A man standing a bit hunched on the Borough Hall 4 train platform is scream-talking with his friend across the platform. His words and hands are flying as he and his friend discuss the importance of selling drugs for the cheapest price so that customers have no one to turn to, except you, leaving you victorious in the drug game. He turns slightly to adjust his drooping jeans and catches sight of me. He pauses, opens his mouth to say what I expect to be a “hey beautiful” or “smile, baby.”
Instead, he blurts out with a throaty, garbled voice, “What is your nationality?”
I look at him and blink slowly, not caring that my hands are full of cashews or that he’s at least a foot taller than me.
He continues, “I’m sorry my voice is weird. What is your nationality?”
Two things come to me at this moment: His use of the word nationality is completely incorrect, and he didn’t even know me. Nevertheless, I raise both of my eyebrows and say, “I’m Black.”
He laughs and crows, “No you’re not. Don’t lie. You’re half Black. Where are your parents from?”
At this point, I’m thinking, “When we get on this train, I’m going to need you to take several seats away from me.” I say, “America. They’re both full Black.”
I’ve never really discussed these aspects of my life, but now, in this moment, I’ve found the time. Here it goes: I’m a Black girl.
Before you roll your eyes and shut me off, hear me out. Every time I meet a new Black person, I receive the same little gestures: the once over, the eye roll and the question, “What are you?” Then they start guessing. “Are you Black and white? Black and Latino? Dominican? Puerto Rican? Blackorican?” Those are the types of questions people ask about a dog. I’m not a mutt who has been bred to look a certain way; I’m a person.
Understandably, people are curious. With my light complexion and looser curls, I don’t neatly fit into the Black stereotype. However, that doesn’t offer my identity as a game in which you can guess and guess, and I’m not going to stand around waiting for you to guess right.
When I told that man on the subway platform that I am Black, I meant it. I have never and will never identify as anything other than Black, because that would just be a lie. Whenever people probe and try to extrapolate pieces of my racial identity that simply are not there, there is always an extra push.
With their curious fingers deep into my hair, girls at camp, who I have known since I was 7, would say to me, “You’re not really Black! You have to be something else.” It was as if they wanted me to go home, do a little ancestry.com-ing and come back with some certificate that says, “Kennedy is part white, part Native-American and part Black. Thanks, slavery!” The same is true of Black friends I’ve had for most of my life, who still turn to me out of the blue and say, “You’re white, Kennedy.”
Anna Julia Cooper, author and educator, once said in front of a crowd of Black clergymen, “Only the Black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”
Born Black and female, both characteristics that come with their own set of struggles, Black women experience oppression in double doses. For Cooper, this condition gives Black women an unparalleled perspective in the fight for equality, which I consider to be an integral part of my identity.
Even though I refuse to be denied my “self,” it still pains me to have to repeat the words “I am Black” 15 times before people accept it. When I read womanists Alice Walker’s, Bell Hooks’ and Audre Lorde’s essays, short stories and novels on the multifaceted, strong and beautiful Black woman, when I see my grandmother, my mother and my aunts embody “undisputed dignity” and when I look at all the Black women around me and know that they bear their Blackness with grace and power, I feel exalted to be part of such an esteemed group of women. These women come in all shades, curl patterns, communication styles, body shapes and personalities, and none of them is “Blacker” than the others. They, like me, are all Black, regardless of what a Black woman is supposed to look like.
Therefore, every time someone on the train platform stops me, looks me up and down and asks me what I am, I think of all the Black women I know and say more clearly than I will ever say anything else, “I am Black.”