ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 17
In Defense of Taylor Swift
Dronme Davis
To clarify, it wasn’t like I had never met any Black people. There
had been the handful of run-ins with my biological father, that guy
who worked at the corner store across from my middle school, and
a boy named Noah from the third grade. He had freckles and wore
purple Converse and every day our fellow classmates would swarm
us on the playground and ask if we were siblings. It didn’t matter that the only trait we physically shared was big curly hair and
brown-ish skin, according to the sea of blue eyes and blonde braids
that shared the blacktop with us, we were obviously blood.
This black sheep dynamic maintained all the way through middle
school. Every day my white parents would drive me to school in our
Prius (that while being painted blue continues to be the whitest car
currently on the market) where I would sit in class and listen to my
white teacher tell all my white classmates about photosynthesis.
When she would leave the room to take what she believed was a
quiet phone call with her divorce lawyer I would pass notes to my
white best friend about the white boy from gym class who said he
liked my sneakers yesterday. After school I would carpool with said
white best friend to our ballet studio where our white instructor
would tower over me, point her hellishly long fingernails at my
round brown face, and with her ice cold French accent, scold me for
the fact that my Afro didn’t shrink into the perfect ballerina bun the
way all my fellow white dancer’s did. My white mom would then
drive me home where I would watch a TV program about the tumultuous lives of white girls in high school and you get my point.
By the time it was my turn to enter the ninth grade, I had spent
several years molding and melding myself into a pretty damn convincing white girl. I had pencil straight hair and perfectly plucked
brows and alternated between Abercrombie dresses and J. Crew
sweaters. I recited Taylor Swift lyrics like they were scripture and
could quote Gossip Girl at the drop of a hat--only seasons one
through three, as my friends and I had collectively decided that
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