I am writing because I can do nothing else. The issues of race, color, and ethnicity have affected my entire life. From being punched in the face because I was light skinned and ‘thought I was better’ according to the puncher, to being told that I was talking white because I could actually articulate a sentence without using slang or southern idiom. Don’t get me wrong I can do that too. I just realized at a young age that I had a choice and besides my mother would have a fit if we used slang in her house. I had forgotten that I was often called white girl, red-bone, high yellow and other names in the midst of the Black American community. On the other hand, I was either ignored, put down or lifted up by the white community depending on the circumstance.
Race, color, and ethnicity are things that I have had to think about every day, even as a young child. The first time I understood racial difference was when the next door neighbors, laughed as my sister and I looked for our rabbit, Bucky. He wasn’t in the dog house that we kept him in when we left the house. The blonde, blue eyed neighbors laughed, because they had let their very big dog into our yard and that very big dog ate our rabbit. They did this because we didn’t belong. You see, it was a white neighborhood and we were one of the first non-white families that moved in. This was in Greensboro, North Carolina in the sixties.
What has pushed me to write is the job I started in 2012. Now, traveling to the African continent and to Madagascar, I experience what it means to be thought of as white. This has astonished me and opened my eyes to how insidious racism and white supremacy are all around the world. Here I want to tell you about my experiences, so that those who read may began to think deeply about how to change the systems that hold all of us back.
And I might explain what it means for me to be beige…
On Being Beige 