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My matriarchs talk in black vernacular, speaking about the terrors of being black in a white world, using words like “kitchen” to describe the kinky hair at the nape of one’s neck, intercepting a conversation about Tamir Rice and the officer that discarded his life, talking about how earlier that week my mom was pulled over by a cop for what we call “DWB”—Driving While Black. It hurts to know I couldn’t do anything but grieve for her mistreatment. I would never share the same experience, because my skin passes as white.
T0 C LA K Mimi used to eat toilet paper because Great Grandma Barber would lock the cabinets to ration the food between her and her eight sisters.
Mom is followed around stores because white people think her black skin makes her a thief who drains from the white system.
As a mixed girl in a black family, I always felt I had to “perform” as a black person—using African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to fit in and feel accepted, saying things like “threads,” “homeboy,” “brother,” “sister,” and even “honkie” with the explicit utilization of hands to gesture our meanings—a language of difference not only in words but in tone and body language. Black people are unique in their connection to their body as a mode of communication, a mode of language.
I was never a good actor though, falling short of fitting into the black identity. I didn’t share the same type of oppression they did. I never grew up worrying I would encounter someone who would be explicitly racist to me.
My dad’s white skin privileged me that way, even if it was the only thing he ever gave to me. He left before I was old enough to remember him.
I was white enough to not be black, but black enough to not be white.
How could I belong when my skin ostracized me in every community?
The inner civil war ripped me from my own skin as I fought to erase what I was, from who I was. I walked back from the pod-style bathrooms into my college dorm room, water dewed my kinky curls. I was slowly becoming more comfortable with presenting my black self—my black hair—to my white community members. I was on the cusp of no longer feeling the pressure to assimilate
—even though everything I had ever known was taken from me. My father, my whiteness, my blackness, my privilege, my marginalization, my identity itself.
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