As I am a citizen of the world, I have friends from many of the world’s cultures and ethnicities. I relish their differences and value our commonalities and celebrate our uniqueness. If I have one Bengali friend I do not assume that all Bengalis do or should act like her or vice versa. I know we all grow as we do and inhabit and interrogate our cultures in ways that spring from our upbringing, curiosity and growth into adulthood. Each of our cultures is infinitely nuanced and from the outside we can glean only so much.
Recently a friend called me in despair because a friend of hers, who she loved and honored, a friend who happened to be European-American, took some time to tell my friend that she needed to be more Black. This person felt that my friend was not saying or doing the things that she herself would do if she was Black. As one can expect this created some discord when my friend finally called her out as a racist. My friend was not seeing the woman as a white supremacist kind of racist. Instead she saw a generally sensitive, non-bigoted, culturally complex person brought up in America and therefore vulnerable to kinds of entitlements that would allow one to pass judgement on the way another moved in the skin they were born in through the world in which they lived.
In these times when more and more people are finding themselves “woke,” I think it is imperative that we keep looking in the mirror when we consider the false paradigm of race, we are all after all a part of the human race, and the actual realities of those defined as other than you. We need to be more caring and careful with our words. In response to my friend’s angst I wrote this:
ask a white person
if you want to know
how to be authentically black
ask a white person
they know from their upbringing and observations
if you walk with that particular swag
have the correct softened consonants
or idiomatic expressions
do you slap hands like you should
move your hips with a grace that they aspire to
speak out against racism in ways they want to hear
reference the correct black tropes
got some blues up in here and some greens
might mix in some black
watermelon seeds spit across the yard
and a bright red dress
they can tell you the right sign to hold
in the demonstrations you must attend
they know what you should write
to show you are holding up your race
just don’t accuse them of being racist
because black for them
has one shade and flavor
and they know it well
devorah major
My thought is this, none of us should correct an other’s expression of their authentic self. There are many ways to be Black, there are many ways to be African, there are many ways to be Yoruba. You can, of course, extend this idea to any and all cultures. In these difficult yet promising days we need, and I must remind myself of this daily, to listen more than we speak.
I welcome your comments.
How presumptive it is to tell someone how to be who they are
without having walked a mile in their shoes!
Yes, it is and even a mile may not be enough. In my youth the book “Black Like Me’ was the rage. A white man browned himself up so he could “experience” being black. Didn’t really work.