Black Enough

Black Enough

 

What does it mean to be Black? 

The school bus halts at my stop. I get off, lugging my overstuffed backpack with an equally overstuffed track bag, to head home. For entertainment, I make sure to step on every crunchy leaf I can find. My cul-de-sac still out of view, I continue forward, listening to the satisfying crunch under my feet, trying to forget the day I just had.  

I’m tired. High school only started a few weeks ago, but it has felt like lifetimes. The school days feel as if I am serving a sentence in hell, engulfed by fire, among fallen angels clothed in blazers and khakis. 

My parents tell me to give it time. 

“It will get better, just wait!”

“Julian loved it there, so will you.”

They tell me this as if time is the cure to my condition. They lie to me, and to themselves, that I am my brother. I am not. We do not see the world the same and never have. He cares for things that I do not, and I care for things that he could care less about. They are blind to this. Just as they are blind to the reality of my world. They thought they were sending me to a premier private all-boys Catholic school because it was best for me. In their minds, I would be better there than at the public high school in my area. At Holy Ghost Prep, I could hone in on my studies without the distraction of girls or drugs or partying, on top of growing in my Christian foundation. They were wrong about everything. By sending me to a private school, my parents thought they were sheltering me, little did they know.  Private school kids may dress nice, but they do drugs and party and get involved in criminal activity at the same rate, if not more, than high schoolers anywhere else. They were also wrong about the girls, but that is a story for another time. 

As I finally reach my street, I see a girl that I recognize from my bus in middle school. I think Sarah is her name. Sarah is walking in my direction, on the same sidewalk as me. The moment she notices me approaching, a look of panic crosses her face. 

Why is she scared? 

She then starts sprinting. I stop walking to watch in confusion and concern as she bolts to the other sidewalk and down the street, looking back every so often as if someone is chasing her.

There is no one, but me.   

What the hell just happened? 

What was she afraid of? 

When I get home, I tell my dad “the weirdest thing just happened,” and explain how this girl from my bus last year started running away when she saw me. He doesn’t seem surprised. 

I am confused. Why is this not as confusing to him as it is to me? “Why do you think she started running away?” I ask him. 

“You’re Black.”

“But I’m light skin.”  

“You are Black,” he says again, his tone still matter-of-fact but almost sad. 

I futilely try making sense to him that she would not have run in fear from me. I’m not scary. I had my backpack on; it was clear I was coming home from school. I wasn’t dressed like a thug. I’m not even that Black, I’m light skin! I tell him. 

My father looks hurt as he listens to me. 

He is not light skin, like me. Does that mean he is threatening? Would it have made more sense if that white girl had run away from him instead of me? Does his darker complexion make him more of a threat? Does it make him any less innocent, any less human, than I am?  

“You are Black enough,” he responds. 

I listen as he tells me that now since I am taller, my hair is longer, my voice is deeper, the world will no longer perceive me as it did when I was a child. For some reason, I think of that older white woman working at the rental car place who called me cute when we visited New Orleans last Christmas. Would she have run from me too, had she seen me now? At what point did my cuteness as a caramel-complexioned child with light-brown eyes turn into something else?

Growing up Black in a white suburban town like Yardley, with two doctors for parents, I was always treated as an exception. I wasn’t really Black. There were plenty of white kids I went to school with that were blacker than me. Their words, not mine. 

In seventh grade, I asked my best friend at the time, Max, to teach me how to be Black. I was the only Black kid at my elementary school. Now in middle school, with students from elementary schools outside of Yardley, I was not the only one. However, I soon realized that I was not like those Black kids. They talked, walked, played, joked, lived differently than me.  I was too white for them, some of them even said so themselves.   

To be clear, my friend, Max, is 100 percent white.  I had seen him in the hallways with MJ, Tyrone, and Savion and figured he was the person to go to for help. The first thing he advised me to do was switch up my haircut. 

My parents remained puzzled as to why I had started asking my barber to give me a part.  

Step two: Change how you talk. Start using phrases like “glo-day” instead of “birthday” and add “ya feel me” to the end of your sentences. 

I didn’t even bother trying that one. 

His last piece of advice for me was to change how I dress. Wear more hoodies, stop wearing ankle socks, buy more basketball shorts, get a few flat-brimmed hats. Do all of that and I’m set. “Buy a Gucci belt and some Jordans if you can too.” I told him I would run that by my mom. 

To Max, and to me, Blackness was defined by how you talk, a haircut, and clothes. 

For so long, I never questioned this time in my life that I had entirely forgotten it even happened. Not until I was working on my college essay, titled “The Whitest Black Kid,” did I think back to that moment in seventh grade with Max. Looking back now, I am not embarrassed, ashamed, or even shocked. Just sad. 

What does it mean to be Black? 

This seemingly simple question has cast its great shadow over me throughout the entirety of my young life. 

I suppose I finally found my answer, in the shape of a white girl sprinting away from me in fear. 

Being Black is being feared. Regardless of how you dress, walk, or talk. Regardless of what you do, or the degrees you have, or titles you hold. Regardless of where you grew up or the people you surround yourself with. Being Black is being feared because of your skin. Being Black is fearing how people will fear you. Will they run away?

 Or, will they shoot? 

 It is doing everything to prove to everyone else that you are not the stereotype, that you are an exception, and still being Black enough. 

When Sarah ran away from me,  she took with her a part of my freedom. The cute little boy that I once was died that day. Since then, I have grown accustomed to that same look she initially had when she saw me and ran. 

What does it mean to be Black? 

 The answer to this question, that I searched for relentlessly as a child, I now wish I never had. In knowing, there is pain. There is anger. There is sadness. It is easier to be blind, to forget. At least when blind you are not forced to see the ugliness around you. You can imagine a world much prettier than the one I see today.

A photograph of the author wearing a black sweatshirt in front of his suburban childhood home

 
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