Walk in My Skin
Spend some time inside of the life of a Black Femme.
Why are you so angry? Why do you hate *fixed typo for the person who only highlighted that*White people? Why? How do you know? It doesn’t matter what I’m saying, the questions are always and have always been the same. Over the last twenty years, I have moved from being hurt and crying about this, through rage, through simple anger, through the need to refute these claims with every breath to this, whatever this state is now. Now, when the questions and rage wash over me, I’m not calm but I’m not bothered. This is banal. This is average.
This is why. Walk in my skin for a few minutes. This is what your life is too much of the time.
Imagine you posted a cat video on the internet. In that video your voice coos to a ginger cat to say hello and then, suddenly there is a hand that is clearly attached to a Black person in frame. It isn’t a viral video but, as the poster of said video you get a little excited when you see that your little clip got some views. Now imagine that in that video, you know all you really said in the video was something like, “hi baby. Say hi, I love you baby.”
The things you say when you’re trying to sweet talk a cat into doing something cute on camera. You know this and yet, you’re shocked and hurt when a slew of comments come in with winning slogans such as:
Die nigger bitch.
Fucking niggers ruin everything.
Set this cat on fire nigger hands touched it.
Etc.
This isn’t because of Trump, this was years before trump when your phone still flipped and the Jolly Rancher size terrible quality video was the height of amazing things to you. You know why it happened, one racist or edgelord or random douchebag from the areas of the internet where it’s funny to use racial epithets found your video and that few seconds of your hand and voila.
You reported the comments and more like it came in. You delete the video and remember that, being visibly Black on the internet, even while stroking a cat is a sin.
You know why.
Let’s go further back in time. You are a little new to the internet and you have an online diary. You write about fashion, events you go to, how when you were going out to a Goth club you wanted to impress a girl and was dressed to the nines but then, your titty fell out while you were getting out of the cab and she wasn’t impressed. You write about going on a kink date with a married couple. You write about being tied to a chair and blindfolded and abused by your friends for a few hours and how much you loved it. You were teaching yourself how to find your own voice and it was good.
You are happy to have a little community of people who enjoy what you have to say and how you say it. You are teaching yourself how to write about yourself and your life. Routinely, usually White men send you messages that are both complimentary and hateful. They talk about how much they love Black pussy but that you’re too vulgar, too Queer. Sometimes they are local, they want to do kinky things to you and when you decline they say they’ll rape you next time they see you out, you Black bitch.
You know why. You are still naïve enough to think on some level if you can figure out the “right” way to be Black in public, folks will suddenly remember you’re human.
Let’s hover there in time. Remember how when your self-esteem was in the toilet and you still had the visible scars on your cheeks from trying to bleach your skin that, people found your photos and used them to make fun of you. You don’t want to believe that you are too dark and you don’t want to believe that of course you can’t buy pressed powder because who the fuck makes it in tar? You want to believe that what you thought were private words of agony, were only shared as a good gesture.
It wasn’t true and you knew then, you know now.
Let’s go back in time even more. The start of the internet. Your own adventures in green screen message boards and you mention a Black author and are told in no uncertain terms that Black people don’t like, write or mess with what you’re talking about.
Okay.
Stop time. You think back and you start to see things and how the depression got worse and the fear and the way you’d go home from school having damn near pooped your pants from anxiety and from silencing yourself. How you taught yourself to cry without making a sound because nobody was interested in your tears. Remember how, you raged and finally cried in front of an adult you trusted, and she told you she didn’t know how to help you but would if she could.
You remember the White man who, when you were tiny and five looked down at you after you mistook his jeans clad leg for your Dad’s jeans clad leg, and he snarled and called you a little nigger bitch. You remember not knowing what good hair meant, not knowing why anyone would call you a Darkie or what nigger meant but you knew what it meant because you knew what it was to feel rage. You remember a white woman grabbing your ponytail and yanking it hard enough to pull you off balance because, obviously it had to be fake.
You remember you kept it all a secret because, you thought it was your fault. That had you been born lighter, prettier, better people wouldn’t hate you. You didn’t know what nigger meant, but you knew they hated you. Sometimes, you had nightmares. Sometimes, you went to sleep with images of Emmet Till’s battered face, of Black bodies hung in trees because you looked up lynching and that is how you thought you’d die.
Let it all mix together. The cops calling you a ho while you sat in front of your Mom’s car waiting for her to get off of work at the library. The cops threatening to tell someone, not your Mother because your Mother couldn’t possibly work at a library, that you stole those books rather than checked them out. Remember trembling. Remember feeling guilty of everything even though you did nothing. The cops, who you were taught would protect you, telling you how you probably did “something” to make a man in the mall corner you in a hallway and try to get his hand down your pants. It was because, they knew how girls like you were. Black girls, bad girls tempting nice White men.
Remember lying in bed and your body jerking and jumping, letting out the terrors of the day. Remember hearing that Black bodies, like yours and unlike yours are a disease. Remember, every person who said you are well-spoken, or sounded white or said they are Blacker than you.
You remember. You remember all of it and yet you can’t remember it all, because to remember it all hurts too much.
Some days all you can think about is the time when, after you’ve offered your work in good faith to explain why racism is bad and how it works beyond white hoods, all you get are people who suddenly can’t read or think critically. You think about how, because your Blackness is always a problem, you can’t always get stories published, you sometimes have to justify why your work has Black people in it. You have to explain over and over again that you’re a person.
Sometimes, when you’re looking for professional resources, you have to deal with angry White women who threaten you with ruining your career because you’ve told them in no uncertain terms that you will not engage with their racist antagonism. You don’t want to think they have that power but, you know damn good and well that a crying white woman almost always wins.
You know you can’t joke about these things to make it a little easier. You know you can’t do the work of dismantling the things that oppress you because, obviously you’re the problem. You know that if you were to put on a white face, everyone would say how brave and wise you are and that hurts.
People ask me sometimes, what is it like to be a Black person in this world. I say it is beautiful and awful. I say that sometimes it is days when you can’t wear your hair as it grows out of your heard, or have some fun with other Black people without someone, usually a white someone has to use it against you. To be Black and alive and in public is a problem for this world.
To be Black and alive and have opinions in public or to set out boundaries in clear concise language, means you’ll be dodging messages like little dehumanizing bullets because some days it is too much and you want to give up. You don’t want to offer education and be told that your directness is aggression, that your statement of boundaries is abuse that you are evil. You know that when white people say, how can we learn if you don’t teach us and you respond they will say things like:
- This is divisive!
- I’m not a racist- HOW DARE YOU BE SO RACIST YOU SAID WHITE PEOPLE.
- To say, literally please don’t do X thing, YOU SLAPPED ME! I FEEL CHASTISED!
- Because of you, yes you personally I won’t even try anymore.
- Racist cunt.
You have to watch, people who are totally not racist act in racist ways and in ways that uphold white supremacy and when you say, I’m not dealing with this, they want you to say you’re wrong and they are right. They say, that you can say goodbye to being published in certain magazines. You need the resources in these professional spaces so, you speak up when you can and chew the inside of your mouth bloody when you can’t speak.
Right now, you’re tired. You know there are precious few places to find comfort. No space is yours to be in and be free because “safe spaces LOL” AMIRITE? The work that sustains your soul. You try to explore professional spaces to be met with enough white woman tears to drown in. They “are just asking”, they “can’t learn if you people aren’t nicer”, they threaten you, they misgender you and your friends in thanks for trying to educate them for free, they balk at being told they should pay for your labor and they laugh when you try to explain.
You are exhausted.
Your heart hurts and if you say so publicly, someone has to chide you for your selfishness, for your solipsism, for your need to be human and fragile and sometimes really fucking broken. You want to scream in their faces, I AM A FUCKING HUMAN BEING, until they can’t ignore you or pretend that you are the real problem.
You do what you have to do to deal with it. And then, you go all the way the fuck back in because that is who you are. You deal with being called a bully, being told you don’t know your life or what words mean or anything.
Now, let’s step out of my skin. I want you to see me. Hear me. Feel me. I know many of you will immediately retort, not me! NEVER ME and devolve into the things that always happen to me when I open my mouth. Later, I hope you remember walking in my skin for a few minutes and re-evaluate. If walking with me for a few minutes, has opened your eyes and shown you a humanity you forget exists, all I ask of you is that you remember.
For those who are like me. For my Black Femmes who work so hard and suffer in silence, I see you. Thank you for being there for me when I need you. I hope I do that for you as much as I can.
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Normally I would add content notes. However, this time I decided not to because if you were shocked by some of the language, that is how I feel all the time. If the threats, the mentions of violence and rape got into your heart, that is what happens to me.
