It Only Took Me 28 Black History Months to Figure It Out

I have always been insecure about my own blackness. Meaning, I have always been concerned that I haven’t earned the right to call myself a black American woman. Of course, I am black and a woman AND I was born here, but I was born to Sierra Leonean parents who immigrated here and raised me with a lot of the cultural practices of their homeland, a place I still have never been too. This left me feeling disconnected from my peers in school and my family at home, as I was never sure what kind of black I should be. However, I wasn’t content with not knowing so I set about misguidedly figuring it out.

From sixth grade on I tried to emulate what I believed to be the blackness of the kids around me, which is typical for children at that age but cringe because I remember it so vividly. I had started getting picked on for the way that I spoke pretty regularly so I thought mimicking AAVE (that I was not raised with, mind you) would make me feel less like a goofy outsider. So I tried out a lot of different accents and ended up sounding like a Baltimore native that had just moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Lots of “Mane” and “Bop”. I was giving Terrance Howard realness. I also attempted to ask for help and pointers from a few friends of mine. I realize now that I must’ve sounded like an alien trying to be human but at the time, their cold response deeply wounded me and stayed with me throughout my time in school. Needless to say, I felt further isolated.

Shortly before I entered college, I decided to embrace my African heritage. Or rather, lean into what I thought made a true African, African. This meant imitating a host of west African, mostly Nigerian, mannerisms with a splish-splash of Ghanaian “vibes” for good measure. All of a sudden I was ‘shoki’-ing at cookouts and could be found in many an ASA general body meeting. This too was disingenuous to me, not because I couldn’t dance or didn’t enjoy myself, but because I was coming at it from an unsteady foundation, pick and choosing which blocks to use to build myself out of. Then came my sorority.

For me, joining my sorority was a Hail Mary in my attempt to secure my blackness for myself. As if this was the currency I needed to purchase black heritage for myself. I did a lot of research and decided to pledge an NPHC sorority (I will not name the sorority here but you can probably guess based on the - well- everything I have said in this newsletter, ever). While I learned a lot and gained four sisters I’m blessed to journey through life with, the entire experience left me feeling more alienated from blackness than ever before, with a resentful twist to top it all off. I couldn’t help but feel cheated. That if it’s this hard for me, maybe I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe blackness was the friends we made along the way. Then this past weekend happened.

Me, exactly six years ago this weekend, trying and failing to get it right

What? You didn’t figure out your identity until 28? Isn’t that too embarrassing to admit on a public forum with your name attached? Bear with me for a bit. This past weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the “The Sensational Sea Mink-ettes” at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre for their black out performance. The most beautiful and varied black people were there, all to support black art and just have a good time. Not even an unexpected fire drill could stop the fun, as we took to the streets with the show’s live band and danced our way through the unintended intermission. It hit them then truly that there is no one way to be black and I understood this not in the “Oh obviously. Why are you so late with this discourse?” Twitter way but in the “I’m outside in the real world and need to figure my shit out” kind of way. This is no longer a buzzy thread I wrote to gain followers at 20 but a realization that for even me, blackness is not something I have to earn or perform it something that has been thrust upon me and it’s up to me to work daily to personalize it for myself. That even though race in America is arbitrary and changes constantly based on the whims of the ruling class, it can be fixed for me and I can do the fixing how I see fit.