Am I Black Enough?

Rashawn Raysor/Staff Writer

There’s this strange phrase that has haunted me for most of my life, a strange phrase that seems to have lingered in the black community for a long time now.

“You act white.”

I heard this throughout my childhood and adolescence. I heard it so much that I would question my own blackness for a very long time. 

I grew up in a household that was, in many ways, stereotypically black and in other ways not. My father was absent for the first 10 years of my life, so my childhood was spent with my single mother and her relatives. 

Sunday dinners were as black as you can imagine. Collard greens, maybe fried chicken, neck bones, cornbread and every other blue moon some banana pudding. The television was always set to Trinity Broadcasting Network so we could all receive the word. Sometimes we’d even have Bible study. 

At the same time, my family felt a bit different from other black families around me. There was no rap or R&B in my house unless my father popped in. Certain shows and movies just weren’t played in my house. “Drumline?” Never seen it. “Friday?” Only ever watched it with my father.

My house was mainly filled with gospel music and media with Christian values. I experienced black things so long as they were deeply Christian. Certain media were deemed too secular and I was discouraged from consuming them. 

I didn’t speak in African American Vernacular English very much either. No, I was the kind of black kid who would say “isn’t” way more than I’d say “ain’t.” I was a bookworm and spoke like it. I had an extensive vocabulary, so much so that my mother took to calling me a walking thesaurus. 

White teachers would praise me for being “so articulate.” Those words would only begin to gnash at my soul when I was around 17. The years in between had taught me about the assumptions that were often behind those compliments.   

On top of all that, I was also (and still am) one of the nerdiest people alive. I loved anime, comics, sci-fi, fantasy video games, etc. I also had no interest in sports except for the Olympics and didn’t know about much “black” stuff. 

Well, there was “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” but that was never quite enough for people. With all those factors in mind, it’s not much of a surprise that I’d hear that strange phrase over and over. “You act white.”

“How do you act a color?” is what I always thought.  

It made no sense to me why my classmates wouldn’t  consider me black. Both sides of my family are from Georgia. My grandparents were sharecroppers like some of theirs. My ancestors got off on the same slave ships as theirs. My skin’s just as dark as theirs. I’m just as much a target of people like Richard Spencer as any of my black peers.

My parents were scared for me after Trayvon Martin was killed like all black parents were. I was scared like every young black man was. The fear was so intense that I held back on learning how to drive for a while.

And yet, I talk and act white. I just took it to be some ignorant nonsense that only fools peddled. I was so naïve back then. As I grew older, I began to better understand things, and the more I understood the more disturbed I was. 

I came to understand that the ideas of “acting white” are deeply rooted in white supremacy and internalized racism. The fact that having good grades and talking in standard English would be associated with whiteness and not blackness says it all. 

The use of that phrase places limits on what it means to be black. It makes one think of blackness as ignorance, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. It puts black people in a box and lets them know they can only aspire to so much. And worse of all, it’s black people using it on themselves.

Blackness is not a monolith; it comes in all shapes and sizes. Blackness is a lot like jazz. It’s all about improvisation, it’s about experimentation and making something new out of nothing. African American identity is a mixture of African, European and American influences. To place limits on such an identity is a slap in the face to the ancestors to me.

And so, I say this all to proudly declare that I have never acted white nor have I ever talked white. I act nerdy. I act awkward. I act like me. I act very black.

Featured image by Eboni on Flickr.

DISCLAIMER:

The opinions presented within this page do not represent the views of PantherNOW Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect individual perspectives of contributing writers and/or members of the University community.

Have questions or comments for our writers? Send an email to opinion@fiusm.com with your name and the name of the column in the subject line.

Be the first to comment on "Am I Black Enough?"

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


*