No Whitewashed Black Girl by Michelle Hawkins (Due to the sensitive nature of this paper’s contents, the student-writer has opted to be published by a pseudonym.)
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hroughout my life, I have constructed my self-identity solely from the influences of everyone around me. Everything started to move in a negative direction when my mother married a white man. We moved to Delaware when I was ten years old and my brother and I attended a predominately-white elementary school. I already knew that I did not fit into the “black” stereotype due to the comments I received from my biological father and his side of the family. I spoke too “white” and he told my mother that he did not want his children speaking too “proper,” as if speaking proper English, using large words, and not using slang was something only white people were able to do. He wanted us to abide by the stereotype that black people were “ghetto,” but my stepfather wanted the opposite. When I moved to Delaware and went to elementary school, I struggled to make friends. I was always too “black” for the white kids and I was too “white” for the black kids. After I made friends with the white kids, I was called an Oreo. The term “oreo” has evolved into referring to African Americans who have “failed” to adhere to the cultural norms of “American Blackness.” This term made me question who I was and I grew to wish that I were white. Friends were not the only people who made me feel as if I was not “black” enough. I would also get “oreo” comments from my biological father’s side of the family. I would receive comments such as,
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“She is too white,” because I got good grades and spoke properly, or “You don’t even want to be black” because I preferred the suburbs to the city. Because that was how people viewed me, I felt that that was how I was supposed to be, a whitewashed black girl. Accepting the comments was easy, but when I was put down in my own home, it began to have more of an impact. I was okay with not being the stereotypical black girl I was expected to be. However, when I tried to express myself, it started to become a problem that lasted multiple years. My mother’s white husband had a secret that he revealed once we all lived together. He was anti-black and tried to strip my black family of their blackness. He is what Derald Wing Sue would call an aversive racist. In Microaggressions, Sue states, “Aversive racists truly believe they are nonprejudiced, espouse egalitarian values, and would never consciously discriminate, but they nevertheless, harbor unconscious biased attitudes that may result in discriminatory actions” (9). This man stopped us from going to church. He would tell my mother that she was not really black because she looked like she was from “the Islands.” He stripped my mother of her headscarves and her dialect. He reacted in disgust whenever either she or I wore our natural, kinky curly hair out in public, making sure it was known that he preferred straight hair. This resulted in us both bowing down to the white man
