Lies a Brown Girl Once Believed by Sonja White

I was 7 years old when I was called a “nigger” for the first time. It happened at a Girl Scout meeting where one of the girls I considered to be a friend informed our whole troop that she was having a birthday sleepover party; She passed out invitations to every girl in our troop but skipped over me. I thought it was by error so I said, “You forgot mine!” She looked at me in tears and said, “ You can’t come because my mom said that you are a nigger”.  Growing up in my household with a mother who was black and a father who was white I had never heard the term because my parents did not use that language, and taught us that everyone is equal. So I responded, “ok” and went on my way.

My mother picked me up from Girl Scouts that night and asked me how my day went and I told her that we had to go to the store to pick up a gift for my friend because it was her birthday and my mother agreed. She asked me when her party was and I told her that it was a sleepover that I could not attend because I was a nigger.  What happened after I told my mom changed my life. My mother got big eyed and asked me to again confirm what I said. I told her again that I could not go to the party because I was a nigger.  My mom asked me if I knew what that word meant and I told her “not really”.

At that time my mother informed me that the word nigger was not a compliment, but an insult and that I was never to let anyone call me that again. She explained to me the best way she could what racism was and that it was not acceptable all while trying to maintain my innocence. Sadly, within my mother explaining what the term meant I had to learn that my skin color was a problem and that some people in this country did not think I deserved the right to be considered equal to my white peers. Although, my mother had enrolled me into Girl Scouts to empower me as a little girl, she was forced to removed me to save me from ignorance.

From that moment on I resented everything about being a black woman and I wanted to be as far removed from it as much as I possibly could because in my eyes it was wrong.  I knew that my skin was brown but I let society tell me that I was the exception, the token, and a unicorn in the world of black people. My surroundings made it very easy to do so. I was in all honors classes where often times I was 1 of 3 black people in the classroom, all of my friends were white girls, and I was a varsity player on my schools predominately white lacrosse team.

It was not until my junior year of high school when I was 16 years old when my stepfather who is black asked me a simple question. He asked me, “ Don’t you have any black friends?” and I responded, “I have nothing in common with black girls.” He brought me to a mirror and asked me about what I saw.  Although at the time I did not admit this, that was the first time I truly saw myself as a black woman. Although I acknowledged at that time that I had a problem, I never addressed it.

A year later, I was in my senior year of high school when I received a letter from the coach of Howard University’s Women’s Lacrosse Team. It turned out that Howard University was home to the only all black D-1 Women’s Lacrosse Team in the nation and they wanted me to come out for a recruitment trip.  Originally I only agreed to visit for the free trip to Washington, D.C. and went in with the assumption that I would not have anything in common with any of the girls on the team.

To my surprise I was wrong, majority of the girls on Howard’s Lacrosse team grew up in similar neighborhoods to mine and felt like they were the unicorn black girls in their communities too. It was at this moment that I discovered the lie I had been telling myself since I was 7 years old after that tough lesson from my mother. The lie I had been telling myself is that being black was wrong and that I was better than other black girls.

I chose to attend Howard University in the fall of 2007 and to this day it was the best decision I have made in my life.  The moment I walked into my first class I felt true freedom and I have not turned back since.

Sometimes I am truly embarrassed at my past beliefs about myself and other black women. So I have dedicated my life to educating those who are just as ignorant as I was less than 10 years ago.  I don’t want any little black girl to ever have to look at herself in the mirror and see herself as the problem and not as a queen that comes from a shared bloodline of other great black women such as Harriet Tubman, Beyoncé’, Maya Angelou, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and many others that paved that way for us.  I am so glad that I found my truth, and discovered how magical and powerful being a black woman truly is.

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Sonja White is a blogger and is currently a resident of Washington, D.C. she attended Howard University as a Psychology Major but wished that she would have studied Journalism. She is in the process of writing her first book and she was always taught as a child that it is far more impressive to know a lot about several subjects rather than knowing a lot about one subject in particular. She is a firm believer that "Perspective and Understanding make the world go round." Oprah Winfrey is her greatest role model and Kanye West is her soulmate from a past life, she identifies as spiritual and meditates daily.

Us vs Them: A Divide in Me by Keyonna M.

“We’re not those people, [the people] who own thousand dollar Mac computers.”—my mother

It almost seems trivial now, looking back on the words that my mother said to me when I was twenty years old. I was telling her how I wanted to buy a MacBook Pro because I wanted to get into video editing one day—at the time my school only had the latest video editing software on the MAC computers and because I had never used one, it was something new for me to learn and explore.

The words that I am sure my mother meant to be harmless stuck with me, they haunted me. There was an US and a THEM. In that moment it was made clear to me that I was straddling the line between both.

I am both the little girl who was born, raised, and still resides in the hood, and the grown woman with ambition for greater things. I want to own my own business one day, I want to own a home, a car, and be able to have a nice savings. I didn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle. I didn’t want to settle. I didn’t want my current situation or the fact that I was born into a poor family determine the type of person that I was or the person that I had the potential to be.

What my mother did with her words was inadvertently placed a stigma in my lap. She planted the seed in my head. I was now painfully aware of the divide between the two sides of me. On the US side was my family, the neighborhood that I grew up in, the people that I knew, it was the street smarts that I had acquired over the years in order to keep myself safe and drama free in my neighborhood.

On the THEM side was the life I was building for myself, it was me as the first person in my family to go to college, me preparing to become a professional woman, my tastes that were growing and evolving, my need to explore and see a world outside of my current surroundings.

My mother’s words stuck with me as I made the change from Community College to University. I had graduated with an associate's degree in social work and was moving on to continue my education. Within my first year of University, I was thrown into a few US vs. THEM moments that had me questioning my place on either side.

It came in small, unnoticeable moments to other people but registered as microaggressions to me. It was in the way that my first social work professor complained about her neighbor daily.

“There is this lady on my block who annoys the crap out of me. This woman literally throws food out of her house. I’m talking old bread and rice. She says she is feeding the birds but it is like, ‘lady, don’t you know you are feeding rodents?’ It’s disgusting. She’s bringing down the quality of our neighborhood.”

I sat in class perplexed by what the real problem was. How did a discussion on gentrification and the homeless population in the city turn into my professor bashing her neighbor? Feeding the birds in my opinion didn’t make this woman disgusting or whatever other offensive term my professor used to describe her neighbor. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised considering that this was the same professor who walked in on the first day of class and after getting a call on her phone, she said to the students in the room, “Hey guys, I have to take this call. We’re on the honor system so don’t steal my stuff.”

I was put off by her statement but I thought I was just a new student being sensitive and not fully understanding how university professors were vs. the professors at my community college.

This a university and this professor was a counselor when she wasn’t teaching. She couldn’t possibly be this insensitive and lack the knowledge to know that just because someone is different than you, doesn’t mean that they are less than you. Someone who does something that you wouldn’t do, doesn’t make them disgusting or wrong, they are just different.

Being a twenty-one year old girl in a new environment, I didn’t challenge my professor when she would talk down on this woman. I watched other students throw out their two cents, agreeing with my professor. And I just wondered, ‘How is this a room full of future social workers and counselors?’

Every time my professor talked about her neighbor, I felt like she was talking about my grandmother or great-grandmother. It was a normal thing for my grandmother and great-grandmother to give us pieces of bread to break up and feed to the birds. As a kid, it was something that I enjoyed. When I was feeding the birds in my backyard, I used to pretend that I was one of those Disney Princesses. It was magical for me. To get to college and find out that some educated woman with multiple degrees considers my little piece of magic as a kid as something disgusting or devaluing, it felt like a personal blow even though it wasn’t.

The feeding of the birds stuck with me because my professor used this lady as an example all the time and because it was something so innocent that was made into this bad thing. People go to parks and feed birds, hell I have even seen people on bus stops throw food to pigeons. None of these people were disgusting or devaluing the spot where they fed the birds at.

In my public speaking class, I was confronted again with this idea of US vs. THEM. While prepping for a speech debating whether to build a casino in an urban area, a classmate of mine brought up a casino that was located in the city that I was born, raised, and still reside in.

“I would never go to that casino because you risk dying just stepping foot in that city. Those people there, man...” His voice trailed off as he shook his head, him and the three other people in our little group laughed.

Our group was made up of myself and another black woman, two white guys, and a white woman. I didn’t fit in with any of them.

The other black woman in my group had come from some nice middle class family with both a mom and a dad. She went to Catholic school and she was the type who laughed at jokes about people in the inner city, people who were working class and working poor.

I felt small in that classroom. I couldn’t focus on the speech I was supposed to give because as my group members laughed and cracked a few more “jokes,” I was screaming internally, “I’m one of those people. I’m sitting next to you right in this classroom. I’m getting the same education as you and probably working ten times harder because I’m working two jobs to pay for all of this.”

But I said nothing. They never knew that I lived in the place that they deemed unworthy of them even stepping one foot in. I felt like a coward for not speaking up, for not defending my community. My inner voice was yelling but I sat there composed. If I had said something, I risked looking too sensitive, too emotional. They already had formed an opinion of everyone in my community, mentioning that I was one of “those people” would have only made them talk about it behind my back. Remaining silent allowed me to listen to the words directly from the source. I knew first hand what they would think of me if they had saw me in the streets vs. in the classroom.

By the third time the divide between US and THEM came up, I was annoyed but I didn’t take it as a personal blow. I was one in a group of six women working on a project for a leadership class. Myself, another black woman, and four white women made up the group. While leaving the cafe where we held our weekly group meetings, the other black woman looked across the street and made the comment, “It’s crazy that the hood is right there. We pay all this money for school and we are right in the middle of the hood.”

Awkward chuckles and low agreements from other group members followed. It was a slight relief that the other group members were a little more aware of the community around us. They chuckled but it was after a pause and looks around to see if it was okay laugh. It was awkward and you could see their discomfort while in the split second of deciding if it was inappropriate or funny. They found it funny enough to give it a chuckle. I didn’t. The woman who made the comment was ahead of me so she couldn’t see the look I was giving her. Was she just making a random observation? Maybe but it annoyed me coming from her. The neighborhood that she was talking about was predominantly black families living in public housing. No one wants to live in what is deemed a “bad neighborhood,” but for many families, this is all that they have. Her tone held this superiority to it, as if she thought she shouldn’t be breathing the same air as the people in the community surrounding our school.

As quickly as she made the observation, the conversation had flowed onto another topic. I can’t remember what the topic was because I was in my head thinking about her comment. I wasn’t offended because at that point, I had dealt with comments about the inner city, working poor, and bad communities for two years. I had heard it on every level; a white female professor, a white male classmate, and a black female classmate. There was an US and a THEM and I was straddling the line between both.

At home it was no better. On one hand people acted like they were proud of me for going to college but the second I made a mistake or did something that my family didn’t like, I got called an “educated dummy” or someone would say, “You’re so smart with all that education, why don’t you figure it out?”

I felt like there was nowhere I could turn, no one that I could talk to that would truly understand me. Within my family, no one understood the stresses of going to school full time while working two jobs. They didn’t understand eight page papers, and thirty minute group presentations. All that they saw was that I was never home and they took my absence as running away from my responsibilities.

I can't lie and say that it didn’t hurt or that I didn’t feel alone because I did. Not having anyone to understand you and not making connections with the people around you, can make a person feel really isolated. Everywhere I turned, I wasn’t good enough and I wasn’t doing enough. For the first time in my life, I felt like a failure. I was failing because I couldn’t even find the balance in me. I was being swallowed whole by two sides that didn’t fully see me.

But somehow in the midst of my isolation, the stubborn part inside of me made the choice that I wasn’t going to let anyone define who I was and who I had yet to become. I wasn’t going to allow the words of my peers to be my judge, jury, and executioner; sentencing me to a lifetime of being silenced and shamed for where I came from and the person that I was because of it. I wasn’t going to allow my mother’s life expectations to be my reality.

I shut out all of the noise and stopped trying appease the US and the THEM. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I got to know me, the real me. Not the lie that people told me about who I was supposed to be.

In Search of My Own Garden by Anneliese Wilson

For avid readers like myself, there comes a time when you read a book that introduces you to yourself. It feels as if, with each page, the author reveals a new side of you. All of your hidden layers are slowly revealed—layers you thought that no one would see.

In my junior year of high school, I was introduced to the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston’s novel tells the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman discovering her independence and strength in her small community in Florida. I have never visited Florida, let alone grown up in the state, but Janie’s story felt very much like my own. A black girl becoming a black woman who learns how to be free in a society that frowns upon her blackness and femininity. Hurston’s novel was the first time I saw a black woman shown as complex and fully human in literature.

The biggest lie black women have been told about their womanhood is that they are not the authors of their own stories. When black women’s stories come from the mouths of others, they take on many forms. We are the women who suffer cycles of abuse, but we still somehow maintain smiles on our faces. We are the loud and nagging partners that are incapable of being wifey material. We are the spunky sidekick to our non-black friends that somehow never get our day in the sunshine.

These narratives are often told as tragedies that always end with us remaining independent and strong, despite being dehumanized. If our life was a book, our perceived strength would be the tattered, torn and stained cover that binds a compelling story. In many ways, the binding tells a greater story than the pages.

The problem with other people telling our stories is that they only share one chapter. Living in this world as a black woman is a unique experience. We are often imitated yet constantly undervalued. We are undervalued by black men, by people of other races, and sometimes by our very own sisters. Historically, our narratives have been stained with tragedy—some imagined, some real. 

Much of what we see in daily life revolves around sharing one chapter of our story. However, black women have chapters upon chapters about our lives. There is loss but there is also love; there is strength but there is also weakness. I have been incredibly guilty of believing I can only have one narrative. As I have grown older, I have become dedicated to authentically stating who I truly am. For the longest time, I became comfortable with viewing myself as the child of single mother who grew up in a white area that never really accepted me. While this narrative is true, I have so many other stories to tell.

I am an accomplished college graduate that finished with honors and distinction, I am a lifelong advocate for those affected by cancer, I am a hopeless romantic who tends to form crushes quickly, I am a badass baker that can make a mean batch of chocolate chip cookies, I am an adventurer that loves to hammock in peaceful places that allow me to reflect, I am a closeted goth that loves watching The Addams Family and listening to The Smiths, and, above all, I am so much more than people expect from me. I am a complex black woman.

When people ask me what I want for myself in the future, I say, “To be free.” Folks are usually puzzled when I make this statement. To me, it seems so simple. I want to live each day in a way that allows me to be at peace with how my life exists. Of course, racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression will continue to threaten my joy for as long as I am alive. It would be foolish for me to believe that each day would be like a Corinne Bailey Rae video. Be that as it may, my quest to live as a free black woman continues to be a revolutionary act.

Every day the world tries to tell me that I don’t matter but I am still grateful to be a black woman. Each of us represent a different story that deserves to be heard. Our freedom exists in our ability to be our own storytellers and to continue to show the world what we already know to be true: we are complex and beautifully divine beings that have an awe-inspiring human experience.

As I’ve grown older, I realize how important Zora Neale Hurston is to my growth as a black woman. While many black writers of the Harlem Renaissance wanted to focus on the struggle that is the black experience, she decided to focus on our full experience. She once stated, “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.”

Too often, the struggles of black women become romanticized or exploited. Our struggle is ugly but our spirit is beauty. Every day when I wake up, I remind myself that it’s my duty as a storyteller to show the world another example of how brightly black women shine. Much like Janie, I am able to recognize my struggle and still enjoy the sunshine.

Self-Reflection By Amy Taylor

On December 25th, 1983 on a New England frozen winter morning, I was born to a black father and white mother who loved me dearly. My family moved to California in 1985 where I grew up in a predominantly white suburb of Los Angeles. In all honesty, my environment was color-blind and I had a very happy and healthy childhood.  As I have gotten older I understand how fortunate I was to have not experienced the painful truths about identity. I never had to choose to identify as ‘black’ or ‘white’ because I only identified as Amy.

That being said, I did have the normal teenage insecurities. I didn’t have white features, but also did not look like anyone else I knew. My features did not resemble my mom and she was unable to teach me standard beauty skills, which made me feel isolated. Luckily, I had supportive friends who didn’t see my curly hair, or my bushy eyebrows and they never made me ever feel less than beautiful.

When I went to college in the fall of 2002 I was not prepared for the exposure of black culture and with it, internal racism. My sheltered upbringing made me naïve to the twisted concepts such as ‘skin tone ranking’ and ‘over sexualized black woman’. It blew my mind because I grew up in liberal Los Angeles where I was exposed to history and the melting-pot genetics of our city and I thought myself cultured. I remember my parents standing in solidarity during the Rodney King beatings and the LA Riots.  In fact, I only know my black family, as my mother was disowned by her parents. So the first time exposure to the black community its struggles was a very impactful period of my life.

The biggest lie I’ve been told about my blackness is that I am not black enough.

When people look at me the last ethnic group they “guess” (because of course it’s a game to figure my genetic make-up) is black. My natural hair is tight and curly, but I wear it straight these days. My go-to joke is that I tell people, “I am black similarly to the look of Rashida Jones”.

My skin is light brown, and I look like my ancestors; but to my peers I was not ‘black enough’ because I didn’t resemble a stereotypical black woman.

This was not my interpretation; those two words “not enough” were said to my face on several occasions. That was a hard lesson to learn during my freshman year of college. I struggled with identity for the first time in my life.

That got me thinking about The Stereotypical Black Woman and The Black Queen.  Think about it. Definitions, constraints, and classifications used for purposes of control. These grandiose notions are alive and well in the twenty-first century. Black women are a diverse spectrum of hue and magic that weave together to make up a community, and when we judge one another off of stereotypes it becomes a never ending vicious cycle. For me, the reality is that I am never going to fit the white beauty standard or the black beauty standard. I have learned that there is ‘no one way to be black’, just as there is no one way to be human.

Earlier in the year there was an art exhibition in LA titled Skin. One of the exhibits had blank books and patrons were encouraged to write a story of their testimony.

This was my entry:

“Last year, in 2015, I approached a (black) man whom I was interested in dating. As the conversation progressed we had a lot in common. I revealed that civil rights are also important to me and that I am indeed a black woman. He proceeded to laugh in my face. When I asked him why, he said that he assumed it was a joke. According to him, white women target black men and he figured that his skin tone was the main reason I was contacting him”.  

In the past few years I have been embracing my black woman identity. Through self reflection I uncovered that my biggest hang up was in how others saw me. While, I wholeheartedly identified as a black woman, I knew the world didn’t see me as black and it is confusing. My insecurities would strike in public, especially if I was out with a black man. Would people judge me thinking he was out with a white woman? This false notion of acceptance in hindsight is ridiculous, but the feeling's justified.

My Truth is, I am American. My parents are American.  I can’t claim an African Country as my heritage. I can’t convince others and prove my worth.  I am uniquely my mother and father’s loved child.

Over the past year I decided to take my blackness into my hands. I have joined several organizations in Los Angeles, including the Urban League on a path of self-discovery among my peers. On this journey I have found passionate and loving sisters and brothers who make me feel valuable and loved. My truth is I am black girl magic, which to me means acceptance, community, and abundance.

Amy is a project manager in the entertainment and music industries. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

 

Lies Given and Handed Back by Luki

I've been told a lot of things about myself. "You won't graduate high", "You won't do much but be just like her", "nobody will ever love you as much as I do" the list goes on and on. Each situation I believed them. Not only that but I behaved the way they wanted me to in order to make these lies a reality. In each situation I had a close encounter with God that made me see that no matter what lies were told to me, my joy and my magic were given to me for a reason. Playing into what other people had to say wasn't going to get me closer to where I needed to be.

The biggest lies though came from a long relationship I was in. He had me believing that he was the only one, that nobody would love me like he did, and that if I left I would never feel love again. He had me believing that his love, as crazy as it was, was the only kind of love I was worth. Overcoming those lies and that mindset wasn't easy and it didn't happen overnight but my persistence, my poetry, and talks with God definitely helped me get through. Morning affirmations and reassuring myself that I was worth way more than what I was settling for accompanied with my poems checking myself pushed me to a place of self love and acceptance. "You've been so wrapped up in him that you done let you pass by watching all your dreams and ambitions die" (line from "Today" by Luki) was a place where I had hit rock bottom in that relationship.

I had to realize that, "This box they want you in doesn't fit...you are a beautiful tornado the calmest tsunami I've ever seen" (line from "Flaws" by Luki) is where I am now knowing that I am a queen and that no matter what mistake I've made or what wrong turn I took, I am success and the true definition of strength. I'm magic and I'm real!!

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Jonté “Luki” Barrett has been writing poetry since 2007. Upon beginning to perform, she has blazed stages for #PurePoetryDc on U Street and various Busboys and Poets locations throughout the DMV Area. When she picked up her pen it was simply for communication due to the lack of outlets. Coming through the last 9 years, she has grown to love and appreciate herself through her writings. While reminding herself of the beauty in struggle and the positivity in every part of her being, she uses her pen to push this kind of love, acceptance, and freedom to everyone she meets. It’s ok to love, to hurt, to be sexy, to cry, to feel pain, and to experience joy because Loving U Kills Ignorance.