While lots of black people have had the desire to escape their blackness, Christian spent a good part of his childhood wanting to escape his whiteness and trade it for anything else:
CHRISTIAN LANDER
I’ve been made fun of by my father all the time for wanting to be anything but white. I wanted to be black for a really long time. I wanted to be Asian for a really long time. I wanted to be anything but white, absolutely.
White culture is very bland and generic. There are no secrets to white culture; it’s all out there. If you’re white and you go into a fancy restaurant in Santa Monica, there’s no secret menu, you’re not going to get a white discount from the waiter.
[When you’re not white], you get this extra, separate thing. You get the culture of your family from somewhere else. You get this whole separate world. You get this amazing food and language and all of this stuff given to you.
As whites, believe me, we get plenty of privileges that make up for it, but I was always envious of that. I was so envious that you could be part of both.
Having a black-guy-born-in-Africa on The Black Panel gave me the chance to ask Derrick about specific instances in which he wanted to distance himself, not just from being black, but specifically from African-Americans.
DERRICK ASHONG
Are there ever any moments when I want to distance myself from Black America? Yeah, sometimes that happens. When I was in Boston, I was doing this hip-hop youth political-empowerment stuff, and the New Black Panther Party people came in, and they hit us with the “blacker than thou. We’re blacker than all y’all, blacker than thou. Blah, blah, blah.”
That doesn’t really work with me, because I am African. You’re never going to get me with the “blacker than thou.” I’m just not feeling it.
I try not to be chauvinistic with it. I don’t think Africans are superior or anything like that, but when people start to question my authentic blackness, I’m like, “I can trace my ancestry back forever in Africa. You can’t really mess with me on that. I know my language, I know my culture, and I don’t have to hate anyone in order to give myself an identity.”
What happened in this instance is there was this idea among some of the New Black Panther Party people—not everybody, but some of the leadership—of “Kill Whitey. Kill white people.”
DERRICK: Why?
NBPP: Oh, you have to kill Whitey. You know, the White Man this and this and this.
DERRICK: Well, first of all, I ain’t really here to kill anybody. I’m in grad school. I’m trying to get a degree, do my thing. I came to do research. I don’t know what you’re talking about killing nobody for. Secondly, you ain’t got a murder rap. You ain’t killed nobody, either, as far as I know. You date mad white girls, so I don’t exactly see what the beef is. And, additionally, when you say, “Kill Whitey,” it just doesn’t resonate with me. Because where I come from all the people who are oppressing us look like us.
NBPP: Yes, but the White Man and Colonialism, and this and this and this.
DERRICK: Yes, that’s real. That’s real. Colonialism happened. We got free. Colonialists do not dominate us the same way that they used to.
So when you say to an average kid in a place like Ghana, or anywhere in West Africa for sure, “We hate white people,” it’s like, “Well, why?” We have no proximate animus. We have no reason to dislike white folks.
When I was seeing that coming from this group of exclusively African-Americans who were explicitly Afrocentric, but had very little interest in an actual African perspective, it made me want to distance myself.
So for the most part I don’t feel a strong sense to distance myself from African-American culture. But when it comes to making race the defining factor of everything, I just can’t get with it. I can’t get with it because ultimately you have to remember I have a responsibility to my people back home and race is not what’s killing us. There are other issues in the world.
Can You Swim?
There are a number of persistent stereotypes about the things black people don’t or can’t do: eat organic food, tip, go camping, do yoga, travel, show up on time, et cetera.* Sometimes large portions of the black community embrace one or another of such notions, but in my own life, I actually tend to do and enjoy the things commonly on the list of activities black people don’t do. I blame my mother. She got us started on organic food, yoga, travel, and more, very early on. One of the most persistent things black people allegedly don’t do is swim, but there, too, my mom got me started early.
When I was six or seven years old, my mother enrolled me in swimming classes at one of the YMCAs in Washington, DC. The pool was the largest I had seen at that point in my life, but our class stuck to the very shallow end and took advantage of various tools and flotation devices for most of the weeks of the class. One day I showed up for what I expected to be another day of splashing around in my floaties when the teachers lined all of us up at the deep end of the pool. We had never been at that end before, and I was terrified. Then I discovered true terror when, one by one, the teachers told us to swim.
I complained loudly, “But you never taught us how!” They ignored my very reasonable protest and began flinging children into the depths. It was the Middle Passage all over again. Clearly, they were trying to kill us! I saw the first few children survive these attempted executions, but that had no effect on my fears about my own chances of survival. Surely, I thought, I was about to die at the hands of these heartless serial killers masquerading as YMCA swimming instructors.
When it was my turn to take the leap of the lemming, I stood at the edge of the pool a long time, reminding all who had ears to hear, that I did not know how to swim because I had never been swimming before. This was so obviously wrong. I searched the faces of others at the pool for any sign of sympathy, any acknowledgment of my agony, but all I got in return were smiles. Sick people, I thought. My blood was about to be on their hands. I cried, and just as I had set my mind to flee this crime scene, someone pushed me into the pool. My short life flashed before my eyes. I saw myself in the hospital a few years earlier, healing from third-degree burns to my left foot. I saw myself hating my first taste of beer courtesy of my pickup truck–driving father. I saw our dog, Honey, and knew I would miss her peculiar habit of playing with rocks instead of sticks.
“It’s all over,” I thought, as my body became completely submerged in a pool far deeper than my young body’s height. I panicked and flailed briefly, inhaling what felt like gallons of chlorinated water, and just as I resigned myself to death’s cool embrace, a miracle happened. My body began to swim! I can’t say I began to swim, because I didn’t feel that the conscious me was in charge, but nevertheless, I was swimming. Everyone cheered, and when I emerged from the pool at the other end, exhausted but alive, one of the instructors boasted, “We told you you could do it!” And I thought, “No, you tried to kill me, but unfortunately for you, I just discovered a superpower.”
After that traumatic introduction, I grew to love swimming in whatever body of water was nearest: oceans, rivers, lakes, and pools. I even spent a year on my high school swim team, though I found out that my body wasn’t really constructed for competitive swimming. Today, in my constant travels, I always make sure to use the pool at whatever hotel I’m in. I consider the ability to swim a natural, fun, and important part of my life, and I’m still black. I threw this question of swimming ability to The Black Panel, and here’s what they came back with.
CHRISTIAN LANDER
Can I swim? Yeah, absolutely. Just like any good white person, I took swimming lessons. I earned the badges all throughout my childhood. I had a pool at my house, which is weird because we were the only house in the neighborhood in downtown Toronto with a pool. It’s probably the only reason I had as many friends as I had in high school. Yes, I can swim. I’m a pretty accomplished swimmer. I can do the butterfly.
JACQUETTA SZATHMARI
I love to swim, and I love water sports. I like water skiin
g. I like wind surfing. I used to do that when I was younger a lot. I grew up on the water. When you’re from the Eastern Shore of Maryland—this used to infuriate me—[there were] free swimming lessons. Why was I the only black person, girl or boy, at my age that would take the free swimming lessons? Everyone else would just be like, “Brother at the pool! Ah!” afraid that water would get splashed up on their face. I’m like, “Who cares? We’re all nappy-headed, shot to the grease. A little bit of water isn’t going to hurt. It’s free.”
Plus, I’m OCD and very pragmatic, so I’m like, “If I fall in the water off a boat or something like that, I need to know what I’m doing.” I don’t know what it is about the swimming thing. I like to swim. It’s good exercise.
ELON JAMES WHITE
Funny enough, I can’t swim and it’s not because I’m black. I went to summer camp as a child, and we used to go to the beach and stuff like that, there were chances to learn how to swim, I just didn’t learn how to swim. I also can’t drive. I live in New York!
DAMALI AYO
I am not a very good swimmer. I have control issues, so when my feet get too far off the ground, I panic. That might be a history of just distrust built in from the oppression, but it could be a childhood problem.
CHERYL CONTEE
I can swim. Actually, I took swimming lessons at the local suburban pool. My swimming, though, could be stronger. But yeah, I can swim. That said, there were some interesting pool interactions with the local kids.
Our school was very, very white. Our neighborhood was very, very white. The pool was very, very white, and we came in for some bullying and some targeted, I would say, not very positive interactions.
I remember my brother, a kid asked him if his color would wash off, if that was going to be a problem for him. Another kid wanted to know why my [hands were different colors on the top and bottom]. Yeah.
DERRICK ASHONG
Yes, I can swim. I can swim quite well. I learned to swim relatively late.
You know what’s funny? If I go to the beach, I ain’t getting in the water. It’s cold, and I like to be warm. I’m also not just going to sit around in the sun all the time, because I have a tan. So when I go to the beach, I walk around in the sand, I buy a hot dog, and I go home. If there’s volleyball, we’ll play it. Otherwise we sit, we look at the girls, and kick it. But I’m not into jumping around in the ocean overly much.
I can swim, though, and I used to play water polo in school and things like that. It was fun. I used to be on a swim team. I was always the last one, because my bones are dense.
W. KAMAU BELL
I can swim well. I’ve been swimming all my life. I’m a fairly good swimmer. Yes, I can swim. I can do several different strokes . . . I can’t float that much, but that’s because I’m 250 pounds, six foot four, built for slavery and the revolution.
Going Black to Africa
In addition to not being able to swim, black people also allegedly don’t travel, but I traveled a lot during my childhood. My mother thought it was essential to mix things up, and we were constantly taking economically efficient road trips in our Nissan Datsun B210 station wagon. She loved that car and wielded it almost as if it were a part of her body. By the time I graduated from high school, we had traveled from Nova Scotia, Canada, to Disney World in it. I can only recall one plane journey in my childhood, but we moved about by Amtrak train quite often. When I was twelve, we took a nearly three-week train trip around the entire United States and deep into Mexico. In many of the places we visited, we chose highly efficient, low-carbon-footprint accommodations, also known as “camping.”
The Mexico part of that epic train journey was a trip itself. I met travel writers in Los Mochis, saw forest fires from our bus on the Mexican highway near the U.S.-Mexico border, and heard country music blasting out of a car stereo for the first time in my life. I didn’t know it was even possible to blast country music! I’m not sure I thought it wasn’t possible. I just know the thought had never crossed my mind before that day. I’ve been a changed man ever since.
All these trips, however, paled in comparison to the journey I was privileged enough to take to Senegal in the summer of 1995, just after graduating high school.
One of the French teachers at Sidwell had established a ritual of taking his students to France every summer. Joining one of these trips never concerned me since (a) I was a Spanish student, and (b) they cost a serious amount of money. My senior year, however, word spread that Monsieur Gueye* was not going to France that summer, but to his home country of Senegal. This got the attention of every black person associated with Sidwell, and the opportunity was the daily focus of attention in the Thurston household for months until I boarded the plane.
For me, bearing an African name, having matriculated through a West African–inspired rites-of-passage program, and being my mother’s son, going on this trip was no choice at all. It was a duty. My mother was especially excited to go but couldn’t afford to send us both, so I represented the entire family: myself, my sister, my mother, and those who came before but never got to return. I was honored, humbled, and excited! I read as much as I could in the library* and planned my packing list. We were told that bartering was a major form of commerce and U.S. goods could fetch a good price, so I rummaged through my clothing, toys, and other possessions identifying anything dispensable.
This was also my first foreign travel to a country that required a passport, and in the process of applying we discovered a small technical problem: my name wasn’t actually Baratunde Rafiq Thurston, not legally at least. I never knew there was any issue with my name before this. As a kid, you just accept what your mother tells you, with no concern for or awareness of “paperwork” and “laws.”
But all official records still had me with my father’s surname, making me Baratunde Rafiq Robinson. That just sounds so strange to me, even now. It doesn’t sound like me, and it isn’t. My mother located a DC lawyer to help her quickly file for an official name change based on the extensive paper trail of school records, communion documents, and other reports demonstrating that I was known as “Baratunde Thurston.” Miraculously, we were able to get me a passport with the Thurston name in time for the trip. A few vaccinations later, I was off to The Source Code of Blackness.
On July 25, 1995, our group met at National Airport—I still refuse to call it Reagan Airport; National for life!—and we took group photos and hugged the family members we were leaving behind. The girls on the trip had dressed up slightly, wearing nice shorts or slacks and solid-color tops. The guys dressed like we were going to just kick it on the stoop, as usual. We rocked oversize white Ts, baseball caps, and Timberland boots. After a quick hop to JFK Airport, we boarded Air Afrique and flew to the east, my brother to the east, my brother to the east, my brother to the east . . .
I’m not sure just what I expected. Would there be a version of the Walmart greeter but specifically for black Americans on a roots-discovering pilgrimage? “Welcome home, brother! We have waited many years for your return! Your African name is . . .” Would there be some version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, still-wet concrete into which we would dip our hands and feet to prove we had made the return trip? Would there be a special place in the mountains, surrounded by all the creatures of the mother continent bowing their heads in respectful celebration, and behind them a fountain from which pure, pristine, unadulterated blackness flowed?
Wow, that’s not a bad idea. African nations seeking to boost tourism could probably convince at least a few American blacks that The Fountain of Blackness existed within their borders. Certainly a part of me, and perhaps all of us on the journey, was looking for something: a more tangible connection to our ancestry; a validation of our Afrocentricity; something to justify the investment in red, black, and green medallions and Black Power fists. We at least wanted some good deals on kente cloth!
Monsieur Gueye had arranged for us to stay at a downtown Dakar Sofitel Hotel with views of the city and the o
cean beyond. The hotel was clean and just what you’d expect from any modern urban lodging. What I did not expect to find was a previously unheard-of flavor of CNN, called CNN International. It was like the CNN in the United States, but they seemed to engage in this peculiar activity known as “reporting” and were less focused on distracting the viewer with swooshy graphics. Don’t worry. CNN International isn’t easily available in the States.
We rolled around much of the capital by bus. I took photos and referred to them as “drive-by shootings,” because living in an actual crack-inspired DC war zone led me to believe this was funny.
Shot:
An armed guard stands at attention, his hands clasped behind his back and his automatic rifle slung across his chest. His uniform is a red, buttoned-up military jacket and red cap embroidered with a golden ring of fabric, plus jet-black pants, complemented by an expressionless jet-black face. Behind him lies the large, white presidential palace, separated from this black man with black pants and black gun by a wrought-iron black fence.
Shot:
Three young boys wave to us as our bus passes along an ocean-side road. They are each wearing pants of a different color: one red, one white, one blue.
Shot:
A group of women heats a large pot of water over a man-made outdoor fire. Whether their purpose is to cook food or launder clothes, I cannot tell.
Shot:
Three men sit against the wall on the edge of an outdoor market. The one nearest us exhales a piercingly lovely wail through his saxophone. Next to him a man seated on the ground strikes his mallet against the wooden bars of a xylophone. The third man plucks notes from his string instrument.
The bus stopped.
We had to hit up the small, partially indoor market crammed between two buildings on the side of the road. Parents, siblings, and distant relatives would have sent us the thousands of miles back if we didn’t return with some “authentic piece of Africa” for them. We spent most of our time in the market looking at “sand paintings,” which are made from a variety of different-colored sands from across the continent to create imagery indistinguishable from non-sand paintings at a far enough distance. I froze when I saw this painted in sand:
How to Be Black Page 8