By the time I got to middle school, I had worked out the bulk of my internal racial issues. This is partially because my parents did a good job of showing me that black is beautiful and partially because I was too busy with being a nerd (dealing with bullies and doing science projects) to be concerned with something as abstract as racial identity. I was black and I was cool with that. But just because I was cool with it, didn’t mean that everyone else was… and I had no idea that something as simple as the way I talked could cause so much trouble.
If you haven’t read Part One, I suggest you catch up then read on.
“You sound like a white boy!”
It was about this time that I started to become annoyed with black people who, upon meeting me, would exclaim, “You sound like a little white boy.”
Now people had been saying this to me my whole life, but now it was different. I’d just gotten comfortable with who I was as a young black man and I certainly didn’t appreciate people undermining that breakthrough by saying I was acting white. I wasn’t “acting white” or “talking white”, I was acting like myself and talking the way I talked.
Where once I didn’t even believe I was black, I now found myself defending my blackness daily. Can you believe that? Everyday, I found myself asking the question, who says that a black person has to act a certain way? Why should I dumb down my speech to make my teachers and classmates feel comfortable with the way I sounded? Truth be told, they should have been stepping their verbal game up! It’s not like I was talking down to anyone or trying to make people look or feel stupid. (well, maybe a little) I was just being myself and very quickly getting sick of that not being good enough.
I wasn’t just the way I talked. People said I dressed like a white boy, that I walked like a white boy, that I acted like a white boy. It was frustrating. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with white people or how they act, because I don’t. I was sad because here were “my people” saying that if you did something correctly then you were acting white. To them, I wasn’t talking the right way, I was talking the “white” way. They were saying, indirectly, that I should lower my standards for myself because of my pigmentation. It made me angry (and it still does) because I was surrounded by people who were satisfied with mediocrity. They counted themselves out before they even started based on their skin color. They didn’t realize it because they were subconsciously doing it, but I saw it because I’d been there. I knew what if felt like to consider your skin a curse and I felt sorry for them.
It started to get to me…
I couldn’t really annunciate that sentiment in as clear terms as I can now, because I was a child and I saw things from a child’s narrow view, but I felt it and I bore the brunt of it. Every year, there was some kid who saw me as a threat and decided to pick on me for being a nerd or a “white-wannabe.” I internalized a lot of it and pretended that I didn’t care, but I did. At the lowest point, I started believing it. Stuff like that hurts. There were times where I asked God, why did I have to be born black. I really thought that had I been born white, I wouldn’t have to deal with those problems. It’s not like white people are going to call me a white-wannabe.
Of course, kids aren’t the most rational creatures and I was no exception. The problem wasn’t that I was born black or that I acted “white”. The problem was with the low expectations of my peers and teachers. Eventually, I stopped feeling sorry for them and for myself and began to react with hostility. The more I felt they picked on me, the more hostile I became. I got into a lot of fights and spent a lot of time in the principal’s office.
It never ends…
Eventually, grew it a teenager. As a teen, the more different you are, the more validated you feel for acting like a stupid teenager. So things kind of leveled out for a while. I found myself at a high school that was significantly less ignorant than my middle school. Pretty soon I was on my way to being a well balanced adult.
I’m still amazed that after all these years (26 to be exact), black people who I meet for the first time often exclaim, “You sound like a white dude.” It’s particularly annoying when it comes from an older person, someone who I’d expect to have the sense not to say such a fool thing. However, these days, I tend to pick my battles; to grin and bear it. I still get the urge to cuss folks out when I hear them say such silly things, but if you can’t say anything nice…
An unexpected positive is that it makes it really easy to weed out the hoodrats. If the words “like a white boy” ever pass through the lips of a girl I’m interested in, then I know I can pretty much write her off as a lost cause. It’s what I call a “deal-breaker”. I already know that I don’t want any part of that.
What you’re talking about in this blog is almost like reverse discrimination. If you’re ignorant and can’t speak or write in sentences with the correct subject-verb agreement, the white people won’t hire you. On the other hand,if your parents taught you how to speak properly and exposed you to more than just “blackness,” then you’re a sellout. Don’t worry about it, because you’ll never be able to please everyone. Just make sure that you surround yourself with people who accept you for the person you are. You’ll always come across the dummies that will say stupid stuff like that (hope I’ve never been one of them LOL), but hey, that’s life and you can’t control other people. Life’s too short to play this people pleasing game. Be courteous and kind, but be yourself. I enjoyed reading this.
Tweezy, I went through the same thing so I can empathize with you. I went to Lakeside Middle and High school (Those of you from Augusta should know the demographics of Lakeside). Hence, whenever I was around a group of blacks outside of school, they would say I talked white or acted white. I really paid them no mind because if speaking correctly was “talking white” then so be it. My family did not tolerate ebonics and slang to be spoken in their presence. So I was used to being spoken to in the correct fashion and responding appropriately. I think those black’s who say those things really need to get over themselves. It’s 2007, so they should understand that speaking unintelligibly is not “being black”, it’s being ignorant.
What’s up ladies. First up, thanks for taking the time to read the article and comment.
I find the concepts of “blackness” and “sellouts” disturbing mostly because they aren’t usually used to describe aspects of cultural difference but rather socio-economic and educational deficit the widespread acceptance of this deficit. It seems sometimes to me like there was a meeting that I missed where black folks just decided that rather than changing the negative aspects of the black experience for the better, that we’d instead use these things as the yardstick to measure who was the blackest.
It’s my belief that it’s one’s respect for the culture and heritage that is most important. I also believe that one can maintain ties to one’s culture/heritage and love one’s people without compromising who he is. I also feel that the ties one maintains with that heritage are more important than keeping the status quo of a culture in decline. When other cultures in history declined, there was usually a renaissance and a return to the roots that made that culture great. Why then, do we as young black people revel in our decline?
I love my black people. I love black music, film and fashion. I love it so much that I won’t tolerate crap from it. Not from our art and not from our people. IMHO, that makes me the blackest person in the room.
tweezy,
I’m a new reader and I just want you to know that this piece really rings true. I go to college at a small Christian university in West Texas and I face the bigotry of which you speak on a daily basis.
Part of it I admittedly bring upon myself by wearing bow ties (and not in the cool militant Black Panther kind of way), but if I had a dollar for every time someone had commented on my behavioral patterns being too unpigmented, I’d have enough money to pay reparations all 4.2 million slaves living in the United States at the end of the Civil War.
Instead of opening up a can of you-know-what on these people, I’ve learned to restructure the dialogue: I speak not like a white boy. I instead articulate with the same eloquence of W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass.
There is no monopoly on using standard English. I am who I am, not who your racist stereotypes want me to be.
Color me cogent, bidges.
It hurts me the most as an African-American, when my own race accuses me of “sounding” and “acting” white. What exactly is “sounding” and “acting” white anyways? Is it because I like to speak using proper English and don’t know the latest slang? Is it due to the tone of my voice and the use of phrases most blacks do not commonly utter? My voice is rather soft and fluent and not loud and boisterous as “others of my kind”—so I am told. All I know is that I am in fact a black person, and the way I choose to communicate my words should not dispute that…