I Am Not Black

I know.  I know.  Yet another shocking confession.

But this is an issue I have been thinking about, pondering on, mulling over in my mind for years and years.  And years.  The older I get, the more I learn, the more I experience, the louder the beat of this particular drum becomes in my writer's mind.

I grew up in a neighborhood and went to schools in the San Francisco Bay Area that were predominantly white, black, and hispanic.  The white people in our area were mostly middle class and I just never fit in with them; the white girls from my elementary school went on to become cheerleaders and wear pale pink cardigans in high school while my parents could barely afford to buy me one pair of shoes from Mervyn's a school year, much less pay for cheerleading fees. The hispanic girls hated me; they pulled my hair as I walked down the halls of my middle school and ridiculed me for my beat up shoes and hand-me-down sweaters.  Black people took me in.  I'm not really sure why.  For all intents and purposes, I was the ultimate enemy.  I dated black boys and represented everything that black girls supposedly hated, a white girl taking one of their men.  That's what the movies tell you.  But I hadn't seen any of those movies yet, and I just knew that I felt at home with the black kids at school and in their homes after school.  

Once, when the Chicana girls at school came after me, my girlfriends surrounded me, forming an outward facing circle around a dirty, low-class, white girl with no other friends and a sure beating in my future if not for their help.  Later that year, those same would be attackers beat another girl so badly that she needed stitches in her vagina from repeated kicks to that area while she was lying on the ground already knocked out senseless.  Right after school.  Right off campus.  

My best friend in middle school took me home one night to stay over.  She had an older brother and a single mother, and they treated me like just another of her friends.  I had a crush on another boy who lived in the same apartment complex, Mondo, who had been flirting with me at school.  Finally, away from I home, I had the freedom to take a walk with this boy, and after wandering for a few moments, just the two of us, we snuck behind some bushes in the complex and began kissing.  I was thirteen.  Kissing was all I had ever done and all I had ever planned to do.  Mondo had different ideas.  He quickly shoved his hand down my pants and before I knew what was happening he had his penis out and rubbing against me.  I freaked out.  I tried to end this encounter, but he grabbed me, pushed me against the wall, and held me there.  Fortunately, it was early evening and we were in a fairly public place.  Someone walked by, I yelled out and broke away.  

When I got back to my friend's house I told her and her mother what had happened.  I wanted to call the police.  I was terrified.  I had been violated.  

At that point, the mother gave me a lesson in white humility.  No, I would not be another "white girl victim of big black brute."  I do not remember exactly what she said to me, but my experience with this strong black woman relating to me the impact of my own actions as a soon to be white woman stuck with me much more than the scary moment behind the bush with the violent boy.

Mondo went on to impregnate another white girl a year later and then beat her up at school when he found out she was pregnant, throwing her to the ground and kicking her in the stomach repeatedly to ensure abortion of her fetus.  

I realize now, years later, that some see his crime as typical of an "angry black man."  For me, it was simply an atrocious act carried out by a horrible person.  My perspective was probably due to the fact that most of my filter was through black friends.  "Can you believe he did that?"  "Stupid white girl."  "Yep, he's gonna be in and out of jail for the rest of his life."  

I was Diggy in Save the Last Dance, the one white girl in a sea of black faces.  "Oh, that's Diggy.  She thinks she's down."  And Diggy responds, "please, I am down."  Yea, that was me.

I did.  When I was in high school, and even beyond.  I thought I was bad.  I would raise my eyebrows and say things like, "I wish you would!"  "I wish he would!"  I picked fights because I was so hard.  Sometimes my little sister would say things to me like, "you think you're black," or "you wish you were black."

No.  I do not remember ever wishing I was black.  But I do remember liking black people a lot more than white people.  I knew there was a war going on, however discreet, however insidious, and I knew which side I was on.  It wasn't the white side.  One of the great loves of my life was a black man who said to me once, "admit it, Shanna, you're racist."  

"What!?"  I distinctly remember this moment, sitting in his car, looking over at him in the driver seat, astounded.

"You hate white people."  And he laughed and laughed.

And I have to admit, at the time, it rang a little bit true.

But that was before college, before years of education and maturity, and working through generalizations and sweeping hatred.

My freshman year in high school, my English teacher let us write an essay on any autobiography we wanted.  I chose The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Back then, I understood his hatred.  I understood the anger.  It was only after a long time, decades of life really, that I understood the matured point of view he adopted later in life.  When I was younger, I would have been that one white girl, "the little blonde coed," he talks about who walked up to him and asked how she could help his cause. 

In college, English majors had four options to choose from as emphases in our field.  I chose minority literature, "New Voices."  I studied Black Literature, Hispanic Literature, Native American Literature, and even, finally, found my way to Women's Literature.  But Black Literature, Black History, Black culture, have always been the subjects that rang the truest to me.  I found my love of Women's Literature, in fact, my way to feminism, through Black Literature.

Now, I am still that white girl walking up to Malcolm, but I respond to the answer he says he wishes he would have given her, to work from within the white community, to change minds and hearts within our own community.  I understand when he says that black people have to head their own communities, lead their own people, to the exclusion of white people in many cases, because of the deep seated psychological superiority/inferiority complex within us all that has been actively at work for centuries.  I recognize I have power in society as a simple matter of being born white.  I do not apologize for being white, and I think the idea that anyone does is simply ridiculous.  I see these websites and articles entitled "never apologize for being white" and shake my head.  

Right, we are overrun with people apologizing to black people for being white.  That is the big problem we face in society today.

The truth is that I do not really have any black friends today.  My friends are mostly white, hispanic, and Iranian.  This reality is one that at times shocks me, considering my youthful days, and also one that saddens me.  I want my daughter in school with people from all backgrounds.  I want her to feel part of a world full of color, not like the brown girl in a sea of white faces.

I realized right before Christmas that all of her dolls and figurines are white.  

"Ahhhhh!!!  She needs black dolls!  She needs brown Little People!"  

"Honey, she's twenty one months old.  We have time to get her more dolls."  My husband, ever the voice of reason.

Many things have come up recently that have made this blog post weigh heavily on my mind, and I still have not said all I want to say, nor am I even sure I have said what I want to say effectively.  

The Duck Dynasty "scandal" was one thing.  How a man can go on record and say that black people were happier before civil rights, that he knows this to be true because he worked side by side with them in the cotton fields, and they never complained is beyond me.  In fact, he says, they sang happy songs. 

Really?  A white man with an audience of millions teaching other white people that black people were so much happier "before welfare and other entitlements," is a detriment to society.

The other big thing that has stuck in my craw as the white girl fighting against racism from within my own community is the Black Girl Dangerous article on Beyonce's latest album.  I was with Mia McKenzie all the way through her article on Black feminism versus White feminism, mysogyny, hypocrisy, and unity, until the very end, when she says:

"One of my favorite scenes in all of Beyonce’s new videos is in “Partition” when she drops that napkin just so that white woman has to pick it up. I read it as an incredible moment wherein a powerful black woman flips the script on white women who are constantly trying to put her in “her place” and in one subtle movement puts them in theirs."

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mia.  Really?

So, here we have Malcolm in his younger days then, ready to respond to me, "nothing," when I ask what it is I can do.  

If the point is to "flip the script" and put white women in our place, then what?  White people's place is to pick up the droppings of black people?  To now be inferior to black people?  To further the dichotomy, the segregation, the hierarchical structure, just inverted?  And then what?  Then after a few hundred years of that arrangement, whites will say, "okay, now we're even."  Or the "script" will be flipped once again, after years of bitter resentment and white people will once again subjugate black people, and the cycle will continue.  

I have this same issue with women claiming superiority over men.

Working toward equality does not allow for racial superiority or gender superiority of any sort.  

I am not black.  I cannot ever empathize with the struggles, with driving while black, shopping while black, living while black.  I can only sympathize, listen, read, observe, and work from within my own community.  

I teach my students about black history.  I buy my daughter books with children of color, dolls with different skin color.  I take her to my city parks where she will encounter children of all colors.  And, yes, I do hope to befriend mothers of color along the way.  Because I think our experience on earth is enriched by our differences, not by our similarities.  I learn more from people different from me than from those similar to me.  I learn from people who challenge my beliefs.  

And while I know that regardless of what I say, how carefully I choose my words, there will still be people out there who would read this and say "she's white.  She can never understand."

Fine.  But in my attempt to get there, closer to understanding, further in my fight towards equality, I will listen to Malcolm.  Not Mia.

I know my place.