{"id":4478,"date":"2020-08-07T11:06:48","date_gmt":"2020-08-07T15:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/imprint\/?p=4478"},"modified":"2020-08-07T11:06:49","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T15:06:49","slug":"im-sorry-i-made-you-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/imprint\/im-sorry-i-made-you-black\/","title":{"rendered":"“I’m Sorry I Made You Black”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Kealani Smith<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hated<\/em> being Black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At twelve, it was the part of me that felt like a stain on my identity. I begged my mom to straighten my hair. I saved babysitting money for months to pay for perms in an attempt to filter the Blackness out of me. I remember never putting on lotion after swimming in my grandma\u2019s pool, so that the ashy color that layered on my dry skin would cast a pseudo paleness upon me. In this way, I could almost make believe I was the Whiteness I sought to embody. Social activist Nellie Wong writes these thoughts in her poem \u201cWhen I was Growing Up\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201c \u2026I felt <\/p>

dirty, I thought that god<\/p>

made white people clean<\/p>

and no matter how much I bathed,<\/p>

I could not change, I could not shed<\/p>

my skin in the grey water\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My family used to joke, \u201cLani wants to be White.\u201d I used to bargain with God in hopes of one day magically waking up, gifted with my mom\u2019s much lighter Filipino skin. Instead, the one drop of Black colors my experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rhetoric of anti-Blackness is sold to Black people, while the borrowing of the Black identity (e.g., braids, curls, big lips) is praised in others. This notion of anti-Blackness in the Black experience is observed in an article published by The Guardian<\/a>. In a piece on Blackfishing, writer Priya Elan writes, \u201cBe it fashion, beauty or music, Black is cool, unless you\u2019re actually Black.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout my life, I have always been told to straighten my hair because it is \u201cunprofessional\u201d to keep it natural or, the most redundant of comments, \u201cthat\u2019s why you\u2019re pretty, it\u2019s because you\u2019re mixed,\u201d as if deserting a little bit of my Blackness is worthy of praise. These messages place me on the scale which measures my proximity to Whiteness so that I could identify myself on ranking of more or less Black. For as long as I can remember, my identity was shaped around abandoning Blackness so that I was not a \u201cdiversity pick,\u201d the Black friend, or ghetto by conception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can vividly remember one specific conversation on race I had with my dad when I was twelve. I sat in the heated passenger seat of our family car that reeked of burnt leather; he was driving our usual route to my middle school in Northridge, California. In the silence of the drive, he looked at me and apologized. I felt confused as the silence grew sticky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLani, I\u2019m sorry that I made you Black…\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

With tears blockading the space between his throat and his eyes, he continued, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI know you don\u2019t like being Black and I feel guilty that I made you that way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, at twenty-one, that morning holds substantial weight in my memory. Reflecting, I realize that my dad apologized for my conception and the inheritance of something that neither he nor I can control. Blackness, to him, was worthy of apology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has become clear with the Black Lives Matter movement today that Blackness is a topic ofradicaland necessary discussion. Upon hearing the news of George Floyd, it felt like my sister and I could not stop crying. We were watching this happen again<\/em>, another Black person murdered again<\/em>. As we cried in our bedrooms, we cried for our dad who is, unmistakably, a Black man. We cried as if we heard our dad\u2019s voice laced into Floyd\u2019s as he whimpered for his mother. We cried for our future Black children, as our fear and grief will one day be theirs to claim. It was as if we finally woke up to the fact that Blackness is the only crime that can be inherited through generational misfortune. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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