their excuses. “Black on black crime, black people did it to themselves, they are all criminals anyway, they are not well educated, they are ghetto, and my all-time favorite, you can’t be black, you are so different from them. You are white to me.”
White people would interact with me as if I were another white person and the things that flew out of their mouths was nothing short of outrageously disgusting. I shirked in fear holding my tongue and the burning rage inside my chest knowing I was a coward – a deserter.
I lived my life knowing I was a mere façade, knowing that what I had inside me did not match my outsides. I spent the next 15 years being ashamed of being part black believing the lie that is fed to everyone, that black people are worth nothing. That we had no heroes. The way media and news portrayed black people and my own experience with the pain and anger toward my skin tone was all I knew. I did not have access to any history or information at that time to tell me otherwise. I built my life on a white-washed foundation.
I married a white man, had all white friends, refused to engage in the black culture at all, went to a white church and turned my back completely on my ancestry. I even began telling people I was only part “Native American” to excuse how dark I got in the summer.
The marriage was more like that of a slave and a master than it was a union. I worked myself into the ground doing everything and serving him as if I were his property. Attempting to address this was only met with more oppression. Eventually I began to feel dead inside. I was living a complete lie. Maintaining an image that went against everything my family raised me to believe. Slowly, I began to rot from the inside out. Eventually it caught up with me and I had to break away from the pressure filled demands of living a lie. I walked away from everything.
Abandoning my marriage, home and church, I set off on my own to attempt to recover myself. Scrambling for years to figure out who I was, I could not find what was missing.
Finally, I began to reconnect with the parts of me that were missing when I watched Beyond the Lights.
“I see you,” he says to her as she is about to jump to her suicide. It shot like lightening into my soul and set fire to the numb vacuous space that had come to occupy my chest. As she sung Nina Simone’s Blackbird tears welled up in my eyes and I realized what it was I had left to find.
Finally, it dawned on me that I had imprisoned an important part of myself. She did not deserve that fate. There was nothing wrong with being black and she deserved to live. I began to devour information on surrounding social issues taking care to avoid racism directly. Longing to know where I came from and looking for some kind of hope, I began to read articles, watch videos and find history I had no idea existed.
Eventually I made my way around to the issue of my race. As I researched, I became enraged at what has occurred. Fury filled me. I felt sorrow and pain for what my ancestors had to endure. I felt shame for uniting myself with the very ideals that caused my ancestor’s suffering. I reached out to my grandmother to discuss with her racism and my boiling rage at the current state of things. Sharing with her what I had learned about systemic racism and recognizing where it had affected my life. She explained to me that on her side we were not descended from slaves but from a Creole tobacco plantation owner. She also explained that he married a woman who was white and Muscogee.
Grandma explained that no one on her side had ever been in slavery. However, on grandpa’s side we were descended from Indigenous Crow and there was history of slavery.
Her mother had her own horse and buggy. Her mother had a brand-new dress every school year and she was able to go to the local school. I found this incredibly odd considering the history at that time would indicate that black people were considered property, provided no rights let alone an education. How could it be possible that my ancestor was a successful landowner with enough money to purchase his daughter her own horse and buggy?
Going back to my regular routine I took the knowledge I had gained about systemic racism and locked it up as tightly as I could in the darkest part of my psyche. Throwing away the key I began to avoid my heritage as much as possible again.
Running from myself could only last so long. The issue resurfaced one day as I was working for a local nonprofit that was extremely influential in the black community. I was excited about working in some capacity to serve the community. I had completely lost touch with the black community, which was the focus of this particular branch. I had no idea what I was doing. I was too embarrassed to say anything. Too ashamed to admit that I really could not understand the culture of the people I was hired to serve. The culture of my people.
A person I worked with noticed this. She had asked me to do a project. I needed to make a poster for a ballet program. When I did, I printed out pictures of only white dancers. She pulled me aside and asked me why I only printed out white images. Utterly confused, I asked her to explain what she meant. She, at this point, realized I had no idea that there were black ballerinas. She began to name several influential black dancers. When I was little, I wanted to be a ballerina and was told I could not because I was not white. I explained this to her. She challenged me to redo everything keeping in mind that the demographic we served would be young black girls who need to see role models they can relate to. I poured myself into the project and became inspired in the process. This was the beginning of me diving into untold history.
One day this person pulled me aside and asked if I had heard of the book called “Passing” by Nella Larsen. A novel about two childhood friends written in 1929. One of the friends passes as white and the two women lead drastically different lives. The one who passes for white lives a life of privilege. I never expected to encounter something so perfectly encompassing my life as the research I did on passing. I found out that the only way it would have been possible for my ancestor to maintain his land was by passing. This was a practice that multi-race people did whom were light enough to claim to be a white person in order to gain social advantage. It involved flattening the hair, acting, speaking, dressing and being educated in a certain way. It also would require you to turn your back on the black community and only associate with white people lest you be discovered and lose everything.
Apparently, my instinct was one many have chosen in the atmosphere of threatened oppression over the centuries. There was at that time an elite class of Creole or multi-race people that occupied the area from France and Europe. Prior to laws being passed that made skin color the dividing line there were black and multi-race people of European heritage that owned land and participated in the system being constructed in early American history in the 1600’s.
When slavery laws passed those, who were able to fulfill the details of that law which would have meant birthplace, religion and skin color would not have been sold into slavery. Depending on the specific laws of the state it might have been possible to never be recognized as a black person in order to maintain your socio-economic status.
This was a crucial piece of information for me to have in order to understand and engage with my community as a woman of color. The truth is I thought if I acted white enough in the south, I could get what I wanted one day.
However, part of my passing was having a white person in authority in my life that would come to my aid and defense. I realized that some of the recent issues in my life were directly related to that fact and being subject to systemic racism as a result of no longer being aligned with a white person. The reality is once I stood on my own it did not matter if I tried to pass because I was not considered white in the south.
It never occurred to me that the concept of passing was simply a way to comply with an oppressor that would never acknowledge me as a true equal. ′
The story coninues in the September issue of ColorsVA and
at colorsvamag.com
Tags: Race
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