I spent most of my life avoiding conversations about race. In grade school, we learned about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement but that was just a chapter in a textbook that I had to memorize for a test. I had to know dates. I had to remember certain figures and the roles they played in the events of history. I had to read the oversimplified chapters from McGraw-Hill and ace a test so I could move on to the next grade.

I sat in classrooms in sleepy suburban towns where I was more often than not the only black kid. I would feel uneasy as we read the chapters on slavery, feeling the eyes of my white classmates glancing at me to see if any emotion registered on my face as we learned about lynching and Jim Crow laws. I would sit quietly, hoping the unit would be over, that the eyes would stop boring into my skull, and that I could go back to existing somewhere between the margins.

My family came to the United States from Kenya when I was barely a toddler and we lived in predominantly white college towns. So, the only black people I knew were our Kenyan family friends we spent various holidays with. People who shared few similarities to the pop culture representation of the black community. The black people I knew had accents, spoke Kiswahili and were fiercely proud of their tribes. At home, it was Kenyan rules, Kenyan languages and Kenyan food.

I had always felt a sense of security knowing that I was Kenyan. I was different from my black peers, but at least, I had my cultural identity at home. However, that all changed when I was in eighth grade and a group of young black students at my sister’s high school published a list of students whom they felt weren’t black enough. The list included both of my sisters as well as a few of our family friends.

Suddenly, the outside world invaded my home and threw our collective identities out the window as we were faced with all the ways we had failed the black community in our town. I remember my parents trying to shield me from the conversation, but I wasn’t blind. They were angry, hurt, and frustrated. My father had that look in his eyes that he often got when I defied his authority, and it wasn’t pretty. I remember seeing my both my sisters cry in confusion and my parents being at a loss as to how they would explain this to them. I remember my dad on the phone with the parents of the other kids on the list, asking how they were going to handle this. It was handled. Sort of. But the pain I felt then and the confusion surrounding the whole situation has never left me.

It was one thing to be teased in passing by my black peers, but the act of publishing that list was so aggressively final. As if the judgment was now a fact to be read in textbooks by future generations. And so as I sit here in 2016 surrounded by news of young black men and women being killed merely for the color of their skin, I have to wonder where I fall in the conversation. As an individual who has been constantly told I am not “black enough,” where does my voice come into play in recent race discussions?

I spent my life just wanting to know who Mwongeli was. Who I was within my Kenyan identity and the individual I was discovering every year of my young life. I knew I was different from the black peers I encountered growing up but there was an uneasiness in the pit of my stomach that began recently as I watched news about Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and LaQuan McDonald. It started to occur to me that it didn’t matter what my nationality was or how “black” I acted, my skin was still the same color as Trayvon and every single one of the countless black people who have been killed at the hands of racism.

No one asked Tamir Rice what type of black person he identified himself as that day. No one asked Emmett Till what kind of negro he was before they lynched him. And I’m absolutely certain George Zimmerman didn’t ask Trayvon any such questions before he murdered him.

We’re all black.

It is in these hopeless moments of outright violence and injustice that I found my identity as a young black woman. I read one book here. I watched one movie there. I kept looking around me and seeing and hearing about all of the ways an individual is black. I heard different stories of people who grew up the same way I did. People who were told they weren’t black enough by their peers. Immigrants, kids from the suburbs, adopted kids. You see, what I never learned growing up was that there are so many ways to be black, there are so many ways to be a woman, my God, there are so many ways to be human. Perhaps I would have taken a step back to see that what was being said to me had nothing to do with me at all. Perhaps I would have known a little bit sooner that there are a million ways to be black. Perhaps I would have opened my mind and realized that my bullies were not representative of the whole.

Toni Morrison once said, “Definitions belong to the definers.” And all of these years later, her words ring truer than ever. I can never account for the actions of my peers growing up, I can only account for my own and I can only continue to define myself for myself within the beautiful black community I have the privilege of being a part of. I still have a long way to go in this journey to understanding race and all of the history behind it but I’ve made the choice to continue on no matter how hard it becomes. I want to learn from my peers and I want to see more representations of our community in the world and I want to have everyone as a part of the conversation because that is where the real work begins.

I don’t want children in future generations to be told they aren’t black enough. I want them to hear that they are black, and that is enough.

“Young-ish, Gifted & Unapologetically Black. I found my voice at a time when the world wanted to silence us. But here I am and I want to learn from you just as I hope you learn from me.” Twitter: @mehllennial, Instagram: @mehllennial

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Mwongeli Masesi

Writing since March 2016 · 1 story contributed