June 29, 2020 First Person The Ancestry Project By Mariah Stovall Seventeenth-century Dutch map of Africa, Atlas van Dirk van der Hagen, ©Wikimedia commons In fourth grade, my teacher assigned us a research report on a foreign country. She was a nice white lady. They all were. She said to choose a country we could trace our ancestry to. I was one of her favorites, but when she made that lesson plan, she was not thinking about me. Or Yvonne. We were the Black kids in class. I asked my mom for help after school. She’s Black on her father’s side and Ashkenazi Jewish on her mother’s side; I thought she might get my bubbe on the phone to wax poetic about Eastern Europe. But she didn’t. Nor did she rant about the nerve of the nice white lady whose bright idea this was. If my mom was bitter, she didn’t let it show. She turned that mess into lemonade. She smiled and pulled out the map and we went back to Africa, Garvey on our minds. Sometimes I learned more Black history in a week at home than I did in a lifetime of Februarys at school. I knew about slavery but I didn’t know about slavery. The information I had to work with was PG, maybe PG-13. Can we ever comprehend that level of unadulterated evil without living through it? My peers were gripping safety scissors, sketching sauerkraut and four-leaf clovers, spreading glue on the back of a cutout of the Great Wall. I was nine years old, trying not to imagine the skin on my great-great-great-great-great-greats’ backs getting shredded by a braided leather whip that might also catch them behind the ears, where their hair hung in braids the Kardashian-Jenners could only dream of. I looked down at the map. The men in the Romare Bearden print on the wall looked over my shoulder, too busy jamming on their instruments to tell me the right answer. I just wanted to get an A. I just wanted to be told what to do. “Mom?” “We don’t know—they made it so we don’t know. So now we get to pick. Something on the west coast, though. On this curve right here. Let me tell you about Gorée Island.” She found a shred of autonomy for me, among so much dehumanization. We got to choose. We got to do what our ancestors didn’t. Senegal. It was arbitrary. It meant everything. Read More
June 24, 2020 First Person Seeing the Country’s Shadows on My White Husband’s Face By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton A Black woman friend who also has a white husband confesses at the height of the George Floyd protests: “Times like these, I don’t know why I’m with a white man.” “That’s a thought I’ve had,” I say. Black people are fighting white supremacy with a force unlike any I’ve seen in my lifetime. This time, the fight hits more personal, too. I had trouble being around white people at the onset of it; my rage was too thick. In my own house, it feels disloyal not to assume the battle lines. It’s like I’m stunting the cause of my life through affiliations that subvert it—most centrally, my husband. At night, sleeping beside him, I feel the guilt of betraying my people, of betraying myself. More than that, I feel lonely. There is a balm for this sort of collective pain my people are experiencing. We have been supplying it to each other for centuries. In conversations with my Black women friends, I have felt soothed not by any one thing they’ve said, but by the gentle power of their complete understanding. And then I go home where I can’t help but see the country’s shadows in my husband’s face. Let me back up. My husband is woke. He’s a senior director of diversity, inclusion, and belonging for a prominent tech company. He frequents protests more than I do, often with our children. He’s quick to correct microaggressions when he notices them. He’s viewed by many in our community as an accomplice who understands the history and weight of white supremacy, the perspectives of Black people fighting for equality, and the relevant corrections that might begin to upend generations of injustice. I am prouder of him than I can say. Nevertheless, he’s a privileged white man: he’s been given the benefit of the doubt in schools, in the workplace, and just on the street for thirty-eight years. The comfort that comes from being appraised in that way can’t be overstated. It’s evident in the way he carries himself, the tone of voice he uses, the rights he assumes. Sometimes I read him as entitled. How could he not be? Our country has raised him that way. Read More
June 23, 2020 First Person We Picked the Wrong Side By Neel Patel When I was in the sixth grade, I met a girl named Nicole. Nicole was a good student; she was polite to teachers. She was in the gifted program, a group of students handpicked for their exceptional promise. I was not in the gifted program. When my mother found out I had not been chosen, she became furious. She wanted to know why I was not worthy and how I might prove otherwise. I suppose this was her mistake—she assumed I was better than I actually was. Over time, Nicole and I became friends. We sat next to each other in class and gossiped during lunch. We watched horror movies on weekends. When boys made fun of me for being queer, she jumped to my defense. If I hadn’t been paying attention in class—which was often—she passed me her notes. Sometimes I imagined what it was like to be Nicole, with her spotless record, her enviable grades. I imagined what her teachers said during parent-teacher conferences, all the glowing, effusive praise. It must have been the opposite of what they said during mine. I talked too much. I didn’t pay attention. My homework was always late. Sometimes I said I had turned in an assignment when really I had not. I would complete the assignment later and step on it with my shoes—this gave it the effect of some mysterious trauma—and drop it on the floor by my teacher’s desk, as if it was her fault she had lost it and not mine. I was diabolical. I impersonated my father to call myself out of school. I cut class and went to the mall. I intercepted the mail to hide my grades. I pretended to be good when I was not. Nicole didn’t do those things. She didn’t have to cover her tracks; her steps were always measured, taken with great care. “Why can’t you use your brains for good?” My mother once complained. “Just look at Nicole.” I spoke of Nicole often, how smart she was and how good her grades were, how she wanted to become a doctor just like my dad. “Wow,” my parents would say, masking their own disappointment in me. “Look at that.” While Nicole was graduating from medical school, I was still unsure of my place in the world, aware of the expectations I had failed to meet. Because Nicole was everything I was supposed to be, the opportunities I had squandered, the chances I’d let slip. In a way, my failure was similar to her success; they both came as a surprise. Because I’m a South Asian. And Nicole is Black. To say I never saw Nicole’s Blackness would be a lie. To say I never heard the narrative of Blackness in America would be an even bigger one. Though we didn’t speak of race often, I knew what my parents had been told about Black people in America. It was on the news, in movies, tucked into conversations at the table. A story of danger. Fear. I had witnessed car doors locking, purses being hugged. I had heard white people describe an unpleasant encounter with someone before saying “she was Black,” as if this was what they had meant to say all along. The danger of Blackness was their central thesis. They supported it at every turn. I had heard these stories, had grown weary of these stories, had fallen victim to these stories myself. I knew what my mother meant when she said, “Just look at Nicole.” I also knew why I talked about her achievements so much at home: her race was the subtext. I wanted to show that she was good. * When I was young, my father had been watching the news in the doctors’ lounge with a white doctor when a crime was reported. The suspect was Black. The white doctor shook his head. “See that?” he said, turning to my father. “We should have never brought them here.” Read More
June 18, 2020 First Person Three Possible Worlds By Natasha Marin In Black Imagination, a complement to the series of exhibitions of the same name, Natasha Marin curates the voices of Black individuals: Black children, Black youth, the Black LGBTQ+ community, unsheltered and incarcerated and neurodivergent and other Black people. The thirty-six voices in the book are resonant on their own and deeply powerful when woven together by Marin. The following excerpt contains three responses to the prompt “Describe/Imagine a world where you are loved, safe, and valued.” Photo: Bureau of Land Management. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. close your eyes— make the white gaze disappear * You don’t talk about moving because I bought the house next to yours. You don’t try to touch my hair, without asking, without saying hello or even speaking when I walk past you. You don’t expect me to do all the work that no one else feels like doing. I’m just out in the world, being myself without fear, shimmering through a star-filled sky. —Laura Lucas, Seattle, Washington Read More
June 18, 2020 First Person Dance Time, across the Diaspora By Nadia Owusu My father, at cocktail parties, liked to get children dancing. We’d be in the backyard flinging ourselves at and off things: tire swings, tree branches, each other. He’d wander out, beer or scotch in hand. “What is this?” he’d ask in a loud voice. “The annual Foolishness International board meeting?” I’d fill with a pleasant warmth. My father would toss one or two of us over his shoulders. He’d run. We’d chase him to the patio or the living room—wherever the stereo system was. “Dance time!” he’d say. He’d teach us moves. Sometimes he’d even do a little choreography. We’d show off, get sweaty. Shy children my father would take by the hand. He’d coax and twirl them until they loosened. I was shy, but not when dancing with him. “Eiii,” he’d say about any child who was really feeling the vibe. My father was Ghanaian. Eiii is a sound many Ghanaians make several times a day. Depending on the context and tone, it can mean either that something is very good or very bad. Toward dancing children, my father always meant the sound encouragingly. Children loved my father. He was playful and funny. For his United Nations job, we moved to a new country every few years: Tanzania, England, Uganda, Italy, Ethiopia. There was little in my life, growing up, that was constant. But at our welcome cocktail party (there was always a welcome cocktail party), I could always count on my father to help me make friends. Those friendships often lasted until we moved again. Most of the children of United Nations employees attend international schools together. Everywhere we lived, my father’s circle of colleagues and friends was very diverse—multinational and multiracial. They worked for UN agencies, or at various embassies, NGOs, and global enterprises. To parties at their homes—if the hosts were white—my father sometimes brought his own mixtapes. “You know, I’m African,” he’d joke as he handed them the tape or CD, “I need proper dance music.” Read More
June 17, 2020 First Person The Sound of Music So Far Away By Wayétu Moore Photo: Fred P. M. van der Kraaij. Via Wikimedia Commons. In the months after Mam left Liberia for New York, we talked to her every Sunday. She sounded the same to me then, though once or twice her voice disappeared while she spoke. I inhaled the heavy silence, hoping that some of her would seep through the phone so that I could lay my head against it. “I will soon be back, yeh?” she would say. After moving into the house with palm trees, I found that her smell had moved with us, followed me as I, on so many Saturday afternoons, had trailed her around the apartment in her red high heels that dragged underneath my feet. In her closet, in her room, in the kitchen, even Korkor smelled like her—the calming blend of seasoned greens and rose water. Every day our driver, a short, chubby man with a blunt line of gray hair an inch above each ear, picked us up from school. Torma met him at the end of the road to walk us home. From the main road we could see our house dancing in the heated rays of the sun, a drawing that grew bigger and more real with each step. We stumbled out of the car in uniform plaid skirts and small pink backpacks. Torma waved at our driver as his tires blew a whirl of dust into the air when he drove away. “Come,” Torma said, turning around to us. “Surprise for you all inside.” Read More