They Said This Would Be Fun

by Eternity Martis

  If Megan felt bad, she didn’t show it. Instead, she was friendlier than before—stopping by my desk at breaks to make one-sided small talk, asking if I wouldn’t mind sharing my notes with her for the class she had skipped once again. All the while, I worked on putting together the best damn summary a dunce could. And when Megan stopped showing up to class and our group meetings altogether but was posting plenty of Facebook selfies in her party outfits, the irony was not lost on me—or Professor Williams when I went to her office hours to speak to her about it. “Oh, I’m very aware, Ms. Martis,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “I’ll give each group member an individual grade instead.”

  During the last class of the semester, Megan showed up to submit her assignment. As Professor Williams gave her final remarks, Megan looked up from her phone and raised her hand. Everyone turned to her.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to thank you all for teaching me so much this year,” she said, squeezing a tear out of her eye. “I’m from a small town just outside of London, and Western has really opened my eyes to all different kinds of people. I had never seen people who weren’t white—well, except for a few Asians in my town. Until this class, I thought that Natives ran naked in the bushes.”

  Professor Williams and I made brief eye contact, and the corners of our mouths twitched. “Thank you for sharing that, Megan,” she said slowly. Satisfied with herself, Megan went back to her phone.

  At the end of class, the professor handed out the graded rubrics, each of us getting our own mark. Megan stormed out, and I could hear her whining, raspy voice on the verge of tears in the hall, complaining about her unexpected, unfair, low 60. I looked down at my own rubric. I’d gotten a 75.

  * * *

  ///

  The inside of a London Transit bus is very blue. It has bright yellow poles, too, so it feels as if you’re riding around in a giant submarine. London buses are also crowded with strollers, walkers, and students’ backpacks. It’s rare that a seat is left vacant.

  On my way downtown during rush hour, I took a seat in the middle of the bus.

  I looked around: all the other seats were taken, except for the one beside me. More people piled on at the next stop. They looked at the empty seat, then remained standing. Across from me, two men alternated between looking at each other, then at me, smirking. I averted my eyes, focusing on the yellow poles.

  At the next stop, several more people got on as everyone shifted uncomfortably, trying to make room. The seat beside me was still vacant. Was my winter jacket spilling onto it? But across the aisle, people were jammed into the four seats, seemingly unbothered by the tight squeeze and puffy coats.

  On the PA, the driver irritably asked people to move right to the back of the bus. As people slowly shifted towards the tail end, a Black girl approached the seat beside me. She looked around for another, then back at it—all without looking my way—before reluctantly sitting down.

  I was in third year by then, and at this point I knew better than to turn to her and crack a smile, so we both looked forward, reading the bus advertisements. Why hadn’t I ever noticed the poles were caution-tape yellow? I looked at the two men across from us again. They were whispering now as they leered.

  I knew she felt the humiliation. The only two Black people on this bus were sitting beside each other, and we would’ve done anything to avoid this, to not become the centre of attention for something that would have been normal back home.

  A white woman in her early fifties with a dark-brown pixie cut was holding the pole in front of us. She looked down at us, smiling.

  “Are you two related?”

  I felt the girl beside me stiffen. I paused, wondering if she would respond. She tilted her head slightly towards me, like she wanted me to speak for both of us.

  “No,” I said assertively.

  “Oh,” the woman stuttered, slightly embarrassed. She turned her body to face the back of the bus. I turned my head towards the girl beside me. She still wouldn’t look at me, but there was now a faint smile on her face.

  The longer I lived in London, the more I came to understand why that girl on the bridge and that girl on the bus didn’t want to make eye contact. Most public space is white space. Parks, museums, schools, neighbourhoods, restaurants—places with middle-class values—are still predominantly accessed by white people. Non-white bodies are hypervisible and heavily surveilled in these spaces. If we want to pass through without trouble, we have to appear non-threatening. We have to dress, speak, and act in ways that are compatible with the other people in these spaces.

  University is one of these white, middle-class spaces, and Black students have been policed and singled out as being “out of place” on campuses across North America. In May 2018, a white student called the police on a Black Yale student who was taking a nap in her own dorm’s common room. In August, a Smith College employee called the police on a Black student who was eating lunch in the common room. In October, a Black student at the Catholic University of America was approached by police officers after a white campus librarian called 911. She claimed he was argumentative, though she wouldn’t tell officers why she denied him entry into the library in the first place. In November, a white professor at the University of Texas San Antonio called the police on a Black student for doing what all students in hours-long classes do: putting her feet up on a chair. In April 2019, a Black Columbia University senior was pinned down by security officials near the Barnard campus library. Students are supposed to show ID after 11 p.m., but students say this isn’t usually heavily enforced.

  A gathering of Black bodies makes us even more visible, more susceptible to being targeted. When groups of Black students hung out together on campus, we were stared at with fear and loathing. Black laughter—Black joy—put people on edge.

  Alone, we stood out on and off campus, but a group of us was asking for trouble. Acknowledging other Black people—being seen with them—validated our tokenness, and raised suspicion. We all contributed to making each other feel even more invisible by ignoring a friendly smile, but the alternative was worse: to make eye contact with one another was to alert the whole campus or public space that there were two Black people in the same spot. And they were all watching, waiting for us to acknowledge each other. It was direct proof that we were out of place, and a dilemma that had no solution: when you are so desperate for connection with people who understand your struggle, how do you reach out when the act of connecting in public puts you both at risk?

  When groups of white girls laugh or hang out in a public space, nobody feels threatened. Nobody thinks to call security or the police. Same with white men—in fact, rowdiness and taking up space is expected. Frat and sorority parties are obnoxious and loud, but that is mitigated by small fines for noise or by moving these groups into neighbourhoods where they can continue to make noise. But the noise and space Black people take up in public comes with greater consequences.

  In 2014, Michael Dunn was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for shooting and killing Jordan Davis, a seventeen-year-old Florida high school student who wouldn’t turn down the Lil Reese song playing in his friend’s SUV. In August 2015, a book club of predominantly Black women was kicked off a Napa Valley Wine Train tour after they were deemed to be laughing too loud. They’ve since settled an $11 million racial discrimination case against the complainant.

  Events that Black folks attend have had their licences revoked or cancelled because of noise complaints from citizens and city councillors. In 2015, the City of Toronto tried to limit Afrofest’s two-day permit to one day because of noise complaints, then took it back after social media criticism—and admitting they only received eight. In 2018, Carnival Kingdom’s soca party in Vaughan, Ontario, one of the biggest music events during Carnival weekend, was cancelled with less than two hours’ notice because of complaints made before it even began. In England, residents living
near the Notting Hill Carnival in London have complained about it being too loud and rowdy, which has led to the use of decibel readers by city officials to police volume levels.

  It wasn’t long before I started doing the same thing as that girl on the bridge. I would spot another Black person from afar, eager for acknowledgement, then instinctively turn away. In my last two years, after meeting more Black students, I learned that they were also guilty of ignoring each other. We were all scared and exhausted; being a token had reduced us to nothing more than bodies to police. It wasn’t about hiding—we were the most visible people around—it was about survival. About doing no more than simply passing through as quickly as possible.

  We all could have broken the unspoken code of silence—the climate of fear that kept the vulnerable isolated from one another, away from the chance of connection and friendship. Perhaps it was solidarity enough that we were at this school, in this chaos, together. Maybe that was all we could give each other at the time. Because that’s how people work under systems of oppression: the best way we can.

  The Necessary Survival Guide for Token Students

  The Token Gym Rat

  WHAT TO EXPECT: People will want to see if you work out differently. They will examine you for superhuman strength to see if you’re fast like your native countryman, Usain Bolt. In the change room, women will try to catch a glimpse of your breasts or vagina to see if it differs from theirs.

  Men will look at your junk to see if you live up to the hype.

  HOW TO DEAL WITH IT: Be sympathetic towards your change room chums! Some of them have never seen token parts in their lives. But that doesn’t mean you can’t toy with them. Pretend to lower your towel repeatedly and watch their heads twist until they have whiplash. When you get out of the shower and they’re anticipating full naked glory under your towel, drop it dramatically only to reveal your undergarments. Tell them you know Usain personally and that you were part of the Jamaican bobsled team a few years back. Don’t be surprised if someone asks for your autograph.

  go

  back

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  country

  “Eternity,” my mother’s friend Angela said sternly, taking a sip of the Tim Hortons coffee she held in one hand as she pointed at me with the other. My mom and I were sitting on milk crates in her garage, as we did most nights—the two of them with their caffeine and cigarettes, and me with my chocolate milk. “If anyone calls you a nigger, you break their fucking nose.” She then proceeded to take my hand and show me the exact force I would need to accomplish this assault.

  I wasn’t yet eleven.

  Angela made me practise over and over, readjusting my flexed wrist, reminding me what part of the nose would need to come in contact with the heel of my palm for maximum damage.

  If anyone was going to teach me how to do a palm strike, it was Angela. She was a butch lesbian, and not out to her Catholic mother, who was still trying to find a good boy for her thirty-something-year-old daughter. I didn’t know what the word nigger meant or why I would need to hurt someone who said it. I looked to my mother for clarity, but she remained silent. Angela sensed my confusion. “Nigger is said by people who hate other people because of the colour of their skin,” she explained.

  My mother’s silence was indicative of the rest of my family’s position when it came to talking about my multiracial heritage. They had never called me mixed or Black—or anything. When my mother spoke to people about my background, she never said I was Jamaican, but that my father was.

  I arrived at the intersection of two brown families from different castes and ethnicities. My maternal grandfather is the son of Mangalorean parents but was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. He and his five siblings grew up without money; their father—my great-grandfather—was a cook for a well-off family that paid him ten cents a day. They didn’t have necessities like food or shoes, nor luxuries like a camera to capture memories. As a child, my grandpa loved reading the news but couldn’t afford a newspaper, so he’d take the neighbours’ off the porch in the morning then return it before they woke up. To this day, he still wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to read the newspaper. My great-aunts and great-uncles were put into arranged marriages, but my grandfather fell in love with my grandmother, an Anglo-Indian woman who was a fellow member of a youth leadership group in Karachi. And, against his parents’ wishes, he married her.

  Anglo-Indians in Pakistan were people of both Indian and British parentage (also known as Eurasians), as well as Brits living in India. My grandma’s mother was Pakistani and her daddy was an Irishman who was left in Karachi by his father after World War Two. Anglo-Indians had a bad rap in Pakistan. At the time of independence, there were about 500,000; many gained the distrust of Indian nationalists over their decision to identify with British rule. They also had a reputation of being partygoers and drinkers, always entertaining and living lavishly.

  When my grandparents got married, they merged two families that had no business being together. Years later, much of our family on both sides made Canada their new home. At the parties that my grandmother hosted every Sunday, my grandfather’s family would sit on one side of the house, looking on quietly at my grandmother’s gregarious relatives.

  There was whiteness in the family, but no one was prepared for a Black child—I had shaken up the family dynamic in a new way. At home with my family, I would sing along to songs from my favourite Bollywood film—Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, starring the dreamy, never-aging Shah Rukh Khan. I wore langas to weddings. My grandmother’s cooking, a reminder of Karachi, brought our displaced and homesick family together on Sunday afternoons, when my uncles and aunts addressed me by Urdu or Konkani terms of endearment as they pinched my cheeks. When my grandmother took me to her favourite Indian grocery store, the owner never looked at me any differently. At family parties or community events, I never felt out of place. Even at our favourite South Asian restaurants, they greeted me like an Indian child: How are you, beta?

  But I was the odd one out—a brown-skinned girl with big curly hair. Even as different ethnic groups poured into the city, my family had their work cut out for them with a half-Black kid, and my father wasn’t around to help us understand my Jamaican heritage. While the ’90s saw the emergence of the mixed-race movement, biracial people were hard to come by. My tan-skinned, straight-haired mom and grandmother would drive to Buffalo, New York, just to find books with characters I could look up to, and dolls that looked like me.

  * * *

  ///

  Even in her late twenties, my mother didn’t have a wrinkle or fine line in sight—she could easily have passed for a teenager. By then, she was rocking tattoos along her arms and chest and piercings on her face, accompanied by bleached blond hair and pink lipstick—Snob by Mac was her favourite. She wore fitted Tommy Hilfiger ensembles and bandanas, and she was always yelling over the phone at some man who was five minutes late for their date, then counting down the time until he came back grovelling. I adored her beauty, brawn, and badassery. I was so happy to be hers. When we were together, I would wonder if I made her feel uncool.

  When Amazing Amy came out in Canada, my mother couldn’t stop talking about how they had a Black doll. She stood in line to get me one, in its massive green box. Amazing Amy was all the rage; she came with different kinds of food that you could feed her, and different outfits. Black Amy was so pretty: cute little burgundy lips, deep brown skin, and curly black hair like mine. She was annoying with her constant whiny demands, though, so I fed her liver, which she hated, as payback.

  I understood that Black Amy and I had the same skin colour and the same curly hair, and I knew that I looked different than my grandmother and mother. But I didn’t see that difference as division yet—we were just different shades. During arts and crafts time in kindergarten, I drew myself and my grandfather in brown crayon, and the rest of my family in peach. We were still a family,
but in an assortment of body sizes and colours.

  By Grade 2, I began to realize there was a difference associated with our skin colours. In my grandmother’s soaps, all the airtime went to the white (or, as I called them, peach) people, like Sharon Newman, the beautiful heroine on The Young and the Restless, who was blue-eyed with straight blond hair. In the tabloid magazines we kept in the house, peach people graced the covers. At school, I noticed the way teachers doted on the cute little peach girls but not me; and how their cheeks turned a magical shade of pink in the winter, the way my grandmother’s did, but mine couldn’t, no matter how long I stood in the blistering cold. I watched the way my mother’s hair, silky and dyed blond, flattened like spun gold as she ran the straightening iron through it in preparation for a night out. I was mesmerized as she applied makeup to her flawless face; when she left for the night, I’d press my finger in her Mac Studio Fix powder and run it across my hand—an astounding contrast, like chalk on a blackboard.

  My mother and grandmother were both closer to peach. But I was closer to darkness, and darkness was danger. Darkness was when I ran back into the house, smelling like the outdoors after playing with the kids on the block all day. It was when bad men drove around to lure little children into their cars when asking for directions. It was when the Boogeyman under the bed made his move. Without realizing it, I had internalized a dislike of myself that I couldn’t articulate.

  * * *

  ///

  The first time my family had to address my Blackness was at my cousin’s house when I was nine. It was a party, and a young boy, distantly related to my cousin, came downstairs to the basement to play video games with the rest of us. He backed out of the room the moment he saw me. “She’s Black! I don’t want to play with Black people,” he yelled as he pointed at me. I told my grandfather what he said, and my grandpa confronted the boy’s parents. We never spoke about it again.