The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (19 page)

After I graduated and moved to New York, my musical ambitions took a hiatus, due to lack of enablers. All my friends were too busy taking their careers seriously while I was still trying to figure myself out. But my desire never went away. In fact, the discovery that my younger brother’s music group, Fly Guys, had gained a bit of internet fame due to a popular dance group using their song in a video actually helped to restore my hope for a musical future. When I moved back to Los Angeles after a two-year stint in New York, making a music video for the Fly Guys was one of my first projects. Between their lyrics, their stage presence, and their dedication, I learned a lot from them.

In Los Angeles, I was also reunited with my best friends from high school. In the summer of 2009, before I returned to Senegal, Jerome, Devin, and Daisy (my fellow HOC-D alum) were joking around in our Facebook messages and decided to throw a party at my mother’s house and invite all our mutual friends. It was my L.A. homecoming party, and it was also the formation of the Doublemint Twins (now known as The Doublemints). That same summer, a group trip to Magic Mountain and an accompanying heat wave prompted us to start singing, “That’s why we got on our booty shawts, booty shawts!” So pleased with ourselves, we vowed we would make that our first single. Around the same time, the first episode of
Awkward Black Girl
was still stewing in my head. By the time I figured out what the opening scene was going to be, I knew I wanted to include a raunchy song. While I initially envisioned a Nicki Minaj song, when we sat down and actually recorded our lyrics on my computer, I was inspired to make it the opening song of
my first episode. A week before I premiered the first episode, we recorded the single in the Fly Guys garage-based studio and boom, magic was made.

Even with my love for ratchet music, I’ve always had a fear of what my children will be listening to in the future, when they are in middle school. I have a preemptive desire to shield them from sex for as long as possible and to protect their innocence as my parents did for me. I joke with a college friend of mine, Adia, who had the same parental restrictions as I did, that we will raise our kids around one another. We agree that friends make all the difference in the exposure you have and the life choices you make. I don’t regret meeting any of my friends, and I don’t regret my generation’s affinity for ratchet music. And, while my high school and college reunions will contain the raunchiest soundtracks, I won’t ever bring that shit home to my future kids.

The Struggle

I
don’t remember the exact day I demilitarized from my blackness. It’s all a blur and since I’m fairly certain that militants never forget, and I forget stuff
all
the time, I guess I wasn’t meant to be one.

I love being black; that’s not a problem. The problem is that I don’t want to always
talk
about it because honestly, talking about being “black” is extremely tiring. I don’t know how Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson do it. I know why Cornel West and Tavis Smiley do it. They
love
the attention and the groupies. But the rest of these people who talk, think, and breathe race every single day—how? Just how? Aren’t they exhausted?

The pressure to contribute to these conversations now that we have a black president is even more infuriating.

“What do you think about what’s going on in the world? And how our black president is handling it?” asks a race baiter.

“It’s all good, I guess,” I want to answer, apathetically, with a
Kanye shrug. “I’m over it.” But am I really? Could I be even if I wanted to?

Even now, I feel obligated to write about race. It’s as though it’s expected of me to acknowledge what we all already know. The truth is, I slip in and out of my black consciousness, as if I’m in a racial coma. Sometimes, I’m so deep in my anger, my irritation, my need to stir change, that I can’t see anything outside of the lens of race.

At other times I feel guilty about my apathy. But then I think,
isn’t this what those who came before me fought for?
The right
not
to have to deal with race? If faced with a choice between fighting until the death for freedom and civil rights and living life without any acknowledgment of race, they’d choose the latter.

Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland, was easy. I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet’s Planeteers. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

All that changed when my family moved to Los Angeles and placed me in a middle school where my blackness was constantly questioned—and not even necessarily in the traditional sense, i.e. “You talk white, Oreo girl” or “You can’t dance, white girl.” Those claims were arguable, for the most part. My biggest frustration in the challenge to prove my “blackness” usually stemmed from two very annoying, very repetitive situations:

SITUATION #1: “I’m not even black, and I’m blacker than you.” It’s one thing when other African Americans try to call me out on my race card, but when people outside my ethnicity have the audacity to question how “down” I am because of the bleak, stereo
typical picture pop culture has painted of black women, it’s a whole other thing. Unacceptable. I can recall a time when I was having a heated discussion with a white, male classmate of mine. Our eighth-grade class was on a museum field trip as the bus driver blasted Puff Daddy’s “Been Around the World” to drown us out.

It began as a passive competition of lyrics, as we each silently listened for who would mess up first. By the second verse, our lazy rap-whispers escalated to an aggressive volume, accompanied by rigorous side-eyes by the time we got to, “Playa please, I’m the macaroni with the cheese,” and I felt threatened. Was this fool seriously trying to outrap me? And why did I care? After the song ended, he offered his opinion: “Puff Daddy is wack, yo.” How dare he? Not only was I pissed, but I felt as if he had insulted my own father (who did I think I was? Puff Daughter?).

“Puff Daddy is tight,” I retorted. He rolled his eyes and said, “Have you heard of [insert Underground rapper]? Now,
he’s
dope.” I hadn’t heard of him, but I couldn’t let this white boy defeat me in rap music knowledge, especially as others started to listen. “Yeah, I know him. He’s not dope,” I lied, for the sake of saving face. Perhaps because he saw through me or because he actually felt strongly about this particular artist, he asked me to name which songs I thought were “not dope.” Panic set in as I found myself exposed, then—“You don’t even know him, huh? Have you even heard of [insert Random Underground rapper]?”

As he continued to rattle off the names of make-believe-sounding MCs, delighted that he had one-upped me, he managed to make me feel as though my credibility as a black person relied on my knowledge of hip-hop culture. My identity had been reduced to the Bad Boy label clique as this boy seemingly claimed my black card as his own.

Of course, as I grew older and Ma$e found his calling as a reverend, I realized there was more to being black than a knowledge of rap music, and that I didn’t have to live up to this pop cultural archetype. I began to take pride in the fact that I couldn’t be reduced to a stereotype and that I didn’t have to be. This leads me to my next situation:

SITUATION #2: “Black people don’t do that.” Or so I’m told by a black person. These, too, are derived from (mostly negative) stereotypes shaped by popular culture. The difference is that in these situations, we black people are the ones buying into these stereotypes.

When I was a teenager, for example, others questioned my blackness because some of the life choices I made weren’t considered to be “black” choices: joining the swim team when it is a known fact that “black people don’t swim,” or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken. These choices and the various positive and negative responses to them helped to broaden my own perspective on blackness and, eventually, caused me to spurn these self-imposed limitations. But not before embarrassing the hell out of myself in a poor attempt to prove I was “down.” I’ll never forget submitting a school project in “Ebonics” for my seventh-grade English class, just to prove that I could talk
and
write “black.” I was trying to prove it to myself just as much as I was to everyone around me.

Even in my early adulthood, post-college, I’d overtip to demonstrate I was one of the good ones. Only recently have I come to ask,
What am I trying to prove and to whom am I proving it?
Today, I haven’t completely rid myself of the feeling that I’m still working through Du Bois’s double consciousness.

For the majority of my life I cared too much about how my blackness was perceived, but
now
? At this very moment? I couldn’t
care less. Call it maturation or denial or self-hatred—I give no f%^&s. And it feels great. I’ve decided to focus only on the positivity of being black, and especially of being a black woman. Am I supposed to feel oppressed? Because I don’t. Is racism supposed to hurt me? That’s so 1950s. Should I feel marginalized? I prefer to think of myself as belonging to an “exclusive” club.

While experiencing both types of situations—being made to feel not black enough by “down” white people on one hand and not black enough by the blacks in the so-called know on the other—has played a role in shaping a more comfortably black me, in the end, I have to ask: Who is to say what we do and don’t do? What we can and can’t do? The very definition of “blackness” is as broad as that of “whiteness,” yet the media seemingly always tries to find a specific, limited definition. As CNN produces news specials about us, and white and Latino rappers feel culturally dignified in using the N-word, our collective grasp of “blackness” is becoming more and elusive. And that may not be a bad thing.

Halfrican

G
rowing up post–
Coming to America
had some benefits. For one, the 1988 film helped to counter the stereotypical, impoverished,
National Geographic
images of Africa that so many were used to seeing at that time. Ironically, the year prior, Eddie Murphy’s own comedy special,
Raw
,
had helped to perpetuate the notion of uncivilized Africans. Mfufu, with the bone in her nose, formerly “butt naked on a zebra” suddenly expressed her dissatisfaction with the economic inequality of their relationship, “Ed-die, why you treat me like animaux?”

Coming to America
brought on a shift in dumb questions, from “Oh you’re from Africa—do you hunt lions?” to “Oh, you’re from Africa—is your family royalty?” I didn’t have any African friends outside of family until I went to high school. Even then, the many Nigerians there didn’t flaunt their African ancestry, and I wasn’t included in their clique because I wasn’t one of them.

In my French class, I met a girl named Monique from Zaire who, like me, already spoke French and was taking the class to get an
easy “A.” More advanced in her French than I was, she knew all the French slang and spoke in the tone of a peppy Valley girl. She seemed to relish the opportunity to secretly talk shit about our peers in French. “
Le gars la est trop con
,” she’d exclaim to me with a smile in a sweet tone that suggested we were discussing flowers and candy.

And we became fast friends when she found out I was from Senegal.

“Oh my God, the guys in Senegal are
so
cute!”

The first time I ever felt beautiful was when I went back to Senegal, my sophomore year of high school. It was the first time I had boys and men pining after me. As a moderate feminist, I shouldn’t rely on the validation of men to feel a sense of worth, but as I mentioned, it was high school, so stop judging. Initially, I convinced myself that all of this sudden attention was because I had lived in America. I wasn’t naïve to the fact that many Senegalese men saw foreign women as an opportunity to “escape,” to establish a better life abroad. Americans were particularly coveted, back when the dollar meant a damn. Before euros emerged as the desired currency, everyone wanted to go to the States. Even people who swore they hated America wanted a piece of it, somehow, some way. I took this into account whenever I was hit on, or whenever I was proposed to, or whenever men offered to impregnate me—you know, the usual.

European and American women of all shapes, sizes, and facial structures were shamelessly courted by Senegalese men of varying beauty, so I knew not to take their attention too seriously. In some sense, we were all like the hefty, juicy chicken mirages seen only by the hungry, thirsty stragglers lost in the desert, fantasizing about survival. But whatevs—I finally experienced what it meant to feel
beautiful. And part of me denied that I was in the same category as those other women, because I was part Senegalese. I was a product of their generational loins, indirectly.

Superficial reasons aside, my other “feelings of beauty” stemmed from the interactions I had with my Senegalese family, whom I hadn’t seen since elementary school. I was on the brink of womanhood now, and I had a new appreciation for them. One particular cousin, Ndeye Awa, is someone I’ve looked up to since childhood. With smooth ebony skin and sculpted features, she is absolutely beautiful. The running joke among the family is that she’s “too skinny,” but there was always a general consensus that she could come to the States and be a model, easily. She and her older sister, Lissa, who was closer in age to my older brother, were the absolute coolest. Lissa was what the Senegalese call
claire
(literally: “clear,” meaning light-skinned, which by Senegalese standards meant her skin was copper-colored). Curvy and very beautiful, she could have had her pick of men. To know that I was related to these two alone already instilled in me a sense of pride. But when I returned the summer before my tenth-grade year, and was reunited with all of my aunts, my first cousins, and some of my first cousins’ children under the roof of the family patriarch, I was overwhelmed with happiness. This was
my
family.