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6/10/2004
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
At least once a day, I look in the mirror. This is less about narcissism and more about personal hygiene. For this reason alone I would hope we all take a look at least once. There are however, days when I am fully convinced some people don't. I digress. Perhaps the biggest jump-start to my day is the fact that when I look in the mirror, I like what I see. Not only do I like it, I love it. I've always been a pretty confident person. With the exception of some terribly awkward teenage years (which included braces, pimples, and feet bigger than my arms), I have always been comfortable in my own skin. From the time I was very young, I would sit on the bathroom sink and stare into the mirror. This ritual took place at least once a month. I would examine every crevice of my face while constantly reciting in my head, "I am me...I am me...I am me". This probably sounds bizarre, but it was quite revelatory for me. I became completely fascinated with the fact that I was a complete original. I would mentally scan all the countries I could remember from geography class to put this fact into proper perspective and I was blown away every time.
For much of my childhood, I led a compartmentalized life. My day job included attendance at a predominately white school. I learned to cope. I'd never known anything different so it wasn't too hard. The rest of my life took place in the predominately black neighborhood in which my parents chose to raise us, my predominately black church, dance classes, track meets, and other extra-curricular activities. I got the best of "both worlds" so to speak. It sounds simple but it really wasn't at all. Attending an all-white school while the rest of my friends were in more racially diverse public schools often put me at the center of ridicule and in a perpetual state of proving my "blackness" (instead of "blackness" insert whatever stereotype you should be fulfilling). If you've ever tried this, you know it will turn you into a schizophrenic loony. To make matters worse, my family lived in Seattle while all our other relatives lived in the South and on the East Coast. Here in the Northwest, we have a tendency to over-articulate our words. It's just the dialect I suppose. But to family members, it seemed we spoke "proper". Add this to the fact that I was a ballerina and a good student, and you get a highly conflicted childhood. This would explain my phase in eighth grade where I wore baggy, over-sized jeans, a huge FILA coat and a baseball cap turned to the side. Let us never speak of that again.
When I got to college, instead of living in the freshman dorms, I chose theme housing where I occupied "Malcolm X House" along with 30 or so other students of varying origins of black descent. I could deal with staying in X's namesake because living with all black students was my way of reconciling the fact that I'd declined acceptance to Howard University and Spelman College, both historically black schools. I will admit, I made some great friends, but even there I was different; not because of race or background, but because of my moral standard. When everybody was out drinking, I was the one in the dorm, blasting gospel music and having a party of my own. By the time I was done with that place, everybody knew who the Cross Movement was. I never had guys in my room with the door shut, I walked around fully clothed, and was the only one up for church on Sunday morning. These seem like small things, but in college, this set me apart from the crowd. Sure there were a few dormies who went with me a couple of times to church, but 9 times out of 10, I had the whole bathroom to myself on Sunday mornings. My decisions in college earned me respect in the eyes of my friends.
Even today, I think very differently from much of my family and friends. Some people will read my words and discount them because I'm only 22. I'm not a member of a political party, I'm just me. There was a time when I would shrink back, but those days are over. Being a manpleaser is no life at all. It's the people that don't care what others think that are the real dangerous ones. Those are the people I look up to. I desire to be one of those people. Lorraine Hansberry wrote the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black on the struggle for equality, but more on the state of the human condition. I snag her title on behalf of all those who are young, gifted and whatever. And there are many of us (after all, young is relative). I just don't think some people are comfortable enough to walk in its fullness. Once in college, it was the first day of my "African American Politics" class taught by one of those name dropping professors who say insecure things to establish their credibility like, "So the other day I was on the phone with Condoleeza Rice and let me tell you, she's more arrogant than you think." Well, on this first day, the professor asked a couple of people to raise their hand and give her a brief definition of "who they were". Hands shot up across the room as over-zealous brown-nosers sought to make a name for themselves. The first to respond called himself, "a Queer, White, New-Englander". Nice. Interestingly enough, none of those things told us much about who he really was. The descriptors went on, "Chubby, Atheist, Liberal" and so on. Every single person who raised their hand managed to attach a false, surface, or socially engineered term to themself. Sad, but somehow I don't think anyone knew any different.
When I walk into high schools, it's like wading through a sea of insecurity. Kids dumb themselves down to fit in with the crowd. Guys play macho because they don't know what it means to be a man. Girls are scantily clad because true womanhood is far gone. We don't have crime problems, we have identity problems. What is it about certain black men, who so hate themselves, that they go out searching for some one who looks just like them to kill? How have certain black women arrived at such a low place of self worth, that "we" would subject ourselves to be sexual objects to men? It is not just a black issue. It is a human issue. It's the question of identity and knowing the original intent for our lives. Give somebody something without telling them its purpose and they're bound to abuse it somehow. I don't believe in peer pressure. I never have and never will. I say this as someone who has "given-in" to groupthink on more than one occasion. People who are swayed by popular opinion or the "lemming mentality" are simply people who aren't quite grounded in who they have been created to be. Identity can only be found in one place: that is the Potter who molded us in the first place. Tapping into that is where true liberty is found. And while we live in a culture that would seek to give us a short cut to our indentity through media messages and social institutions, it's all really just to pacify the latent potential resident in every person who becomes comfortable with who they truly are. I would fear that day. Because then maybe we'd see some true originality instead of this watered down thing we call "society".
posted by ambra at 6/10/2004 12:53:22 AM | link to this entry |
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