by Issa Rae
Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland, was easy. I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet’s Planeteers. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.
All that changed when my family moved to Los Angeles and placed me in a middle school where my blackness was constantly questioned—and not even necessarily in the traditional sense, i.e. “You talk white, Oreo girl” or “You can’t dance, white girl.” Those claims were arguable, for the most part. My biggest frustration in the challenge to prove my “blackness” usually stemmed from two very annoying, very repetitive situations:
SITUATION #1: “I’m not even black, and I’m blacker than you.” It’s one thing when other African Americans try to call me out on my race card, but when people outside my ethnicity have the audacity to question how “down” I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted of black women, it’s a whole other thing. Unacceptable. I can recall a time when I was having a heated discussion with a white, male classmate of mine. Our eighth-grade class was on a museum field trip as the bus driver blasted Puff Daddy’s “Been Around the World” to drown us out.
It began as a passive competition of lyrics, as we each silently listened for who would mess up first. By the second verse, our lazy rap-whispers escalated to an aggressive volume, accompanied by rigorous side-eyes by the time we got to, “Playa please, I’m the macaroni with the cheese,” and I felt threatened. Was this fool seriously trying to outrap me? And why did I care? After the song ended, he offered his opinion: “Puff Daddy is wack, yo.” How dare he? Not only was I pissed, but I felt as if he had insulted my own father (who did I think I was? Puff Daughter?).
“Puff Daddy is tight,” I retorted. He rolled his eyes and said, “Have you heard of [insert Underground rapper]? Now, he’s dope.” I hadn’t heard of him, but I couldn’t let this white boy defeat me in rap music knowledge, especially as others started to listen. “Yeah, I know him. He’s not dope,” I lied, for the sake of saving face. Perhaps because he saw through me or because he actually felt strongly about this particular artist, he asked me to name which songs I thought were “not dope.” Panic set in as I found myself exposed, then—“You don’t even know him, huh? Have you even heard of [insert Random Underground rapper]?”
As he continued to rattle off the names of make-believe-sounding MCs, delighted that he had one-upped me, he managed to make me feel as though my credibility as a black person relied on my knowledge of hip-hop culture. My identity had been reduced to the Bad Boy label clique as this boy seemingly claimed my black card as his own.
Of course, as I grew older and Ma$e found his calling as a reverend, I realized there was more to being black than a knowledge of rap music, and that I didn’t have to live up to this pop cultural archetype. I began to take pride in the fact that I couldn’t be reduced to a stereotype and that I didn’t have to be. This leads me to my next situation:
SITUATION #2: “Black people don’t do that.” Or so I’m told by a black person. These, too, are derived from (mostly negative) stereotypes shaped by popular culture. The difference is that in these situations, we black people are the ones buying into these stereotypes.
When I was a teenager, for example, others questioned my blackness because some of the life choices I made weren’t considered to be “black” choices: joining the swim team when it is a known fact that “black people don’t swim,” or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken. These choices and the various positive and negative responses to them helped to broaden my own perspective on blackness and, eventually, caused me to spurn these self-imposed limitations. But not before embarrassing the hell out of myself in a poor attempt to prove I was “down.” I’ll never forget submitting a school project in “Ebonics” for my seventh-grade English class, just to prove that I could talk and write “black.” I was trying to prove it to myself just as much as I was to everyone around me.
Even in my early adulthood, post-college, I’d overtip to demonstrate I was one of the good ones. Only recently have I come to ask, What am I trying to prove and to whom am I proving it? Today, I haven’t completely rid myself of the feeling that I’m still working through Du Bois’s double consciousness.
For the majority of my life I cared too much about how my blackness was perceived, but now? At this very moment? I couldn’t care less. Call it maturation or denial or self-hatred—I give no f%^&s. And it feels great. I’ve decided to focus only on the positivity of being black, and especially of being a black woman. Am I supposed to feel oppressed? Because I don’t. Is racism supposed to hurt me? That’s so 1950s. Should I feel marginalized? I prefer to think of myself as belonging to an “exclusive” club.
While experiencing both types of situations—being made to feel not black enough by “down” white people on one hand and not black enough by the blacks in the so-called know on the other—has played a role in shaping a more comfortably black me, in the end, I have to ask: Who is to say what we do and don’t do? What we can and can’t do? The very definition of “blackness” is as broad as that of “whiteness,” yet the media seemingly always tries to find a specific, limited definition. As CNN produces news specials about us, and white and Latino rappers feel culturally dignified in using the N-word, our collective grasp of “blackness” is becoming more and elusive. And that may not be a bad thing.
Halfrican
Growing up post–Coming to America had some benefits. For one, the 1988 film helped to counter the stereotypical, impoverished, National Geographic images of Africa that so many were used to seeing at that time. Ironically, the year prior, Eddie Murphy’s own comedy special, Raw, had helped to perpetuate the notion of uncivilized Africans. Mfufu, with the bone in her nose, formerly “butt naked on a zebra” suddenly expressed her dissatisfaction with the economic inequality of their relationship, “Ed-die, why you treat me like animaux?”
Coming to America brought on a shift in dumb questions, from “Oh you’re from Africa—do you hunt lions?” to “Oh, you’re from Africa—is your family royalty?” I didn’t have any African friends outside of family until I went to high school. Even then, the many Nigerians there didn’t flaunt their African ancestry, and I wasn’t included in their clique because I wasn’t one of them.
In my French class, I met a girl named Monique from Zaire who, like me, already spoke French and was taking the class to get an easy “A.” More advanced in her French than I was, she knew all the French slang and spoke in the tone of a peppy Valley girl. She seemed to relish the opportunity to secretly talk shit about our peers in French. “Le gars la est trop con,” she’d exclaim to me with a smile in a sweet tone that suggested we were discussing flowers and candy.
And we became fast friends when she found out I was from Senegal.
“Oh my God, the guys in Senegal are so cute!”
* * *
The first time I ever felt beautiful was when I went back to Senegal, my sophomore year of high school. It was the first time I had boys and men pining after me. As a moderate feminist, I shouldn’t rely on the validation of men to feel a sense of worth, but as I mentioned, it was high school, so stop judging. Initially, I convinced myself that all of this sudden attention was because I had lived in America. I wasn’t naïve to the fact that many Senegalese men saw foreign women as an opportunity to “escape,” to establish a better life abroad. Americans were particularly coveted, back when the dollar meant a damn. Before euros emerged as the desired currency, everyone wanted to go to the States. Even people who swore they hated America wanted a piece of it, somehow, some way. I took this into account whenever I was hit on, or whenever I was proposed to, or whenever men offered to impregnat
e me—you know, the usual.
European and American women of all shapes, sizes, and facial structures were shamelessly courted by Senegalese men of varying beauty, so I knew not to take their attention too seriously. In some sense, we were all like the hefty, juicy chicken mirages seen only by the hungry, thirsty stragglers lost in the desert, fantasizing about survival. But whatevs—I finally experienced what it meant to feel beautiful. And part of me denied that I was in the same category as those other women, because I was part Senegalese. I was a product of their generational loins, indirectly.
Superficial reasons aside, my other “feelings of beauty” stemmed from the interactions I had with my Senegalese family, whom I hadn’t seen since elementary school. I was on the brink of womanhood now, and I had a new appreciation for them. One particular cousin, Ndeye Awa, is someone I’ve looked up to since childhood. With smooth ebony skin and sculpted features, she is absolutely beautiful. The running joke among the family is that she’s “too skinny,” but there was always a general consensus that she could come to the States and be a model, easily. She and her older sister, Lissa, who was closer in age to my older brother, were the absolute coolest. Lissa was what the Senegalese call claire (literally: “clear,” meaning light-skinned, which by Senegalese standards meant her skin was copper-colored). Curvy and very beautiful, she could have had her pick of men. To know that I was related to these two alone already instilled in me a sense of pride. But when I returned the summer before my tenth-grade year, and was reunited with all of my aunts, my first cousins, and some of my first cousins’ children under the roof of the family patriarch, I was overwhelmed with happiness. This was my family.
We had actually moved to Senegal as a family when I was three years old. My dad felt that we needed to learn more discipline and my mother was worried about what the budding Los Angeles gang violence would mean for her three sons, then aged twelve, ten, and a few months. As a toddler, I had no qualms about the move, but for my older brothers, it was the end of the world. Amadou and Malick had friends and reputations they were leaving behind in the only city they knew. They were devastated, which is probably why their love affair with Senegal is, to this day, a bit tenuous. I had no idea about anything life had to offer, so the adaptation was fairly easy for me. Senegalese food? Bring it on. Wolof and French? Guess I’m trilingual up in here!
Yes, my parents were ready to start a new life in Senegal, leaving the States behind for good. During the time we spent there, we had a great life. We lived in a huge, multilevel house, with a security guard and two maids, in an affluent area called Anne Mariste. I could see my cousins whenever I wanted to and was in a school where my American-ness made me special. Life was great, for two years. Until my father attempted to build a hospital in Senegal and instead got ripped off by the government, losing most of his money in the process. That’s when, to my sadness and my older brothers’ relief, we packed our bags to return to the States.
We wouldn’t come back to visit until I was ten years old and, while that visit served as a brief reminder of what once was, it didn’t trigger any fond nostalgia. In fact, during that particular visit, the one thing I took back with me was “Roachelle,” a cruel nickname given to me by my mother on the plane ride back home. One of my only surface gripes with Senegal, due to several horrible experiences and really, the general grossness of them, is the abundance of cockroaches. If you don’t see them, they’re somewhere. The incident that sparked my new nickname began at the Dakar airport, on our way back home to Potomac, Maryland. I really had to use the restroom and couldn’t wait until we got past the ticketing line to go. I was wearing an all-white booboo, with beautiful color-printed accents, and these cute white harem pants. The outfit was a parting gift from a relative that my mother insisted, to demonstrate our appreciation, I put on right away.
My family waited for me in the ticketing area as I pee-pee danced to the bathroom. As soon as I walked inside, I knew I didn’t want to be in there for very long. It smelled like a urine fairy was floating around the bathroom, blowing his pee-pee breath ever-so-delicately directly up my nostrils. I rushed inside the stall and pulled down my pants, only to look down and see several small roaches scurrying along the floor tiles. I quickly pulled my pants up to my thighs, holding them tightly while keeping balanced enough to squat over the seatless toilet, all the while attempting to keep my eye on every single roach, to ensure my safety. When I got out of the restroom, before I could tell my mother about the nastiness, she rushed us to the gate.
In the middle of the thirteen-hour plane ride back home, I kept feeling a strange brushing sensation on my inner thigh. Being a stupid child, apparently too lazy to investigate unfamiliar sensations, I ignored the tingling the first three times it occurred. Maybe the cloth in my new pants was especially stringy in the crotch area? After the fourth brush-up, I reached down and discovered a hole right in the center of my pants. Intrigued, I stuck my hand near my inner thigh to see what was causing my irritation. I grabbed what I thought was a loose piece of fabric or a tag, held it to my face for closer inspection, and was met with the absolutely disgusting cycling legs of a thick, three-inch-long cockroach. I freaked the entire hell out and instinctively threw it out of my hands, next to me, where my younger brother sat. Horrified, he let out a high-pitched squeal and brushed it off his chest and sent it flying down to the aisle between him and my mother, where it landed on its pedaling feet. My mother, who sat holding a four-year-old Elize, looked at the walking roach and shrieked with alarm. As it made its way to the front of the plane, my mother tapped the man sitting in front of her, who was engaged in reading a newspaper, and asked him with pleading panicked politeness, “Monsieur, could you please kill that roach?”
In response, the man barely turned his eyes to the floor, where the roach leisurely roamed, and calmly told her, “No.” He resumed his newspaper reading as the roach prepared for his new life in New York, and that’s the story of how “Roachelle” was almost impregnated by a cockroach.
* * *
In general, my mother and father have always been very good about keeping some aspect of Senegal in our lives, whether they intended to or not. One incident particularly endeared me to that culture. Alioune was one of my aunt Mame Bineta’s friends and one of the many Senegalese visitors over the years who had extended his stay in our home. My mother quickly learned that when she said “I do” to my father, she said “I do” to his culture, which states that any visitor is welcome to stay at your house, eat your food, and cause you inconvenience, indefinitely—family or not. Many relatives took advantage of my dad’s generosity and general politeness. In addition to sponsoring the visits of over fifty relatives and close family friends, my father has repeatedly housed at least half of them.
Alioune had been in our Los Angeles home for only a couple of days when, during a balcony smoke break, he saw what appeared to be a black baby doll floating on top of our backyard pool. Upon closer inspection, he realized it was my unconscious body and promptly ran down to jump in the pool and retrieve me. At only one and a half years old, I had wandered outside alone and fallen into the gateless pool. My mother called the paramedics in a frenzy as my brothers rushed outside to watch while Alioune administered CPR to me. Had it not been for a random Senegalese stranger staying at our house, I would certainly be dead.
This is a fact I’m sure my mother never forgot, and that must have remained in her mind as she tolerated more and more stays from visitors over the years, even after she and my father divorced.
One of our visitors, Cherif, my father’s elderly “uncle” who resembled an African Redd Foxx, had decided to grace us with his presence for several weeks. I was fourteen at the time, and my parents and siblings were gone for some inexplicable reason. Maybe I had stayed home from school. Who knows? All I know is that I found myself alone with this man, who had to be in his seventies, but was still in good enough form to do some jumping jacks if he needed to. His Frenc
h was broken and often unintelligible, and so was my Wolof, so our language barrier was pretty prominent. When he called me from my snack searching in the kitchen to where he lay stretched out on the couch, lazy and entitled, like the Senegalese version of Jabba the Hutt, I knew I’d be in for a struggle.
The request started out simple enough. He indicated his hands and asked me in a French-Wolof hybrid, “Ana coupé? Coupé?” (Literally: “Where’s cut? Cut?”)
It took me a minute, but all I had to do was look at his nails to understand his request.
“Ahh, les couples d’ongles? Je vais les chercher.” I pointed behind me and pronounced it again, louder, as if my volume would magically make him understand, “CHERCHER!”
So I went to find the nail clippers, which I knew my mother kept in some cluttered drawer of her bathroom. As I thoroughly searched each drawer, I crossed my fingers that we had all been responsible and considerate enough to have put them back where we found them. I shuffled through tampons and cotton balls and nail polish and . . . Eureka! I jogged back to the family room and handed them to him. He nodded with mild appreciation as he took them from me. I went back to my dad’s office to internet surf.
Ten minutes later, my surfing was interrupted.
“Isseu!” Had I heard my name? I waited. Maybe he was coughing.
“Isseu!” Nope. Not a cough. I scooted away from my leisurely act of nothingness and made my way back to the family room. Cherif handed me the clippers and as I nodded, readying to put them back, he stopped me.
“Xadda, xadda . . .” I turned back to see him pointing, this time . . . at his feet. I looked down at the long-nailed toes he wiggled as he continued to say something in Wolof that I didn’t want to understand. I tried to hand the nail clippers back to him and was met instead with a closed fist and single finger pointing in my direction. Me?