Each day is a treasure to be home in my office when my sons come home from school. The first to burst through the door is my 14 year. There are days when he bursts through the door and there are days when he barely pours across the threshold. There are days when he will spend five minutes telling all about his day, his interactions with friends, and these strange creatures called girls. Then there are days when all I get is a deep(his voice has changed and that’s a whole different topic all together) groan which in the teenage world translates in to “Hi, Dad.”
Over the last week it seems all I’ve been getting is groans and caveman grunts and when I ask what’s wrong, I get, “hggh, ghdhg” which means “nothing.” Over the past 6 months I have become very fluent in teenage gibberish.
After awhile the caveman-speak gets REALLY annoying and I am tempted to demand he tell me what’s bothering him. Instead, I know he will tell me when he’s ready. I know the bro-code. Men will talk when they are ready.
My wife does not, however, have a subscription to the bro-code, nor does she have the official rule book. Her approach is to question/interrogate him until he cracks like spring ice under a 350 pound man.
His issues are typical teenage issues but one issue is something I can really relate with. He is having a hard time with a group of blacks in his school. This group doesn’t think he’s “black enough.”
He goes to a diverse school and his friends are really of every race and background including several black kids. My son is light skinned like me. We often joke and say we are the “high yellow brothers.” I have learned growing up in the black community there is a struggle with racism in our own race. There is s split between those who are BLACK and those who are “not black enough.” There is also a split between light skinned and dark skinned blacks and the prejudices involved between them. (that is the topic of another blog)
I was an offender of this in-race racism in college. I questioned those blacks around me that were better able to assimilate to their white environment. I too wrote them off as not ‘black enough.” I have also been on the other end of the spectrum and have also been accused of not being black enough because I talk “white” and don’t dress a certain way.
This used to bother me just as it does my son. To be charged by your peers as being “too white” is painful and the fact that my son is genetically just as black as those leveling the charges makes it sting even more. It is painful because it screams, “You are not one of us.”
My fear was always that if I wasn’t accepted by blacks, and I wasn’t white than I would fall in the gap between the two never really fitting in with either. My bigger fear was that neither would want me as part of their group. Then what would I do?
I remember in college for a creative writing class I wrote a story called, Whited Out, it was a story about a black teenager who moved from the city where he was surrounded by people who looked like him to a rural all-
white town. I described his first day of school in this all white environment where he was not accepted by anyone and he didn’t know how to handle it. At the end of the day he went home, went in to the garage, closed the garage door and turned on the car. His solution to not fitting in was to kill himself. When his parents found his lifeless body in the car, death had changed his skin color, he was now more gray than black or white. On his lifeless face he wore a partial smile.
I know is was a like hokey but that story told a lot about how I was feeling in college and it vividly brought to life my fears; fears that I never put to rest until I was in my 30’s.
One day while wrestling with where I fit in, it occurred to me. I was most comfortable around middle class blacks. It may sound horribly classist to say it but while with this group I feel the most at ease. Here I have the culture I love so much and I don’t get the questions about being black enough. As I get older I find more of my peer group gravitates to this group and finally that’s alright.
The great news is I figured it out. Being a part of the “black and strong” crowd didn’t make or break my survival. Finding where I fit in did and once I understood that, what the “black and strong” crowd said or thought no longer mattered. The better news is I can share this with my son and provide him with a detour that will eliminate 15 to 20 years of searching.
Perhaps you feel easier with middle class blacks because the line between black and white isn’t as rigid? I think that to get to the middle class in the U.S., a black person has more opportunity and more impetus to learn how to span the bridge between the black and caucasian cultures. Does this make a person less black? I don’t think you have to lose anything from your own culture just because you learn how to navigate your way within another culture. I believe that people just become more multi-faceted with more exposure.
Kevin, I want to thank you for this blog and for your comments on the transracial and hair care groups on yahoo. You have helped to clarify my thoughts on a lot of things. I hope that my AA son will grow up to feel about his adoption the way that you feel about yours. Julie
Please let us know how that conversation goes and if it really does make a difference for him. As an army brat, I have never felt like I fit in…. no matter where I went. Now, looking back, I realize that I have always had a core group of 3 or 4 friends in each of the places I lived. I guess that means that I DID fit in. I think sometimes kids want to be liked by everyone (who wouldn’t?). The lesson in growing older is figuring out whose opinion matters and learning not to care about the rest.
Oh wow, thank you for being so open and real! Did you KNOW that is something on the hearts of us adoptive parents?! I can talk on the phone to a help desk or customer service or something and tell that the other person is black by the way they talk–my daughter is simply not going to have that b/c her parents, brothers and sister are white. And I’ve worried about it, that she will be rejected as ‘not black enough’. Tips??? I did like the previous commenter that as we get older we realize ‘whose opinion matters and not to care about the rest’, but that doesn’t make it easier for her in the meantime. Keep sharing! :)
Another great post, Kevin!
The racial divide nearly killed me growing up. In my 20’s, I had severe depression over trying to figure out where to fit in. I was most comfortable around people of color, yet wasn’t always welcomed because I look and am 99% Caucasian. (Sometimes I was welcome. And those moments were like Christmas for me. Black love is Black wealth, as Nikki Giovanni so aptly put it.) I wasn’t comfortable in the white community because invariably racist comments would be thrown around and envelop me in either a cloud of rage or depression. I had to find a way to fit in or I was going to slowly die from the scratches and bruises from repeatedly trying to climb up and over the wall between two worlds.
The way I did it was to take breaks. I had to make sure I had a safe place inside where I could retreat to and rest up for the next time I had to confront racism. That safe place was God.
My husband and I named our daughter’s middle name after the mountain we climbed on our honeymoon. We plan to hike up to the summit in the next year or two, whenever she is tall enough to climb the huge boulders, so that she can stand on the gold seal at the top (with us holding her feet down so she doesn’t blow off) and claim her name and take in the spectacular view as a part of her. We want her to see how very small people are from this vantage point. And every time she signs her name, we want her to be reminded how small people really are, and that the wall she straddles every day, and the struggles she faces every day are created and caused by other people, not by God. She will see that God’s world is much bigger than she can ever imagine. And that she fits in this amazing world because she’s alive.
Yet another excellent post Kevin. Thank you. A couple related questions, however, for you. Would you agree that the racial/cultural divide between whites and blacks is narrowing as more African Americans integrate into the middle class? I just finished a two year stint where I worked with youth of varying races and seemed to notice a lot less reluctance on their part when socializing between races than I remember seeing when I was a youth.
As I consider the fact that my generation was the first to grow up 100% outside of Jim Crow, never really knowing the full extent of the tension created by those social norms and racist tendencies, and even recognizing that our parents’ generation still perpetuated a lot of those prejudices, I think the fuller racial integration experienced by my generation radically changed our views.
That said, when I watch this next generation more freely socialize between races, I hope/wonder if this is not translating into broader acceptance of skin tone or family racial make up differences within the African American community too. In other words, do you think this issue of acceptance as a black from a transracial family in the African American community is easing or is this wishful thinking on my part? I worry about this often when it comes to our adopted African American son.
Regards,
Matt
Matt,
I have tried to answer this question several times and keep deleting my response. In a broad general answer I will answer, “yes, to a degree.”
Again, I think those middle class/educated AA communities who desire to have a more diverse scope of friends will be very accepting.
There is a segment in the black community who may not be as accepting. This is the group my son has come up against.
But I have also found, if you can ride out the initial wave and ignore the comments you can find acceptance in this segment too once they get to know the t/r child. It is scary though because there are some that can handle this initial phase and will be fine and some who will be crushed by it.
I hope that makes sense.
Interesting. This is exactly my problem as a coconut (what you in the US call an oreo) I was educated during the aprtheid years but because I was granted a scholarship, I was able to attend a white private school while the reast of my generation went to black schools where they were taught by black teachers who were only ‘educated’ enough to become tea-servers and garden boys. Needless to say, the accent is very ‘African’ But here I am with an accent so white that one radio DJ refused to believe that my name was Thandi and that I lived in the township. My own fiance (at the time) dropped the phone on me because he thought I was a white girl when I answered the phone. Just by the way I WALK black folk in the township shout ‘Model C!!’ (which is what the white government schools are called that were opened to black kids that could afford it.)My parents were from different tribes-my dad spoke in Sotho, my mom in Xhosa, to me, they spoke in English. As a result, though I can understand both languages, I cannot speak any fluently. I hate it. The only people I feel comfortable with are middle class black immigrants from places like Zimbabwe.