Teaneck, New Jersey was a shock. Despite, having been black all my life I had never been in a room with so many black people who weren’t my family members. I had grown up going to schools where I was one of a handful of black students and tensions among the few of us were high. Though we were united by skin color, class was a different story. It was a line in the sand that, in our young age, we weren’t able to make sense of constructively. So when I walked into my first class and saw nothing but people who looked like me staring back I was visibly thrown. I hate to admit this, but I was actually uncomfortable. This is why my mother had moved us there. In Alabama, she had wanted me to be among the generation of kids who weren’t supposed to think about race- who couldn’t “see” it. But I could see it and the only thing my mother got out of her attempt at color-blind parenting was a daughter riddled with internalized anti-blackness.
In Killing Rage Ending Racism, bell hooks, frequently refers back to Toni Morrison’s “On The Backs of Blacks” where Morrison defines something called “Race Talk” as “the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than pressing African Americans to the lowest level of the racial hierarchy.” She goes on to say, “pop culture, shaped by film, theater, advertising, the press, television, and literature is heavily engaged in race talk. It participates freely in this most enduring and efficient right of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native born black population.” In a world where race was not dissected in such a way, because we weren’t supposed to “notice” it — and when I did “notice” it I was told I was seeing things that weren’t there — I had internalized “race talk” in spades. I had learned to be comfortable in my little piece of suburbia. I had lulled myself into believing that because my life walked the lines of respectability I was safe and “different” from the images frequently shown of blackness. My mother, disturbed by this, moved us to Teaneck, a suburb of New Jersey where diversity is life and not just a buzzword.
In time, I grew comfortable in Teaneck. It became my home and for the first time so did other black people. There was a very narrow view of blackness when I was growing up in the South. In Teaneck, I was able to see its vastness. Blackness across cultures, in different hues, in different languages, and class backgrounds. In a way, it helped me heal from the ways in which I and the other Black children back in Alabama treated each other. We did not know yet that there were so many ways to be Black and I did not yet know that suburbia and my diction were not going to save me. And it led to a policing of one another, on both sides, that embittered us. In Teaneck, we were able to talk freely about race in class, we were assigned Malcolm X for summer reading, and our syllabuses were diverse. I was forced to engage in conversations about race, gender, and class that I had not been able to have under the cloak of whiteness back in Alabama where my friends were white and my school was white and everything was white.
When it was time to start thinking about college my mother suggested I go to an HBCU. At the time I felt like an HBCU would not reflect what the “real world” would look like, so I declined. That was a mistake.
Though I came away with friends I hope to keep forever, there was a lot I resented about my college experience. The time I got into a screaming match on the way home from a party when a young white man got into the car and asked, “What is this sand n***er music you’re playing?” to our designated driver who was playing world music. The dejected feeling I had about being the only person who called him out and about being asked by other passengers to not make a thing of it. Having to explain to Non-Black students why they couldn’t say the N-word. Having to explain why Chris Rock’s “N**gers vs. Black people” was not “true” and was not funny and did not give them leeway to use it to excuse their racism. Having to explain why their race jokes weren’t funny. Having to explain my changing hair after I decided to stop relaxing it. Having to explain to my white classmates that history classes are still important even if they made them feel “guilty.” Having to also explain in front of a class that feeling “guilty” was a privilege in and of itself because again it pushed aside racial harm and centered their feelings instead of offering any solutions or accountability. Going back to being one of a handful was creating in me a firestorm. I started feeling depressed. Not wanting to go to class. Not wanting to interact with people. I wasn’t partying as often. My group of friends dwindled to around two people. My grades started slipping. I wanted to transfer but my school had given me the most money to attend. There was a Black Student Union. I had briefly joined freshman year but by the time all this became too much it was so late in the game and I was not emotionally ready to start my social life all over again. Later, I found that I had social anxiety so that may have also had something to do with it.
Instead, I retreated to my old safe space. Something that has saved me over and over again. When I felt alone as a child, it was books that kept me going. Back then I never felt out of place when I read Harry Potter or Judy Blume. And it was books I returned to when I felt the brunt of being a black girl in a white place. Ntozake Shange started it all. I picked up For Colored Girls. . . when I came home one summer and felt like she was calling me home. All the black girls I had been and the one I was becoming met between those pages and comforted each other. “I found God in myself and I loved her I loved her fiercely.” Those words unlocked something in me. The idea that I was priceless despite all the messages all around me telling me that I wasn’t. Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man spoke to my feelings of being both invisible and hypervisible — alternately used and ignored. James Baldwin in No Name In The Street named everything I felt in the blur of anti-blackness I had found myself in. He named and understood my growing rage, my discomfort, and everything I was seeing around me. He gave me a language and way of seeing the world in which to ground myself. He helped me begin to decolonize my mind. Zora Neale Hurston had written all my feelings and every slight I’d held inside me as a black woman in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
It was in these books that I built a black safe space for myself. And when I came out of my cocoon I was different. I felt less embattled. I felt able to explain what I was seeing in the world and why it was a problem. I felt more able to connect with my people. I started seeking out safe spaces where I could talk with people who looked like me. I felt able to take on the world and what it had to throw at me. I started going to protests. I started standing up for myself more because I felt more capable of holding my own. I had drawn clearer lines about what I would and would not stand for and who I would and would not be for anyone. In 2013, Clutch published an article that said “Black Students Who Are Taught Racial Pride Do Better In School” and my experiences have taught me that this is true. I had never been ashamed of being black but without the language and space to discuss my experiences, without the exposure to other black people, and without the space to decolonize my ideas about my class position and its relation to blackness, I struggled emotionally and in school.
We have to do our children the service of giving them the tools they need to explain what they’re seeing in the world around them and why it is the way it is. Not only will respectability politics and color-blind theory not save us, it can damage us, isolate us from each other. And if there is anything I learned by going to a PWI or spending my childhood around so many white people it’s that we need each other desperately. We need each other’s presence, writing, art, music, energy, and laughter. We need each other to hold ourselves accountable to ourselves, our beliefs, and to each other. Respectability politics and color-blind ideology leaves us open to Race Talk and we have to stomp those ideas to the ground for the sake of our children’s psyches. James Baldwin said, “The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ” If we leave it up to society and the messages it has about black people we are dooming our children and ourselves. We are left with negative images of blackness and no language or energy to dissect, deconstruct, and transcend them. When we teach our children to be color-blind we teach them not to see themselves, or each other.
