Black: A Section of Me |
Intersectionality is simply about how certain aspects of who you are will increase your access to the good things or your exposure to the bad things in life.”
-Kimberlé Crenshaw
Reflection and hindsight can lend perspective to your future. I see so much in reflection as I approach fifty. I see cloudy memories from childhood painted in pale colors as they appear in glimpses and flashes often when triggered from the bright happenings of the present.
There are, however, a few memories that are just as bright as the present; as if they were seared to imprint that moment for me to pick up and analyze during quiet times like now. There is one memory that seeps into the quiet, and it clamors loudly when I feel the enveloping anxiety that accompanies the imposture syndrome that occasionally slips into my corporate life. In that memory, I’m seven or eight years old sitting in our yellow and green kitchen with my mother. She’s at the table enjoying her breakfast, which I’m sure included runny egg yolks that blended well with the colors of our kitchen. I’m sitting on a stool at the counter so that I could be closer to the twelve-inch TV that was struggling to show a clear picture of Fat Albert via adjusted rabbit-ear antennas. As all Fat Albert episodes did, this one ended with a lesson, and an awful song about the lesson (sorry Fat Albert fans, but that was my least favorite part of the show). The lesson for this episode had to be about staying in school or something else related to education. I say that because, as that awful song was being sung, my mother nonchalantly mentioned that when she was in school they used to say people with lighter skin were the smartest. And usually the proverbial they applies to the general consensus of society often driven by small, elitist groupings whose baseless opinions are repeated, sometimes even shouted, until they become our perceived truths.
I’m sure my brow wrinkled as I frowned after she said that, because my frown is now my resting face as I seem to always be trying to make sense of things. So, at that moment, my frowning didn’t constitute anger, but a lack of understanding. Since pre-school I had sat amongst kids whose skin was lighter than mine, and I had concrete evidence that they were no smarter than those of us who had brown or black skin. As best I can remember, with all the wisdom my seven or eight years of existence allowed me, I think I replied with, my head shaking, “Then that means white people are the smartest people.”
My mother nodded and simply said, “That’s what they used to say,” before resuming her enjoyment of runny egg yolks.
Over the decades of that bright memory cycling through my quiet times, the resonating questions that have always followed are: How? and Why?
After watching George Floyd’s murder, reading facts like The 1619 Project, and witnessing public assaults on Black books and culture, it’s easy to understand the answers to both How? and Why? are the same. The How? answer just has more layers of complexity as the application of racism has had to be more malleable and adaptive with the changing times and laws that try to push our country towards what we tout.
The How? answer is why I felt my brow wrinkle as my frown deepened at a recent party when someone I was having a candid conversation with said, “We all just need to get over slavery, because no one who is living today has ever been a slave, and no one living today has ever owned a slave.” Except this time, my frown obviously wasn’t just due to a lack of understanding.
The How? answer forces you to realize that, though this party you are at is a celebration of a gay marriage between two people whom you truly love, you and your partner are the only two women of color present. The How? answer forces constraint and conformity as you determine how to now navigate this candid conversation without displaying a Black woman stereotype that surely frequents this person’s mind. The How? answer reminds you that just because someone perceives themselves to be an ally, their unrecognized privilege prevents them from being their perception.
Police killing unarmed Black people while arresting white mass shooters, workplace restrictions on braids or dreadlocks or Afros, the Ku Klux Klan, the government denying Black WWII veterans the G.I. Bill and VA loans, the necessity for the Green Book (no, not the damn movie), the withheld knowledge that Black women were intricate in sending a person to the moon, pictures of white people (men, women, and children) posing with lynched and burned Black people, the Dred Scott case, Confederate statues, the raping of enslaved women and recounting it as grandiose love affairs, red-lining, the third verse of the National Anthem, Jim Crow, and teaching children in segregated schools that they are only as smart as their hue are just a few contributions to the How? answer.
It’s easy to believe that because we have had a Black First Family and because, thanks to social media, the contributions of Black people to this country can no longer be denied, that we have overcome. It requires much more work to understand Why? I am among the mere second generation of Black people to attend fully integrated schools, and perhaps that is Why? it is completely inappropriate and offensive to say to me “we all just need to get over slavery.”
The How? answer forces you to have an outlook on the potential impact to your relationships after you upload this narrative to your site. The How? answer makes you consider the comfort-level of others, because of your concern on how your white friends and colleagues will receive this. Will they digest this with the dignity and grace they extend when we interact in person, or will they have a bitter taste as they swallow this and perceive me to be one of the many agitators who race-bait everything and hinder us all from “just getting over slavery”? Regardless of how this is received, the problem is, and yet another contribution to the How? answer, I’m consciously fighting that comfort-level so that it doesn’t dictate this narrative.