White Washed

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
~Zora Neale Hurston

I grew up "the white girl" whose first alphabet book was "Jumbo Means Hello," a book of Swahili words. I spent the early '90s living on a HBCU campus with my mother. I was constantly surrounded by black, red and green Africa pendants and listening to Arrested Development. I grew up like a meek Michael Evans from Good Times, retreating to the library during class to read books of African-American history and African tribes. I would examine the plains of my face and take a mental picture, comparing it to the young, painted and scarified faces and I would report to mama every night during dinner where the Diggs' came from. We've been temporarily Ethiopian, Kenyan, South African, Cameroonian and more ... but when I got to school, I was just an "Oreo," black on the outside, white on the inside.

So was I my parents' sick joke? I mean, my name is Kimberly and in my short life, I had never sat in a churr or turned a do' knob but apparently all the other black kids around me had. I grew up in Dallas--totally out of place.

I felt like an impostor because as brown as my skin was, I was treated as if I was going to school in black face. I was intelligent. I had long, thick hair, a sharp nose, and an accent that hugged each syllable like a long lost lover. I thought I was black, but apparently I was white-washed -- a black person who talks, dresses and acts white out of shame and disgust of blackness.

So if I am white for being intelligent, do I have to be ignorant to be black? If I am white for liking to read and write or for speaking correct English, must I dumb myself down to be black? If I am white for never wearing breads or always wearing glasses, do I have to spend $500 on my hair and buy contacts to be black? I can't help that I lived a good portion of my life in the suburbs but does that now mean I have to move to the "hood" to preserve my blackness?

If being black is only based off of an ignorant, uninviting, poverty-stricken existence, then wipe me clean of my family history right now because clearly the right race did not..choose...me.

But I know this is not the case. Why? Because my grandmother picked cotton in Douglas, Georgia as a little girl and wasn't able to go to school like she wanted. She lived and fought in Jim Crow's south, so that my mother didn't have to. My mother was one of two black kids in her school; the other one was her sister. She was called racial slurs and ostracized for a while, until they got to know her.

Here I sit, the benefactor of all the work that the strong women in my family have put in so that I may live a more comfortable, integrated life in pursuit of education and progression and I'm supposed to braid my hair and dance like Sambo to be accepted amongst my own race? Absolutely not.

It took me 15 years into the voyage to find myself for me to realize that I am the epitome of black.
My skin is brown, my hair is corse and I am the great-great grandaughter of a slave. I may not know what countries in Africa my family started in, but I know exactly where I belong now. I represent a tribe of super fly, almond brown intellectuals that originated down south to turn this country out. Bad Brains and Jimi Hendrix are village people too.

I am but a burnt sienna spec in a techni-colored sea of people. The word "black" doesn't do us justice. We are custard yellow, mahogany and everything in between. The skin colors of African-American people being so vast is evidence that everything else within us can be as well. And it is -- whether some want to live an eternity in the 1800s or not.

I rock out in my underwear when no one's home. I wanna be buried in a J. Crew store. I hate catfish and I find absolutely nothing funny about Tyler Perry plays, and it makes no sense for anyone to call me less black for it. I chronically use the word awesome. I'm not Baptist and I will promptly shut anyone out of my life for calling me a bitch, whether it was "in a good way" or not.

I don't need my own music, hair care products and clothing labels. I wish I didn't need my own magazines, television shows and political activists. I don't try to make the other races around me comfortable by looking and sounding like them, and I also don't hold my tongue when I witness injustice.

And yep. Last I checked, I was still black.