Too black to be white, too white to be black

As I continue to investigate the culture and history of blacks, today I will look at the existing division within the black community based on skin tone. It’s a touchy topic and hence its need for discussion. The word “black” isn’t an accurate word to describe Afro-Americans in the U.S. There is a fusion of so many different mixes of the “black” race that some of us are copper, honey , rich mahogany brown, and of a sensational shade of bronze. There’s just no way that one word could ever capture the distinct red, brown, and auburn undertones on the many faces of Afro-Americans. As an Afro-American of mixed race, my skin tone is less rich mahogany brown, not quite caramel and just sweet enough to be honey tone. I have come to love and appreciate my color now, but it wasn’t always so. Growing up especially and even into my young adulthood, I often find that I’m too black to be white, and too white to be black.

Many multi-racial children and adults (who may not have an inch of Afro-American in them) experience a quasi existence between the races that determine their physical characteristics. In other words, when you’re a blended child of many flavors, you may not look like you belong to a certain cultural group. To avoid this process of choosing between races, some individuals prefer ”passing”. Passing is an option for people who look so much like one race that they don’t need to acknowledge another race.

My mother is Afro-American and native American and if you shake the tree long enough, there’s Caucasian blood on my maternal grandmothers side. She has red tone to her silky brown skin. My father is Afro-American, Native-American, and Irish. He is much lighter skinned with curly hair. Naturally, their offspring came out somewhere in the middle.

Ever since I started attending school, I always had trouble finding out where I fit in. I grew up in white suburbia. My white Auntie Martha and I jammed to alternative music anytime we were in the car and she played a major role in raising me. This is where nature versus nurture comes in. All of my other siblings were reared in a different neighborhood than I and we moved to the suburbs with my Auntie Martha when I was an infant. All I know as home, is a tree lined street in Northeast, USA. Spending a great amount of time around my Auntie Martha made me appreciate a somber church service on Sundays, rock music, and speaking with elocution.

Growing up, my own siblings would say that I was “acting white”, “trying to be white”, and ”corny”. Though they didn’t mean it at the time, and it was because they saw that I was very different than they, these words and accusations stuck with me for the greater part of my youth. It’s true that racism, race-consciousness and prejudice starts at home. My own mother would say that I was “puss colored” because I was lighter skinned than all of her other children. She would criticize me when I said that I was mulatto. She spat the word mulatto like it was a curse word. I grew up very confused, received completely conflicting messages, and I know that I’m not alone in this.

My Auntie Martha enrolled me in private school when I began fifth grade. There, I was one of only a few other minorities in class. The school was so small that cliques formed, bullying happened, and all the other middle school madness that takes place in every school. But when I reached high school, it was an entirely different ball game. I attended a private high school in Newton, MA. The year that I enrolled, the BUYF (Boston Urban Youth Foundation) had initiated a program to subsidize the education of inner-city youth. Not only where the rich white elitist parents in a frenzy, I was too.

I was incredibly sheltered and I had never been around other black kids from the hoods of Boston. The black girls that I met then could tell that I wasn’t like them. I didn’t get intricate hair styles with extensions, I didn’t use Ebonics, I spoke properly, and was a stickler for the rules. (Here’s where the importance of parenting a child in race relations comes in.) Because the transition of mixing two incredibly different group of high school students was overpowering, race riots broke out in my Newton, MA high school in 2000. We had to sit in the auditorium and talk about the riots because they were so severe. Sitting in the auditorium, or dodging arguments in the hallway or cafeteria awoken me from the slumber that I had lived my life in. The black kids said that I talked white, acted white, and wasn’t in touch with my blackness. The white kids who I had a bit more in common with wanted nothing to do with the black girl especially during the race riot. It was one of those times when being multi-racial leaves a girl more than bummed. Eventually the race riots quelled and somehow the black and white kids came to intermingle. My class never forgot those race riots though.

What I describe above is a case of  internalized racism on several levels. When a group is subjected to unfair treatment, what might happen is that members of the group begin using the weapons of the enemy on themselves. For example, I had internalized racism about blacks because since I was a child, they had never accepted me even ones that should have. The other black members of my high school had internalized racism by ostracizing me from their group because I wasn’t black enough in speech, demeanor, and especially appearance. My professor once compared this process of internalizing racism to swimming in psychological poison. She said: “It’s hard to swim in psychological poison and not catch something.” She’s absolutely correct in this.  Any member of a marginalized group can be thought to be swimming in psychological poison. Due to the exposure to insults, mistreatment, passive aggressiveness and other forms of  racism, these members pick up these poisons and begin to use them on themselves.

As I discuss skin tone in the black community and how it causes division, I must acknowledge Mr. Willie Lynch. Willie Lynch was a West Indian slave master said to have given a speech entitled “Making of a slave” in 1712 at a Virginia Slave Holders Convention. In this speech, Willie Lynch gives strict instructions about ensnaring blacks in mind games in order to keep them subordinate. In his speech, Lynch notes that if slave owners implement his methods, slaves and blacks will be subordinate for 300 years and will begin to “refuel” or reuse his tactics on one another. In this speech, Willie Lynch describes the process of dividing blacks by making them distrust and envy one another. His speech discusses pitting men against women and vice-versa. Of particular importance is Lynch’s discussion about creating a lighter-skinned race of blacks who will inevitably be envied by the darker skinned blacks. Accordingly to Lynch, if blacks were divided and lighter skinned more soft haired blacks were put against darker skinned blacks, slave masters would have no worries about slave uprisings because the groups would not mix. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to relate the expiration of the Willie Lynch legacy and the big 2012 end of world scare. Wouldn’t it be something like the end of the world that we know if these mental shackles were totally removed from blacks by 2012?

Although historians are dubious of the legitimacy of the Willie Lynch speech, the ideas set forth in those letters have been successfully executed in the black community. Why do readers think Chris Rocks’ movie Good Hair got so much attention? Hair is a huge part of a black women’s life. Decisions about using a chemical treatment or going natural have always been up for debate amongst most African-Americans. In the early 20th century, black women would use bleach on their skin to lighten their complexion in order that they didn’t look so much white, as much as they didn’t want to look so dark skinned. Tupac, the rapper, let us know in one of his rhymes: “The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice. The darker the flesh and the deeper the roots.” This early 1990′s lyric was meant to empower darker skinned blacks who had once heard: “If you’re white you’re alright, if you’re brown stay around and if you’re black get back get back get back!” Even if Willie Lynch was not a real living and breathing human being, the idea of corrupting any hope of unity based on appearance has ravaged the black community and I can attest to it first hand.

Other Posts by Eryn on Black History Month:

Black History’s Leading Literary Lady

Making a Madam

Burning Black Wall Street

The Black Panther Party For Self Defense

In the name of Science…

Intelligence of Interference? COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party

“How they sold Marcus Garvey for rice”-LH

Trippin on X

Yes you’re a woman…just a different kind

Justin Bua and Urban Realism

And then there was hip hop

Vote to Discontinue Black History Month

So Soulful

Black and Gay? No Way!

Colored People’s Time

Where’s my Forty Acres and a Mule