A Girl Called Black

A Girl Called Black: An Essay

I'm not sure when it began, but at some point in my childhood, I began to call myself Black. Perhaps it was my family members, television, or the social experiences I encountered growing up in the racially segregated city of Cleveland but I found the term increasingly inexorable in describing my own identity, which had formed separately as it were.

I first began to question this notion of my blackness when I started going to school with white girls. I had been accepted into a prestigious all-girls private school with a hefty scholarship and imbued with all of the hopes and the dreams of my ancestors that I may use this opportunity to better our circumstances. Like most African-American families the legacy of white fragility and racialized brutality had manifested into a lack of opportunity to access employment in the public sector and many people in my family turned to entrepreneurship as a means of survival. When I arrived at this school, I truly began to learn about race for the first time. During orientation, we were shown videos about prejudice and race that I've only ever seen again much later in life in a human resources module. The video provided definitions for race and discrimination and showed examples in a way that seemed so objective it was as easily digestible as any content I mastered as a child, and yet foreshadowed experiences I had yet to consider I could encounter. Somewhere along the 8 years I spent at this school, through adolescence and pre-adulthood, I learned that I could not call myself white. This is not to say that I desired to call myself white, because I did not. Yet I came to understand that had I desired to do so, an invisible force field of social stigma would come to reinforce the racial classification system that Europe adopted some 300 years ago and brought to this country.

Calling oneself white was tantamount to sin. And I had to ask myself, why this mattered so much to people in the first place. What was it about this notorious word white that had to be so adamantly protected? I became keen to an ongoing debate occurring between some of the children I grew up around, African-American children from similarly segregated neighborhoods. Their questions were, in retrospect, an echo of the conversations they heard from the adults and children around them. "What is the difference between African-American and Black?" was a question that may as well have been rhetorical as we all lacked the prerequisite knowledge needed to fully understand and ultimately dismantle a systematic classification system that had not ever asked any of these people what they should -- or should not-- be called.

In high school, I became best friends with a girl whose family origin is in Syria. One day the topic of race came up and she explained that she was classified as "white" on the census, but disagreed with this conclusion. She felt that the word Arab more accurately described her ethnicity, a concept so often conflated with race that the two have virtually become intelligible to the average, under-educated American. And in truth, she was Arab, because she and her ancestors spoke Arabic and had since as far back as she knew. My ancestors, I would come to find later, spoke Igbo, Kimbundu and Tikar. They had originated in Nigeria, Angola and Cameroon, respectively, at least on my mother's side. Years later, as I discovered race was purely an invention that served to justify colonialism and was the proud creation of eugenicists, I began to use the term Africana to describe myself. I borrowed from the easy-flowing term "Latina" which seemed less cumbersome than African-American or Latin American, for that matter.

At 26, I told my mother that I was not Black and she was so taken aback her reaction was almost violent, it seemed no amount of explaining how I had come to that conclusion could dispel her of the fear that I harbored some type of self-loathing or anti-black sentiment. I am a scientist, a curious, wandering mind. I have always sought out truth and through a series of experiences, research and a particularly spirited Art History professor, this was the truth I had found. Whether I wanted to believe it or not was irrelevant, I fully understood at this point that the concepts of blackness and whiteness were totally and completely made up.

Not only does race not belong on the census, it does not belong in science or in any other meaningful, research-based subjects. People come from places, they speak languages that signify their connection to these places, and these connections can be traced genetically through mitochondrial DNA. That is ethnicity.The great white myth, or race, on the other hand, exists to create an artificial and genetically nonexistent rift between those of European descent and all other humans on Earth. From the perspective of being a species on Earth, it is laughable, absurd even, to imagine any other life form simply deciding one day it was different from the others in its species and creating a new, nonscientific, classification system to support this idea. But for humans, this absurdity has been codified into law and applied to life-or-death decisions which make the concept of race humorless at best and terrifying at worst.

It turns out another author coined the term "the great white myth" one year before I was born. Her name is Anna Quindlen and she writes about the great white myth being a kind of psychological reinforcement that color, rather than effort or even talent, should determine one's socioeconomic status and access to wealth. And so it was for over 400 years until Abraham Lincoln was forced to use the only weapon he had against the South to prevent it from becoming a sovereign nation and taking all of the economic power of the United Stated with it. This country has always relied on commerce, and ownership of both labor (enslaved Africans) and raw materials (more suitable climate for plantations) gave the South an unwinnable advantage. That is until half of their production power, in the form of laboring enslaved Africans, was emancipated. With this act the country was again united and African-Americans, consequently, were free at last. This was, and had always been, their birthright.

Therefore I reject the notion that I am anything but what my ancestors were, which is African. I am Africana because my ancestors came from nations within the African continent. Just as the immigrant does not change her or his identity when emigrating to this country, I am reclaiming mine. As a United States citizen and child of survivors of 400 years of American brutality, I also acknowledge that my nationality is American and that the contributions of my ancestors are the reason every class, color and creed of person, born in America or emigrated, has the right to vote and exercise their civil freedoms today. Therefore I accept the term African-American as well.

Today, and everyday, I define myself. I reject all notions that the most diverse continent on Earth, with over two-thousand five hundred ethnicities can be boiled down and reduced to a monolithic color. And as a product of this continent, I carry within me the histories of countless peoples whose languages, customs and traditions carry on until today. I honor these people by calling them their names, just as every other nation of people on Earth is identified by its name. I am Mandinka, I am Sousou, I am Malinke, I am Wolof, I am Diola, I am Serere, I am Khoi Khoi, I am Habesha, I am Yoruba, I am Hausa, I am Fulani, I am Banyarwanda, I am Baganda, Banyamulenge, I am Bembe, I am Hema, I am Mbuti, I am Dir, I am San, I am Luba, I am Ashanti, I am Oromo, I am Edo, I am Batonu, I am Fon, I am Senufo, I am Baoule, I am Mande, I am Zulu, I am Tchaman, I am Fante, I am Gnawa, I am Haratin, I am Jebala, I am Tuareg, I am Toubou, I am Urhobo, I am Igala, I am Beja, I am Mozabite, I am Chaoui, I a Chenoua, I am so much more.

So do not call me Black.

Artwork credit: Pam Chan