Once again summer is here and time seems to be flying by and that leaves me feeling highly reflective. One of the greatest liberations since shaving my head Memorial Day 2016 is that I no longer have to endure the entitlement that white folks have always felt to shove their grimy hands, root deep into my curly crown and pet me like a dog. It was a liberation that -to be perfectly honest- I had not anticipated. Originally, I shaved my head for personal and style -aka completely vain- reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with race. I had dyed my hair shortly before making the decision to go natural and my hair was fried at the ends with bleached red hair. I didn't want to Big Chop for fear of being “ugly” with such short hair or even a bald head so I transitioned slowly and got the red cut out little by little until finally in a fit of frustration I tried to hack out the red and jacked my shit all the way up. The resulting botched hair cut left me feeling really insecure about my looks and I had already been debating shaving my head for a little over two years. It was a style I was nervous about because the thought of “looking ugly” or “not right” floored me. It had nothing to do with anything political. However, I’m not so sure that’s the case anymore.
If anyone will bother to recall, I wrote a blog post awhile back called “Kiss my voluptuous Mulatto a**” in which I touched base on the isolation that I have felt from my POC community where I live. That deeply rooted feeling of isolation gave way to me feeling highly alienated and unidentifiable. I felt like an Other. To whites, I would never be white, and to blacks I was always simultaneously not black and not black enough. That’s what, for many years, almost forced me to take the term “mulatto” a word with a deep, hateful history of colorism and reclaim it for my own. I felt, that given my circumstances of exclusion and isolation that I had to reclaim, recycle, and give new purpose to a term just so that I could feel slightly more complete and actualized because for practically my entire life -in my community anyhow- when simply using the term “mixed” I was told repeatedly that I wasn't mixed, that I was white.
Many people expressed anger, hurt, and even disgust that I chose to refer to myself as a term dating back to slavery. For many people it further solidified that my body had no place in the realm of blackness. To be honest, I contemplated deleting the post but thought better of it. People tried to make me feel horrible about the choices that I tried to make in order to feel more grounded in my identity. However, it was those same people that demonized me that made me feel misplaced and unwanted in the first place.
I spent the first nineteen years of my life feeling as if I had no racial identity because the people that surrounded me told me I didn’t belong anywhere. So, as people are often wont to do, I tried to create a space for myself. I tried to find my own belonging. It was a solitary belonging but for quite some time it was all I had. It was the only space that shut the door -if only by a smidge- on the hate filled memories of being teased and ridiculed. It dissolved a small fraction of the insurmountable shame I felt for things that I could not control. I felt shame for being light skinned, for being the “little white girl,” for being “stuck up and boujee” because I “talked white,” and for a while “mulatto” dissolved this ever present, incessant need to prove my blackness.
Finally a victory. Though as small as it was despite many years of struggling I felt as if I was discovering myself. It wasn't perfect and some days I still yearned for a community that would welcome me with open arms and raised voice but for the moment it had been enough. It was enough until ultimately it wasn't enough. I had created a space for myself, this was true, but somewhere around my 25th birthday when I had a five course meal of spiritual revelations; I came to the conclusion that I needed more. I felt comfortable but I was far from feeling whole because in the back, crowded, and dark spaces of my mind I still felt immensely….inadequate. I still felt, despite my age climbing ever higher, like I wasn’t enough, like I wasn’t good enough because in the back of my head I knew I wasn’t black enough.
Fast forward to the weekend of February 17th when I attended MBLGTACC 2017 with a group of my peers in my college’s GSA. For those who may not know MBLGTACC is the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference and a GSA is a Gay Straight Alliance both of these things strive for feelings of inclusion and love. The theme of this years MBLGTACC was “solidarity” and, given experiences growing up it was a word that I understood intellectually, something I craved, but had rarely felt. At MBLGTACC you are invited to attend lectures going over a wide variety of Queer issues and, though my heart did the Samba, Zumba, and Jumping Jacks in my chest all at once I decided that the first lecture I would attend would be on QPOC (Queer People of Color) solidarity. Immediately I felt frightened. Just looking at the title of the lecture made me uneasy because I felt like simply by gazing upon it I was a criminal trying to deface something that did not belong to me.
I was not a person of color; this was something that had been instilled in me since the ripe young age of seven. If I went to this, in my heart of heart, I knew that I would ignite in myself a wave of insecurities but I had to take the chance. My spirit called for me to take a leap of faith and for once I listened no matter how much fear I felt. I'd been rejected before; I could take it, even though it would hurt like hell…
Walking into the room, I felt relieved to see people as light as me, lighter than me amongst the beautiful sea of black and brown faces. For a brief moment I didn't feel alone. I still shied away into the back of the room though, straining to see the two gorgeous lecturers past the magnificent afro of the handsome gentleman in front of me. I liked that. His afro felt like a shield protecting me from my frightful memories that dared to boil over the surface of my memories. Two white girls came in late with -no joke- Starbucks cups in hand and I wondered with a dull ache if I had gotten lumped in with them. A trio of white girls paired together not because of any proximity in relationships but because of the glaring, obvious, paleness of their skin coming to a lecture about things they could never possibly understand. The thought made my heart race into its frenzied Zumba dance again. I focused on the handsome individual in front of me. He was -unbeknownst to him- my protector for the first portion of the lecture until we were asked to get up for an activity.
The activity? Graffiti Wall. There were large strips of paper scattered around the room with different prompts on them and we were asked to respond. I clutched my little marker and wandered around the room aimlessly as I answered each prompt to the best of my ability. The last wall felt fifty feet high when I read the words “barriers within the QPOC community” and someone had spoken the words that had resounded in my soul for years. Written in quotation marks were the words “you're not black enough/POC enough” and when asked to share our opinions about each wall prompt something snapped inside of me.
For those who don't know me personally; I have Anxiety. Volunteering to speak in public is an absolute no-no for me unless I am otherwise forced like at school or something. I don't like speaking to large groups of unknown people, I can barely tolerate speaking to large groups of friends and family. Yet, here I was, brazenly asking to speak and share my truth.
I broke down.
To a room full of strangers I bared my soul and openly sobbed as I admitted my struggles of racial identity. I told an entire group of strangers of how my entire life I had been Othered and cast aside by my own community because my Blackness was labeled as both less than and non-existent. I was the white girl for liking anime, video games, and fantasy novels. I was the white girl for loving to read and write and not “talking” or “sounding” black. I wasn't black because I had “good hair” and “good skin.” I told a room full of strangers the pain I had harbored in my heart for years and instead of laughing and telling me things like that couldn't have happened….instead of telling me that I was being sensitive, instead of invalidating my experience; that day something truly remarkable happened that touched me to my core.
People listened to me, not only that but they rallied behind me. For the first time in my life I knew what true solidarity felt like. I had a group of my beautiful QPOC family telling me that I was worthy, loved, and most importantly enough. I received thanks for sharing, words of encouragement, I was told how brave I was for speaking my truth so openly and without abandon, and best of all; I received some great hugs (I'm a hugger) y’all. The lesson that I cannot other define me no matter how badly they try to beat me down and shove me into a mold that they can identify me as finally stuck. That lecture put roots deep in my spirit and I'll never forget the beautiful faces that made me feel -for the first time ever- comfortable and actualized in my own Blackness, the beautiful faces that stripped away the sense of Otherness and the rubble left behind by society, and gave me the access and confidence to sculpt my own beautiful identity.
My shaved head has helped a lot with giving me a sense of connectedness with my identity. It was completely unexpected but something blossomed within me when I shaved my head. As each chunk of my hair fell away I felt like I was shedding my skin, my past, and feelings of inadequacy. Gone was the notion that I am my hair and that it had to define my identity and my beauty. Gone was the notion that I had to keep my hair in order to fulfill some convoluted concept of self that was completely centered around the only thing I was told my entire childhood that was good about me. The best part was no more white people wanting to pet me like I was a dog or some type of exotic, foreign creature. Even better than that? No more men telling me I couldn't be mixed with black; that I just had to have some Puerto Rican in eme, or Indian, or something else other than what I was. My hair became this political force that snapped in front of me like a shield. No more unwanted touching without my consent and no more backhanded compliments that were actually insults, and no more comments of how I “talk funny for a black person.” Ever since shaving my head -though assholes will always be prevalent- I feel as though I've stepped into a space where I am free to simply be. Be a person, be human, be a genuine and nothing feels better than that.
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