ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 21
lapse. Sometimes I catch myself getting a little sweaty when I walk
into a room with majority Black occupants.
Growing up I had believed that the source of all my discomfort
and misery was simply the lack of being surrounded by people who
looked like me. I thought that if I could just find people I shared a
likeness with, then I would finally have found my place in this big,
scary world. Pretty quickly however, I realized that skin color and
continent of origin isn’t everything. Of course it is important to
exist within a community that shares your experiences. The years
between elementary and high school were littered with racist confrontations and bigoted comments, and my need to surround myself
with people who could relate was natural.
There was however, something incredibly unnatural about the
gymnastics I was doing to make myself seem more appealing to
my Black peers. In a way it was no different than when I used to
straighten my hair and beg my mom for a nose job.
To clarify I did not just wake up one morning with all these
self-realizations tucked under my belt. Those years in between
were ripe with therapy and painfully uncomfortable meditation
retreats and a desperate (ongoing) search for friends who saw me
for me, not just the frizzy-haired brown who made them look thin
and feminine by comparison. Ironically, one of my best friends is a
Black woman who approached me after class one day because, you
guessed it, she liked my Malcolm X shirt. So my white dad’s well-intentioned yet mildly problematic fashion venture wasn’t a total bust
after all.
I now recount this tale as a twenty-one year old Dronme. The
walls of my room are covered in framed photos of Civil Rights leaders. As it turns out, my desperation to finally be a “real Black person”
resulted in me enrolling in several African-American history classes,
which I fell in love with and later declared as my major. I even got
13
