little black white girl
9:36AM on August 20, 2008
I need to write a blog entry so badly it’s nauseating. I may also need to warn you I am out of my ADD medicine so don’t expect me to linger around on one subject for too long before I get… pulled off by another unruly tangent.
Already I am getting sucked into this fucking Sex and The City bullcrap on TV. I am so easily distracted, are you? I can’t help but get side tracked when I try to do anything in life which is why I probably don’t stay with the same life plan, each time I recreate myself… or with the same hair color for that matter.
Today I got two pairs of pants in the mail off of my Amazon clothing wish list. They rule. The first are some black slacks that I was in dire need of since I never have nice pants and also some really effing cool bell bottom jeans.
<a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v153/Clubmix1996/?action=view¤t=blackslacks.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v153/Clubmix1996/blackslacks.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v153/Clubmix1996/?action=view¤t=bells.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v153/Clubmix1996/bells.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>
Now I can go out and have nice time in fancy black pants! Well decent pants.
Someone drown me in a pool of shallow piss.
I can’t sleep and it’s 7 am on the nose somehow and all I can do it think about how I am not writing “this down.”
I got up out of bed to find that my dear dog had gotten into my pancake syrup and spilled it ALL OVER my bedroom in random spots centered around the doorway. These sticky splashes are now collecting massive amounts of all kinds of dog cat and human hair my house has to offer.
I write maybe one real blog entry a month now. I wonder how that quotient ends up equaling out to when you add in the various amounts of spoken word/video bullshit blog posts I make a month as well.
Today I basically sat around fixing the physical evidence of past fails while sitting on my ass watching various episodes of The Boondocks, Home Improvement and a particularly interesting episode of the Tyra Show.
This episode had to deal with the various shades we strong black sisters share within our sisterhood. To catch up any newcomers that may not be in the know; I am in fact a black woman and being so I Identify myself as such.
This episode I was so fond of dealt with the issue of how we as a black American society tend to bicker, play favorites, discourage, encourage, project judgment on one another based on our shade whether it be pinkish tan, chocolate, black as tar or high yellow.
I realize that by discussing this issue and its place in MY OWN LIFE as a woman of color, I could be scrutinized by those that don’t understand my position or agree with my stance on this topic. Because of this I want to say that if I need to be corrected in any respect or commended or if YOU YOURSELF have a say/view that needs to be heard PLEASE POST IT as a comment or email me about it at my personal email address:
undressjess@gmail.com
With this said I now reprise to share my experiences within the matter.
Growing up as an extremely light tan skinned individual I have experienced racism and prejudices on both sides of the spectrum. First of course as children we have no sense of what color or is or what it means. And for that period we are lucky. But it wasn’t long before there was another black little boy in my prekindergarden class at my private white bread elementary school.
I of course had and have been raised in a black family with little to zero ties to the white side of my creation. So to me I really didn’t see why people would stare at me and my great grandmother at the shoe store and whisper to each other, “She must be baby sitting.”
In her neighborhood growing up it was a predominantly black neighborhood; I went to a Southern Baptist Black church, everyone in my close to extended family was one of the many juicy and rich shades of mahogany, honey brown or deep chocolate. Seeing a little boy like this when all of my earliest childhoods experiences were that of other black children and adults just felt like an extension of my home world into my alienated school life.
I asked my cousin, what does it mean when they called Peter “a black”? She smacked my mouth and told me to never say that word again, call him “brown” if I need to point out his differences from me or the other kids at all in the first place. Pointing at people that are different than you is “rude.”
This is when I realized I was regarded as being inherently different than my other black peers or even my family.
My family could joke about various racial slurs with each other but if I repeated them thinking I would get the same gut laughs out of them I was scolded and if I stood up for Peter or other children of other races by informing my peers that we are all the same under our skin (and I know cause I am a black kid too!) I was laughed at, mocked, even one girl in particular that terrorized me in elementary school told me I was making my dark roots up as I went along because I wanted to “fit in”. (Side note: This is after of course my Mother ripped me out of my comfortable full ride scholarship paid for, special and exclusive white elementary palace and threw me into the inner city elementary that was closer to her so the bus could take me to school as she had just moved out of my grandmother’s house [her mom] and we were so dirt poor she didn’t have a car to export me across town twice a day. Bitch.)
Looking back on it seeing as the only talent I showed at the time was artistic, and private schools don’t seem to be so keen on giving 5 to 7 year old dirt poor girls full scholarships for “artistic talent”, I bet I got that fucking scholarship because my family is and I have always been known by the government as “black”. Even in college I got special scholarships and other crap because I am recognized by the system as black. My equal opportunity guilt is entirely another entire conversation however, that I am not yet ready to have with myself, my therapist or let alone you, the world so I’ll skip my opinions, fears and praises to this topic all together for the sake of the subject at hand.
Yeah so this girl… Michelle was her name. She went to the inner city school and was pretty, had the cutest coolest boyfriend, prettiest clothes and friends, highest grades and low and behold she was also MIXED! We were even born on the same fucking day and seeing as how we were born in raised in the same town I often wonder if she was born on the fucking gurney next to me at the same hospital as I. Rivals at birth.
She constantly would do shit like hold up her arm and recite, “See this everyone; this is what MIXED looks like. Jessica’s lying to get you guys to think she is cool, look how WHITE she is!” Luckily I later saw this girl in beauty school and she was about 300 pounds heavy and in BEAUTY SCHOOL. I felt like God answered my prayers.
Of course I over compensated for this for a large portion of my life thinking if I could just somehow get “blacker” I would be able to sit at the table with Michelle and her other cool black friends. So in my ignorance I would only speak in stupid Ebonics and reciting rap songs and wearing the latest hip hop styled fashions thinking if people heard me talk or saw me in my cool threads they might know I am in fact “one of them”.
I realize how retarded that sounds now and I am thoroughly ashamed of these actions but at least I heard (on the recent Tyra show) that it seems to be a common thing among girls that are lighter toned black women to “turn it on” like this in order to be accepted as one of the group.
Girls automatically hated me saying I wasn’t as cute as I thought I was (as if in all of my insecurities I actually had the nerve to believe that), I was lying, I was adopted, my mother or father must be mixed because there is no possible way I could actually be mixed myself. Nope. Never. Too white.
Then Mother dearest jumped up and moved me from this inner city school all the way out to the boondocks of an actual place called “Yankeetown” where I switched primary schools and was the sorest thumb of them all.
Here I come being this TuPac blasting, baggy jeans only wearing, strictly BET program watching, hood rat wanna-be poor girl to being thrust into an environment of half hillbillies and the other half being somewhat wealthy white kids with both having racist mothers, fathers, or grand parents.
Some kids immediately liked me because I was “different” and the kind of kid they saw on TV, and trust me these children were few and far between and by all means were the hugest dorks of all. Most of these little girls wanted to know why my hair was so DARK and FRIZZY. Yes this bitch actually asked me that. While I had attained a sort of weird popularity from my super strange presence at my inner city school going from being the little falsely-accused-of-being-white wimpy girl to the next Mariah Carey to being a fucking troll doll again.
At this point I had never seen anything on MTV cause it wasn’t gangsta enough for my tastes to being stuffed in suburb who’s television company didn’t even offer BET as a channel because the black demographic was severely lacking and NOW being in school on Martin Luther King day. WTF.
Most of the girls thought I was weird; number one because I didn’t grow up with them and having new students at their school was like unheard of since there moms and dads lived in the same houses as the one their parents bought them to live in on their wedding days.
When these lovely dear children saw my Mommy dearest showing up or NOT showing up to PTA (because you know she actually worked which was totally weird and unlike the other mothers) in torn jeans, booty shorts, stained t-shirts and wearing a nose hoop… fingers started pointing and N words were heard flying from their deer parents.
I was SOOO BLACK at this school I seriously needed to stop going out in the sun for fear I would just blacken up like Cajun catfish and crisp into dust. Ok not really but this is how I fucking felt, Ok?
Then once again when I reached a somewhat comfortable position as a now chubby and all TOO black little white girl in an all American rural world that seemed to be ever existing within a time period of racial segregation and hate, you seriously won’t even guess what fucking happened next… You can’t even fathom.
|
