On Being Black

When I was in college and went down to the admissions office to pick up my schedule and discuss an issue on some forms I received, I was met with serious derision. My classes were the ones I chose and I liked them all. The first semester of college was actually fun for me because I took a jazz dance class along with biology, economics, and a history class that introduced me to the writings of Chinua Achebe. After taking these courses I was going to be nicely rounded out as a person, thank you very much. The forms had few race categories from which to choose and I was in a tragic mulatto phase at the time where I desperately wanted one of those boxes we checked to include a “mixed race” category. I wasn’t trying to push buttons, though I have, admittedly, a rather defiant personality. The lady at the front desk wasn’t sure how to respond to my request so she said this to me.

“There is no ‘mixed race’ category. You’ll just have to choose one or the other.”

That didn’t sit well with me and I was a 19-year old college student who also happened to be a mother. I had dragged my little 3-year old daughter all the way to that admissions office and it left me deflated. Every time our class schedules were printed out, race was written plain to see underneath my name. It wasn’t my identifying with race so much as it was my college’s way of pointing it out to me.

After my third visit to that office that woman at the front desk rolled her eyes when she saw me coming. Not again, I could almost hear them say. She was exasperated with me and explained that it’s the computer that doesn’t allow that a ‘mixed race’ code and that it wasn’t her fault.

“Aren’t you smarter than the computer? Don’t you people program that to determine what categories there are?” I asked.

She was never amused with my requests so I asked her if I could please change my race and she said that students were allowed to do that at any time. So, after my first semester of college I put down that I was Asian. I became Hispanic and Native American during my sophomore year, White during the first part of my junior year and Black during the last semester of that same year. When she saw me coming she would roll her eyes again and say, “What race are you THIS time?” and I would smile sweetly and ask to see what my options were. Even though there is no Spanish in my bloodline I liked to fall back on that one as I rotated through them all because I had grown up in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago and attended a bi-lingual school for a while. When I hung out with Hispanics I felt like I could blend in with them so long as I understood what they were saying in Spanish about me. My older sister looked far more latina with her olive skin and brown hair and dark brown eyes, but, for the most part, they accepted me. Trust me when I say that I also had to learn quickly what puta negra meant as well as a string of pejorative Spanish words that denoted my mixed heritage.

If I wanted to go all the way back in my bloodline I suppose I could have chosen something to reflect all the German, Irish, African and Creole I knew about. What I hadn’t known at that time was that, if our family had dug a bit further, I would have known that I also came from a history of family members born in Belgium as well as the very tiny place of Reding, Luxembourg. Had I known that, any derisive reference to my genetic makeup, but then my knowledge of ethnophaulisms would have been far more extensive as well. But I think I’ve heard enough ignorant ethnic slurs in my lifetime that I don’t need to go looking for more.

As much fun as it was messing with the admissions office of my university in the early 90′s, I would have to say that my being, my person and my preference is just to simply say that I am black. Perhaps I have tired of the explanations or the corrections I make when people ask me what I am.

“Are you Hawaiian?”

“Who’s the Black one in your family? Your mom or dad?”

“That’s black hair you got, girl. But not Black Black. Just sorta Black.”

The one I hear most often is simply “Are you mixed?” to which I reply “Yes, part Doberman Pinscher and part poodle.”

I do that just to mess with people because, unless you know me very well, you have no right to act so familiar with me that you question my background. It’s just rude. It always has been.

When I was hired by the first school district at the Career Fair at my college I was “Black” at the time. Not that they saw my course schedule card and knew that. I had taken my transcripts and my resume (which was on a floppy disk at the time. Floppy disk, y’all!) with me to interview with two gentlemen from the Human Resources department of the district for which I still work. One of the things I got to show off during the interview was my Spanish because the possibility of teaching that seemed like an option even though I wanted to be an English Literature teacher.

By the time I packed up my little family (by this time, my daughter was 8 and I had a baby boy as well) and headed to my new job I was entirely too excited about finding an apartment and getting my children enrolled in school and day care and finding my classroom and reading my teacher’s manuals and getting my curriculum mastered before the first day in my own classroom. The English department chair called me over that summer to set up a time to meet and I went to the high school on a hot day with my shiny, new college degree and a bucketful of teacher dreams.

A few people were milling around the main office and I didn’t know what she looked like, so I searched for a person that was, well, searching for a person. There’s a look people give off when they’re waiting to meet someone they’ve never met before. She walked by me a few times and I worked up the nerve to stop her.

“Excuse me. Are you Mrs. Neece? I’m supposed to meet with a Mrs. Neece about my teaching assignment.”

She looked stunned and said, “You’re Kelly? The new English teacher? That’s you?”

We shook hands and she led me to her classroom. We quickly chatted about novels I would teach and what courses I would have to learn all the curriculum to and where all my rooms would be since I would be a traveling teacher that year and wouldn’t have my own classroom. (Curses! All those posters and classroom decorations and desk formations I planned! Wasted!)

It took me three months into the school year to work up the nerve to talk to her about her incredulity at our first introduction. She was more than honest with me and said that she hadn’t thought I was the teacher she was looking for because she was simply told this: you’re getting a new Black teacher. What she didn’t say, and what I guessed all along, was that I was filling some quota and that when she saw me I just looked like an ambiguously ethnic person so she didn’t recognize me as “Black” right away.

There are only two ways I’ve experienced my race.

Not Black.

Black Enough.

Either way, it seems that I get to be assigned a category that either makes other people feel comfortable or one where they can trot me out and show off as a college educated Negro. When I got divorced last year we had to hire a CPA to determine how much of my pension that my ex-husband was going to get from me. (Don’t even get me started on how a man can fix his face to ask me for such a thing because I am still embarrassed that any working, White-privileged male would see this as an option.) When I read the paperwork it described me as a “Negroid female” and my attorney said that my case would be difficult to defend in court. Historically speaking, most court cases in which the husband was suing the wife for child support and pension funds were done with White couples. They hadn’t seen many cases where the Negroid wife made more money than the Caucasian husband.

Imagine that. Black enough when it comes to finances. Whatever would a Black woman be doing daring to be ambitious and making more money than a White man?

But I’m done with apologizing for that or for anything that comes of being Black. Because, let’s face it. In this country at this time, I am Black and it’s not for you and it’s not for my ability to get a job nor is it a declination of my White heritage. Every job I have gotten after that first one wasn’t because I was Black. It was because I was good. That was all I ever wanted in the first place. Maybe the people who hired me to teach or to be an educational consultant saw me as an ethnic educator, but I got the job for the entirety of my being and all the experiences it encompassed.

If you asked my father why I have what I have and why I do what I do, he would never envision that my work relied on my race. And he knows that I took my current position as an assistant principal because I recognized that in a school with a high percentage of students of color there was no administrators of color. We talked at length about why I was changing jobs and how strongly I felt about students seeing someone that looked like them in a position of authority. Black enough. He is a proud man who gushes every time he talks about my college degrees. Degrees. Plural. I’m the first generation college student in my family and my White mother is equally as proud of that fact. No category on an admissions form will tell you that. It’s not something you can tick off in a box. That you will just have to experience when you meet me and get to know every part of me.

I’m Black enough. But I won’t be Black just for you.

“If you know your history, then you would know where you’re coming from. Then you wouldn’t have to ask me who the hell do I think I am.”  Bob Marley, “Buffalo Soldier”