How to Be Black (8 page)

(See the chapters “How to Be The Black Friend” and “How to Be The Black Employee” to further sharpen your skills as racial representative.)

Have You Ever Wanted to
Not
Be Black?

S
peaking on behalf of black people, being The Black Friend, understanding your place on the scales of blackness—all this can be quite exhausting. Sometimes, and for any number of reasons, you don't want to be black anymore, even if just for a moment.

There can be a certain mental overhead that accompanies being black, and it isn't always welcome. When I asked The Black Panel about this phenomenon, most admitted to, at one point or another, wanting to distance themselves from or even renounce their membership in Team Black America.

DAMALI AYO

I had a little bit of a “want to be Korean” phase in college. I straightened my hair, I was dying it black,
*
hanging out with Koreans. That lasted for a couple of months.

CHERYL CONTEE

In terms of “Are there times when I have wished that I wasn't black?” no, there aren't times. Certainly I've experienced real discrimination in my life, discrimination that has impacted my career and my social life, and that has been painful.

There's a young man who basically told me he wasn't going to marry me because his family said, “Just don't marry a nigger.” That was really painful to live through, like a hundred times more painful, dehumanizing, humiliating than it sounds, but I didn't wish that I wasn't black when that happened, or when I found out that I was getting paid less, like $20,000 less, than a white guy who was reporting to me.

It didn't make me wish that I wasn't black. It just made me really angry and frustrated at the inequities and even more committed to making sure that that part of my work and that part of my life is designed to remove those inequities, because they impact everyone.

I've never wished that I wasn't black. I have wished that people were more insightful. I have wished that people were more compassionate. I've wished that other people could see me for the complex being that I am, not see past my race but see that and all of the things that I have done, to embrace all of me.

Okay, so maybe Cheryl is stronger than some of us. Meanwhile, my stand-up comic panelists both acknowledged that in their younger years, they contended with Denial of Blackness attacks but have since strongly embraced race as part of their identities:

W. KAMAU BELL

I think I spent the first seventeen years of my life probably not wanting to be black half the time, at least. It seemed hard from the perspective of being one of the few black kids in the private school. Then it seemed hard from the perspective of when I was around black people: they could smell that I hadn't been around black people.

And so I spent a lot of time not wanting to be black, just because it was like, “This is too much pressure from both sides.”

It wasn't until probably I turned eighteen, I read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. I started listening to the bands Living Color and Fishbone. And I found that, “Oh, there's different ways to be black? Oh, wait a minute. Oh, okay. I like these ways. Wait a minute, John Coltrane? I like these ways.” And I started to assemble my own version of blackness.

In my mind, I picture a nineteen-year-old Kamau at a special Toy Shoppe for Self-Determination. He browses the aisles and happens upon the object of his search: a very-special-edition LEGO™ Negro Identity Building Set. It comes with pieces of various shapes and sizes, and on the side of the box is printed:

Build the black identity that works for you! Tired of being pressured by black people and others to fit their idea of blackness? Don't wear the “right” clothes? Don't listen to the “right” music? Don't commit the “right” crimes? This set will liberate you. Inside you'll find every country, every type of food, every genre of film, all granting you the unlimited power to be whoever you want to be while maintaining your strong sense of blackness.

ELON JAMES WHITE

When I was growing up I totally knew that it would be an easier world if I was white because then I wouldn't be yelled at by my uncle and my mother when we were in arguments about race.

I will fully admit that I didn't have the clear, strong feeling that I'm supposed to be black probably until the last couple of years when I realized that this time in history, what I do, the discussions I have, everything that I really find important is based on the idea that I feel that a people has been mistreated. And that even now, after all of the bullshit that happened, we're in this weird line of things where it's like well, we're not slaves, but we're not equal.

So I feel like I am supposed to be black now, and I would never want to change it now only because, as a random white guy, especially if I was a stand-up or something like that, I don't feel I could do as much good as being a black guy in this time making the arguments that I make.

Many black people reach a point of tension with their own black community when that community rejects their membership in Club Blackness and forces that person to make The Choice, as in the Questionably Black Person must choose either to continue the unauthorized activity or continue being black. This usually revolves around an activity that doesn't fit the community's cultural definition of blackness. Sometimes, sadly, it's achievement-based, such as an academic or extracurricular organization. Other times it's athletic, and can include a decision to pick a “non-black” sport over a “black” sport. Often it has nothing to do with what one does but rather
with whom
one is doing it.

JACQUETTA SZATHMARI

I had a best friend, Amanda Fry. She was white, and at a certain point when we were in third or fourth grade some black girls were like, “You have to choose between being friends with this white girl,” who's my best friend since we were four and a half or five years old, “or all black people.”

I was like, “Well, sorry, all black people. You lose out because this is my friend. I'm just going to be black on my own. I don't have time for that.”

Those kinds of situations, over time, crop up in more subtle ways as you get older, of people trying to force you to make a choice. But it's a false dichotomy. You can never choose or not choose to be black. It's impossible. It's like choosing to be five foot one or not be five foot one.

While lots of black people have had the desire to escape their blackness, Christian spent a good part of his childhood wanting to escape his whiteness and trade it for anything else:

CHRISTIAN LANDER

I've been made fun of by my father all the time for wanting to be anything but white. I wanted to be black for a really long time. I wanted to be Asian for a really long time. I wanted to be anything but white, absolutely.

White culture is very bland and generic. There are no secrets to white culture; it's all out there. If you're white and you go into a fancy restaurant in Santa Monica, there's no secret menu, you're not going to get a white discount from the waiter.

[When you're not white], you get this extra, separate thing. You get the culture of your family from somewhere else. You get this whole separate world. You get this amazing food and language and all of this stuff given to you.

As whites, believe me, we get plenty of privileges that make up for it, but I was always envious of that. I was so envious that you could be part of both.

Having a black-guy-born-in-Africa on The Black Panel gave me the chance to ask Derrick about specific instances in which he wanted to distance himself, not just from being black, but specifically from African-Americans.

DERRICK ASHONG

Are there ever any moments when I want to distance myself from Black America? Yeah, sometimes that happens. When I was in Boston, I was doing this hip-hop youth political-empowerment stuff, and the New Black Panther Party people came in, and they hit us with the “blacker than thou. We're blacker than all y'all, blacker than thou. Blah, blah, blah.”

That doesn't really work with me, because I am African. You're never going to get me with the “blacker than thou.” I'm just not feeling it.

I try not to be chauvinistic with it. I don't think Africans are superior or anything like that, but when people start to question my authentic blackness, I'm like, “I can trace my ancestry back forever in Africa. You can't really mess with me on that. I know my language, I know my culture, and I don't have to hate anyone in order to give myself an identity.”

What happened in this instance is there was this idea among some of the New Black Panther Party people—not everybody, but some of the leadership—of “Kill Whitey. Kill white people.”

DERRICK:
Why?

NBPP:
Oh, you have to kill Whitey. You know, the White Man this and this and this.

DERRICK:
Well, first of all, I ain't really here to kill anybody. I'm in grad school. I'm trying to get a degree, do my thing. I came to do research. I don't know what you're talking about killing nobody for. Secondly, you ain't got a murder rap. You ain't killed nobody, either, as far as I know. You date mad white girls, so I don't exactly see what the beef is. And, additionally, when you say, “Kill Whitey,” it just doesn't resonate with me. Because where I come from all the people who are oppressing us look like us.

NBPP:
Yes, but the White Man and Colonialism, and this and this and this.

DERRICK:
Yes, that's real. That's real. Colonialism happened. We got free. Colonialists do not dominate us the same way that they used to.

So when you say to an average kid in a place like Ghana, or anywhere in West Africa for sure, “We hate white people,” it's like, “Well, why?” We have no proximate animus. We have no reason to dislike white folks.

When I was seeing that coming from this group of exclusively African-Americans who were explicitly Afrocentric, but had very little interest in an actual African perspective, it made me want to distance myself.

So for the most part I don't feel a strong sense to distance myself from African-American culture. But when it comes to making race the defining factor of everything, I just can't get with it. I can't get with it because ultimately you have to remember I have a responsibility to my people back home and race is not what's killing us. There are other issues in the world.

Can You Swim?

T
here are a number of persistent stereotypes about the things black people
don't
or
can't
do: eat organic food, tip, go camping, do yoga, travel, show up on time, et cetera.
*
Sometimes large portions of the black community embrace one or another of such notions, but in my own life, I actually tend to do and enjoy the things commonly on the list of activities black people don't do. I blame my mother. She got us started on organic food, yoga, travel, and more, very early on. One of the most persistent things black people allegedly don't do is swim, but there, too, my mom got me started early.

When I was six or seven years old, my mother enrolled me in swimming classes at one of the YMCAs in Washington, DC. The pool was the largest I had seen at that point in my life, but our class stuck to the very shallow end and took advantage of various tools and flotation devices for most of the weeks of the class. One day I showed up for what I expected to be another day of splashing around in my floaties when the teachers lined all of us up at the deep end of the pool. We had never been at that end before, and I was terrified. Then I discovered true terror when, one by one, the teachers told us to swim.

I complained loudly, “But you never taught us how!” They ignored my very reasonable protest and began flinging children into the depths. It was the Middle Passage all over again. Clearly, they were trying to kill us! I saw the first few children survive these attempted executions, but that had no effect on my fears about my own chances of survival. Surely, I thought, I was about to die at the hands of these heartless serial killers masquerading as YMCA swimming instructors.

When it was my turn to take the leap of the lemming, I stood at the edge of the pool a long time, reminding all who had ears to hear, that
I did not know how to swim because I had never been swimming before
. This was so obviously wrong. I searched the faces of others at the pool for any sign of sympathy, any acknowledgment of my agony, but all I got in return were smiles. Sick people, I thought. My blood was about to be on their hands. I cried, and just as I had set my mind to flee this crime scene, someone
pushed me into the pool
. My short life flashed before my eyes. I saw myself in the hospital a few years earlier, healing from third-degree burns to my left foot. I saw myself hating my first taste of beer courtesy of my pickup truck–driving father. I saw our dog, Honey, and knew I would miss her peculiar habit of playing with rocks instead of sticks.

“It's all over,” I thought, as my body became completely submerged in a pool far deeper than my young body's height. I panicked and flailed briefly, inhaling what felt like gallons of chlorinated water, and just as I resigned myself to death's cool embrace, a miracle happened. My body began to swim! I can't say
I
began to swim, because I didn't feel that the conscious
me
was in charge, but nevertheless, I was swimming. Everyone cheered, and when I emerged from the pool at the other end, exhausted but alive, one of the instructors boasted, “We
told
you you could do it!” And I thought, “No, you tried to kill me, but unfortunately for you, I just discovered a superpower.”

After that traumatic introduction, I grew to love swimming in whatever body of water was nearest: oceans, rivers, lakes, and pools. I even spent a year on my high school swim team, though I found out that my body wasn't really constructed for competitive swimming. Today, in my constant travels, I always make sure to use the pool at whatever hotel I'm in. I consider the ability to swim a natural, fun, and important part of my life, and I'm still black. I threw this question of swimming ability to The Black Panel, and here's what they came back with.

CHRISTIAN LANDER

Can I swim? Yeah, absolutely. Just like any good white person, I took swimming lessons. I earned the badges all throughout my childhood. I had a pool at my house, which is weird because we were the only house in the neighborhood in downtown Toronto with a pool. It's probably the only reason I had as many friends as I had in high school. Yes, I can swim. I'm a pretty accomplished swimmer. I can do the butterfly.

JACQUETTA SZATHMARI

I love to swim, and I love water sports. I like water skiing. I like wind surfing. I used to do that when I was younger a lot. I grew up on the water. When you're from the Eastern Shore of Maryland—this used to infuriate me—[there were] free swimming lessons. Why was I the only black person, girl or boy, at my age that would take the free swimming lessons? Everyone else would just be like, “Brother at the pool! Ah!” afraid that water would get splashed up on their face. I'm like, “Who cares? We're all nappy-headed, shot to the grease. A little bit of water isn't going to hurt. It's free.”

Plus, I'm OCD and very pragmatic, so I'm like, “If I fall in the water off a boat or something like that, I need to know what I'm doing.” I don't know what it is about the swimming thing. I like to swim. It's good exercise.

ELON JAMES WHITE

Funny enough, I can't swim and it's not because I'm black. I went to summer camp as a child, and we used to go to the beach and stuff like that, there were chances to learn how to swim, I just didn't learn how to swim. I also can't drive. I live in New York!

DAMALI AYO

I am not a very good swimmer. I have control issues, so when my feet get too far off the ground, I panic. That might be a history of just distrust built in from the oppression, but it could be a childhood problem.

CHERYL CONTEE

I can swim. Actually, I took swimming lessons at the local suburban pool. My swimming, though, could be stronger. But yeah, I can swim. That said, there were some interesting pool interactions with the local kids.

Our school was very, very white. Our neighborhood was very, very white. The pool was very, very white, and we came in for some bullying and some targeted, I would say, not very positive interactions.

I remember my brother, a kid asked him if his color would wash off, if that was going to be a problem for him. Another kid wanted to know why my [hands were different colors on the top and bottom]. Yeah.

DERRICK ASHONG

Yes, I can swim. I can swim quite well. I learned to swim relatively late.

You know what's funny? If I go to the beach, I ain't getting in the water. It's cold, and I like to be warm. I'm also not just going to sit around in the sun all the time, because I have a tan. So when I go to the beach, I walk around in the sand, I buy a hot dog, and I go home. If there's volleyball, we'll play it. Otherwise we sit, we look at the girls, and kick it. But I'm not into jumping around in the ocean overly much.

I can swim, though, and I used to play water polo in school and things like that. It was fun. I used to be on a swim team. I was always the last one, because my bones are dense.

W. KAMAU BELL

I can swim well. I've been swimming all my life. I'm a fairly good swimmer. Yes, I can swim. I can do several different strokes . . . I can't float that much, but that's because I'm 250 pounds, six foot four, built for slavery and the revolution.