It's called "on not bein" by mary hope whitehead lee. I'll copy it in here for reference while I continue to try and collect myself from my last reaction to it in my Race, Gender, Class, & Culture class (nearly bursting into tears while trying to discuss it in an academic kind of way).
on not bein
mary hope whitehead lee
"be a smart child trying to be dumb...
not blk enuf to lovinly ignore...
not bitter enuf to die at a early age.." -- ntozake shange
she never wanted
no never one
did she wanna
be white/to pass
dreamed only of bein darker
she wanted to be darker
not yellow/not no high brown neither
but brown/warm brown
she dreamed/her body
moist earth brown
she prayed/for chocolate
semi/sweet/bitter/sweet
dark chocolate nipples crownin
her small chested tits
2 hersheys kisses
sittin sweet like top of
2 round scoops of smooth
milk chocolate ice cream
*
momma took her outta
almost all black lincoln high
cuz she useta catch hell
every day in gym class
the other girls reactin to her like
she was the cause of some
kinda gawdawful allergy they all had
contact could be fatal
survivors would be scarred
with kindness
cuz she wasn dark enuf
was smart enuf
wasn rowdy enuf
had a white girl friend
cuz none of them would be
beige or buff/ecru or chamois
jus wasn color/ed enuf
to get picked for the softball team
wasn sufficient protection
'gainst gettin' tripped in the shower
she wondered/
would they have treated florence ballard
so shabbily
*
but she envied them all
felt every once now and then
they just mighta been
righteously justified
since/after all
they was brown like
the sun loved they skin special
cuz it warmed 'em
chestnut
bronze
copper
sepia
cinnamon
cocoa
mahogany
her/he was drab faded out
yellow like a scorched july sky
just for it rains & rinses
away the hint of brown from the smog
she wasn/
no maureen peal
no 'high yellow dream child'
not/dichty
a hex muttered
not/hinkty
a curse let fly
not/saddity
like girls was spozed to be
did they went to catholic school or
was they from germantown or
baldwin hills or
valencia park
*
(the man she married/cuz he was the first one to ask/her bein afraid no body else would/said he thought he was gonna hafta marry hisself white cuz/he couldn find him no colored girl was/in-tel-li-gent e-nuff/but with her bein the next best thing to white...)
Okay.
So, as it has been established, I am a half-Black, half-white woman. As it has also been established, I am pale as hell. I don't look "Black." My skin is yellowish pink and covered in hundreds of brown freckles, my hair is blonde and curly, and I have light hazel grey eyes. I am the exact opposite of the poster child of Blackness. And yet, my blackness is something I identify with very, very much. It's a part of who I am, and it always will be. I wasn't raised to dismiss my whiteness or my blackness--I'm both. But still...I've always had a lot of trouble, and maybe I've been internalizing it and whitehead lee's poem just really triggered it, but I've always had a lot of trouble accepting that I will never be black enough. I'm never going to know what it's like to have the sun kiss beautiful cocoa caramel skin. I'm never going to know what it's like to have people immediately judge me because of the color of my skin--I know that's that is a good thing, because having people judge you for any reason is terrible. I have so much privilege because of my white skin; people see me and they don't think "oh maybe we should watch out for that black girl she might steal something maybe i should pull her over maybe she's dangerous she's probably an angry black woman." But god, some sick part of me wants to be able to know what it's like to have people not immediately erase me because I'm just another white girl because I'm not.
I think the reason talking about all of this made me cry (and is currently making me cry) is that being told that you're not black enough, or that you're too light to really "be black" is because it's basically like the people who tell you that are saying that you just aren't enough. You were born, and you weren't enough. You're not white enough, you're not black enough. You're just stuck in the borderlands between black and white and it's terrible. Setting race aside, being told you aren't enough is basically just a huge part of how Western society works. You either tell yourself that you're not enough, or other people make you feel like you're not enough, or the media tells you you're not enough---not skinny enough, not pretty enough, your hair isn't straight enough, not smart enough....not black enough....not enough.
I see other Black people and I feel this pull, this connection to them. I want to be like them, I want to be with them. I want to be a strong, beautiful, confident Black woman. I want to really, really fit in. In my wildest dreams, I wouldn't have been born the lightest child. I would be dark like my brother and sister and my cousins and my mom and my aunt and my uncles, I'd belong, I'd fit in. I'm grateful that I haven't had to face the same kinds of discrimination that they did/do, but I'm angry that I had to sit on the sidelines and witness people's blatant ignorant racism all through elementary to high school to college. Why should I have to "pull the race card" (which is literally me pulling out a picture of my mother when I say "btw I'm black") whenever a white person says something racist, intentionally or not? Why do people think they can get away with their racist bullshit just because I look white? Is my light skin an excuse for jackasses to be commence their jackassery? Why? Why is it an excuse? Why can't I just fit in with the people I feel so connected to? Why can't I just belong, and not have to exist in this fucking weird middle space where nobody really understands how you feel because everybody experiences it differently? Just...why?
And I know, I know that I am smart and talented and kinda cute and I have a potentially bright future ahead of me. And I know I shouldn't let the prevalence of colorism in the Black community get me down, but it's so HARD when for my entire young life, people told me I wasn't what I said I was. People said "you're not black," people said things like "nigger" and "coon" and any other racist crap they could think of around me, people told me I had to be adopted, or that my mom was my stepmom or any other excuse they could find to strip me of my identity because GOD FORBID someone doesn't conform to the whitewashedness of our society. You try to ignore people's crap, but it always sticks with you, even if it's just a little bit. But those little bits build up and next thing you know, you're reading a poem about not feeling black enough and you're crying in class and then you're crying at your computer and you realize that people are really terrible and that you've got a lot of identity stuff to work on and it's probably going to take a while but it's good because you're on your way and that's what matters, right?
This is some heavy stuff, and it's weighing down on me pretty hard. I guess it's good and it's healthy because I'm learning and growing (I hope) and maybe some of these tears are the backhanded insults of racists and colorists and ignorant folks just washing out of me. That would be really great and symbolic and part of me definitely believes that, but honestly...I'm just kinda weepy and sad.
And that's okay! As I'm winding down from this very long blog post, I'm thinking of this great quote from my favorite book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith:
“There had to be dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background it's flashing glory.”
Right now, I'm wading through some dark and muddy waters, but I'm confident that the sun will come out, and it'll kiss my yellow pink skin and let me know that I'll always be loved, and that I'm black enough, I'm white enough, I'm good enough...
I'm enough, dammit.