This is for every black girl that
has ever been told: “you act like a white girl”, each world a knife through the
back, skewering you into a box and leaving you there shamed and marginalized.
Nobody puts Baby in a corner, but you aren’t Baby and your back is against the
wall, kept there by preconceived notions from family members and friends who
can’t seem to wrap their heads around the way you act and talk. They tell you
that you’re trying to be some you’re not: white.
Online,
this topic has been beaten like a proverbial dead horse, and it’s probably
cliché to make this the first posting of my blog, but I want to address this in
my own words, from my own insecurities and experiences.
I
think the first time I ever heard somebody say I was acting white I was seven
years old. I overheard my mom and stepdad discussing me. He ended their
conversation with “somebody will get two for the price one: a black girl on the
outside, and a white girl on the inside.” They laughed uproariously. I sat on
the living room floor confused and hurt. Whatever asinine cartoon I had been
watching lost its appeal. Why would they say I was a “white girl” on the
inside? Was there a white girl living
in me? That couldn’t be right. Were they
making fun of me? I wondered. For the next twelve years I would hear more
the same in varying degrees from both whites and blacks alike. I couldn’t
escape people’s opinions of me no matter how hard I tried to fit in.
I
felt alienated from the other black girls around me. They teased me and called
me ‘oreo’. I was told on more than one occasion that I was ‘too dark to be
acting the way I was’, whatever that meant. I would come home angry and hurt,
not understanding why people didn’t like me for who I was. What was so wrong
with how I talked and dressed?
With
sixth grade came my interest in rock music (thank you Green Day and Fall Out
Boy!), something I vehemently hid from my black girl friends. On the bus rides home
I rapped the lyrics to Ying Yang Twins’ ‘Whisper Song’ and Usher’s ‘Yeah” like
everybody else, but secretly once I got home I ran to the TV to watch TRL and
hear ‘Hollaback Girl’ and ‘Sugar We’re Going Down’ (still classics in my book).
I
was caught one day, my love of System of a Down too great to be kept inside
once I heard a friend (white) playing Violent Pornography in class. I sang
along to the chorus absentmindedly. Another friend (black) said in annoyance,
“You would know that white song”. The small feeling of just
being wrong was back with a
vengeance.
It
wouldn’t be until eighth grade that I would fully embrace my otherness and meet other black girls who
jammed out to Panic at the Disco and S.O.A.D.; who thought Pete Wentz was way
cuter than Plies, and that Baby Phat looked tacky as hell. I started hanging
out with a more diverse group of people, racially, musically, etc. where I felt
more comfortable being myself. I only had to deal with negative comments on my
bus ride home from girls who referred to me as ‘uppity’. In loud voices they
talked about me, their voices filled with vitriol. I sat there quietly,
refusing to acknowledge their words and give them power over me. I endured the
talks about my hair (“she’s too dark for all that to be hers”, or conversely
“she thinks she’s better than us cause she got long hair, she ain’t shit”), and
my skin color. I reverted back to the seven-year-old girl who was confused
about what was wrong with her. They make
fun of me for being dark, and then make fun of me for acting white. Who do they
want me to be? By age 13 I knew I couldn’t win, so I said fuck it and did
what made me happy.
That’s
my advice to anyone reading this. Do what
makes you happy. You have to live for you, not everybody else. Life’s too
short to be something you’re not. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, why
should it matter how you dress or talk, or especially what music you listen to?
I wish I could go back to the petrified 11 year old girl who was ashamed of who
she was and tell her to shout her love of anime and alternative music to the
mountain tops. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
