It is difficult
in a world of privilege, earned or otherwise to replace the lack of meaning in
their own lives with acceptance and humility.
It is way easier to mistake privilege with superiority. It is not.
Recall the lives
of comparative privilege experienced by European Jewry in the rising twentieth
century economy and how easily it was swept away. Or the lives of comparable privilege of the
middle class swept away by communism.
Yet it is simple
to ensure everybody with a firm foot on the first rung of privilege through establishing
a base economy managed at the community level and made even internally
sustainable and profitably tied to the land and its responsibilities.
This writer has
returned to Trinidad and Tobago, a country that desperately needs her skills to
help upend illiteracy and health care at the least.
Goodbye to my
American dream
My mom moved us here for a better life. But as a
black woman, I'm tired of loving a country that can't love me back
TUESDAY, JUL 16, 2013 04:00 PM PDT
On the day of college graduation, I told my friends
and family the news: I was leaving the country I had lived in since childhood.
“I just need a change,” I told them, but they knew
there was more. Was it some romance gone awry, they wondered? Some impulsive
response to a broken heart? And I was running from heartbreak. My relationship
with the United States of America is the most tumultuous relationship I have
ever had, and it ended with the heart-rending realization that a country I
loved and believed in did not love me back.
Back in the ’90s, my mother brought me from our
home in the Caribbean islands to the U.S., along with my brother and
sister. I was 4 years old. She worked as a live-in nanny for two years, playing
mommy for white kids whose parents had better things to do. She took trips to
the Hamptons and even flew on a private jet to California as “the help.” My mom
didn’t believe that nanny meant maid, but she did whatever was asked of her,
because she was thirsty. She had a thirst that could only be quenched by the
American dream. One day, she thought, her children would be educated. One day,
they might have nannies of their own.
That was our path. Get a “good education.” When the
neighborhoods with quality schools became too expensive for my mom to afford as
a single parent with three kids, we traversed the United States with
GreatSchools.net as our compass. New Jersey, elementary school: decent, mostly
Hispanic school, even though my gifted and talented program was predominantly
Indian. Texas, middle school: “Found a great school for you guys,” my mom said
while rain poured into our car through the open windows where the straps of our
mattresses were tied down. It had an “A” grade and was 70 percent white.
Florida, high school: “Hey, Tiffanie, you should have this egg. It’s the only
brown one like you!” my classmate told me during AP biology. Philadelphia, Hawaii,
North, South, East, West. Car, U-Haul, Greyhound, plane, train. New York City,
private university: “I really want to write an essay on being the gentrifier,”
one courageous young man pitched in a journalism class. I was one of only two
people who were disturbed.
For a long time I survived by covering myself in the
labels I’d accumulated over the years. I plastered each one to my body
with super glue as if they were Post-It note reminders that I was someone.
Sports fanatic (hot pink). Feminist, beautiful, writer, comedian,
fashionista, friend (fuchsia, yellow, blue, purple, red, green). I hid behind
them; they were my only shields.
Green covered my eyes when a childhood friend’s
family banged down my front door and demanded their daughter get out of the
house full of blacks. Blue protected my heart when my black peers
ostracized my enjoyment of complete, complex sentences. Yellow blocked my ears
when whispers floated through the air at my ex-white-American boyfriend’s home
like haunted ghosts: I can’t believe he is dating a black girl. The
words passed like a gentle breeze barely creating flutter.
I existed right there on the fringe of ugly,
ignorant and uncultured. Black but not black enough for my positive
attributes to be justified. “Where are you from?” potential dates asked when
they met me. “I am from Trinidad and Tobago,” I said. “Oh, that’s why you are
so beautiful and exotic — I knew you couldn’t be all black.”
“Black people don’t really know how to swim,”
my co-worker once told me when I worked as a swim instructor at my
neighborhood’s pool. “What about me?” I asked. “Oh, you aren’t black. You’re
from Trinidad,” she said.
“The black children don’t like to read very much,” I
overheard one librarian discussing with another while I sat down reading a book
a couple feet away. They passed right by me with smiles.
I was the model minority — absent, yet present. The
yardstick to which other minorities were measured. If I could finish high
school and college, why couldn’t so many African-American people find their way
out of their hoods and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If I could speak
English without using a single ebonic slang, why do others call themselves
“niggas”? If I managed to make it through 23 years without contracting an STD
or getting pregnant, why do black women have the highest statistical risk of
disease and teenage motherhood? Daddy America looked to me to prove that he did
something right. After all, one of his children turned out all right. The
others must simply be problem kids.
I survived because I was never able to make America
my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by
helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments.
No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my
family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No
school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,”
“rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested,
stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through
square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of
emptiness.
In that empty, dark space I
found my blackness. I stripped myself of the labels, painfully peeling
them off one by one. Beneath them there is a wounded, disfigured colored woman
who refuses to be faceless anymore, remain hidden any longer. My face may be
repulsive to some since it bears proof that race continues to be a problem.
Still, I count myself lucky. Where my open cuts
remain, eventually scars will take their place and those scars will fade with
time. For many, their wounds will never heal. Gunshots bore coin-size holes
into their chests that will never close. Their chained wrists and ankles will
continue to bruise. Their minds have collapsed under the weight of a failed
education system.
I was already back in Trinidad and Tobago when the
Trayvon Martin verdict came down last week. I wasn’t surprised, but I was
speechless. My hope is that it will force Americans to reexamine their
“post-racial” beliefs. A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “You made
the right choice.” I think I did, too.
I have found freedom by leaving the land of the
free.
5 comments:
"I was already back in Trinidad and Tobago when the Trayvon Martin verdict came down last week. I wasn’t surprised, but I was speechless. My hope is that it will force Americans to reexamine their “post-racial” beliefs."
Trayvon Martin was beating the skull of a another man into the concrete. Tell me, bleeding heart - what would you do if a "white cracker" wanted to beat the living hell out of you - lie their and think of England?
Yeah... you have issues. We all have issues. Overcome them.
Poor little mixed-race girl: welcome to the real world, where most of us are mixed race: Comanche, Apache, Metizo, Metis, etc.: Hispanic and French and Italian and Irish and Scots and Welsh and Swiss and Hutu and Farsi and Viet and Korean and more. Look at American communities and see what colors we are: we stand up for ourselves, we aren't part of groups or "races" - if you can not be an American, then go back to your society where you can be part of a group instead of an individual, where you can blame everyone else for your own failings.
Perhaps this accurately reflects the problem:
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.
Remarks at a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago (27 November 1993). Quoted in "Crime: New Frontier - Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue" by Mary A. Johnson, 29 November 1993, Chicago Sun-Times (ellipsis in original). Partially quoted in US News & World Report (10 March 1996)
See --- blacks do, in fact, commit a lot of crime. I doubt that it is because of the color of their skin. But unless and until they fix their culture --- start acting white if you will, or asian, or any non criminal culture, then there will be problems
Perhaps this is an even greater cause of the problems that blacks have. As the author says, there is not there there. They are completely passive and have no control over their lives:
I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes.
Yep. Force fed. Unable to turn off the TV. Can not interact with other family members. Not EVER EVER EVER responsible for their own actions or their children.
This is fantastic!
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