I’m protective of my blackness because I had to find it myself |
I’m protective of my blackness because I had to find it myself
The Guardian
2015-11-12
I was dogged in my determination to evolve outside the narrow margins of the small white world of my beginning and into another more racially familiar one
I spent the first 20 years of my life internalizing white beauty standards, intellectual values and cultural sensibilities. By the time I was a freshman in high school I had, like many of my white female peers, embarked upon an ongoing war with my body. I was never diagnosed as anorexic or bulimic, but I intermittently starved myself and took laxatives in an effort to be skinny and hipless without any sense whatsoever that my curves might be considered a thing of beauty in black culture.
I abandoned my 11-year-old crush on Michael Jackson (with whom I became almost preternaturally smitten after seeing him in The Wiz) in favor of the young white male stars that adorned the covers of Tiger Beat – Rick Springfield, Lief Garrett, Rob Lowe. I was guided by college counselors to consider New England state schools and maybe long-shot universities – historically black colleges and universities were not on anyone’s radar…
…It took a long time to find my blackness, find my people and my relationship to black culture, despite my own (albeit limited) self-awareness regarding race at a very young age. “I am a black child” reads the first sentence of a short personal essay I wrote when I was eight or nine years old…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Rebecca Carroll, The Guardian