When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  “What’s wrong with it?” I’d ask. She never gave me a precise answer, only insisted that it—by which she meant interracial dating—wasn’t acceptable. Though I didn’t yet understand that I was mixed myself, the notion that interracial dating or marriage was not appropriate in our wholesome suburban community left me bewildered and angry. It didn’t make sense to me that something as simple as two people from different ethnic backgrounds being together was looked down on as immoral or wrong.

  All my years growing up, I was taught to believe something about myself other than what I saw in the mirror; that even though people assumed I was African American, they were wrong; that my community would not accept my dating a black boy because I was white. When it came to my own identity, I was so thoroughly taught to deny my own instincts that by the time I was in high school, I doubted my own sense of reality and relied on my family’s story of who I was.

  Thinking back on these experiences as I tried to integrate my multiple identities as an adult, I was angered by the gaslighting inherent in my parents’ insistence on my whiteness. Recognizing the denial and conditioning to which I had been subject for so many years was the most difficult thing for me to come to terms with. How could they have lied to me for so long?

  My parents acted as if they truly believed I was white, and when the news came that I had a different biological father, they both seemed genuinely surprised and dismayed. Did they lie to themselves as well so they could raise our family the way they wanted, the way they thought was best for us?

  During those fights with my mom about whom I could and could not date, she seemed to wholeheartedly believe what she was saying. Her opposition to my involvement in interracial dating seemed earnest, which could have only been the case if in her racist mind she really believed I was white. Or did she just want that to be true, so much so that she created a truth in her own mind and inflicted it on the rest of us?

  Did my dad just go along with it for his own sake, or was it a kind of folie à deux, a delusion shared by two? When the truth came out, my mother and father both assured me that they had never discussed my race. Even if that were true, I couldn’t understand how it could go unremarked upon for so many years.

  It remained difficult for me to grasp that at the same time my parents were teaching me to believe a lie about who I was, they were loving, supportive, and encouraging in every other way.

  In second grade, they enrolled me in the school band program at my insistence and bought me the instrument I wanted to play: an alto saxophone. They listened to hours and hours of loud, terrible honking as I learned to play and attended all my grade-school concerts. It was just one example of how devoted they were to me as parents, and this made the idea that all along they had been subjecting me to psychological and emotional abuse even more difficult to accept.

  How could both things be true? Did they even know they were doing it? Was my racial identity too wrapped up with a trauma my mother had willed herself to forget, thereby rewriting the whole family’s history? Was my mislabeling just a symptom of a bigger system of denial in my family? Is it possible to gaslight someone unintentionally? How deep is the mind-set of racism?

  As I asked myself these questions, I realized my mind was spinning, unable to even tell if the situation I was in with my family was emotionally abusive or not. I didn’t trust my own evaluation of reality. Even more than the matter of what racial category I fell into, I couldn’t get past the knowledge that my upbringing centered on a lie my parents consciously upheld regardless of the effect it might have on me. They were too busy being good parents to realize how deeply their racism and denial affected me.

  My mother became extremely angry whenever the topic of race came up, while my dad calmly explained that race was simply not our problem. In both cases, I felt bullied, confused, and full of doubt. When I did try to assert how I felt, it was dismissed as teenage rebellion. Because I trusted my parents implicitly, because of how close we were as a family, because of all that they had done for me over the years, I couldn’t even conceive of the fact that they would lie to me, that they had known the truth all along.

  Despite our arguments, growing up, I trusted my mother’s judgment. I’m not the kind of person who makes a lot of casual acquaintances, because I don’t trust many people. I’m socially introverted and have a close circle of friends I have known for a long time. I am confident speaking in front of a crowd of people but shy away from unstructured contact with those same people. I tend to have long-term relationships but will end or sabotage a relationship before someone has a chance to betray my trust. When I found out that my mother, the person I trusted most in the world, had been lying to me for years, emotionally and psychologically, it was too much for me to handle.

  After my friends went home and the coming-out party ended, I sat huddled in bed paging through Black Hair magazine. I marveled at the creative, sometimes gravity-defying hairstyles, complex braids, and heads bursting with spiral curls. I realized, somewhat sadly, that most of the hairstyles pictured would not really work on me. My hair’s texture could not hold a true Afro and was too limp to wear straightened or in cornrows.

  I went to the salon in high school to have my hair fixed in a French braid for homecoming. Because of my hair’s texture and fineness, the braid tapered to a skinny rattail at the end. When I got home, I took the braid out and wore my hair the way I usually did—with the front pulled back and the rest hanging suspended above my shoulders. The moment that was supposed to be fun and exciting for a teenage girl—getting her hair done at a salon for a high school dance—just reminded me that the long, full, highlighted braids that graced the tanned necks of the other girls at the dance were beyond me.

  I didn’t really know how to take care of my hair; it was an uneven mass when I let it down, and I usually wore it brushed into a tight ponytail. It grew to around my shoulders and then would break off, frizzing out on top and at the ends. I realized I would never have hair like the women modeling the hairstyles in Black Hair. Nevertheless, I wanted to do something different with my hair to signal the change that was happening on the inside.

  I researched curly hair patterns online and discovered that my hair was somewhere between type 3B and 3C. 3B hair had springy ringlets that dried fluffy without any products to add moisture and definition. 3C hair had tight corkscrew curls and tended to fluff up even more, like an Afro. Its curl made it brittle, and it broke easily at the ends. The description of 3C hair reminded me of the issues I had with my own hair: breaking off when it grew shoulder length, looking puffy and undefined if I wore it down. I was excited to see that the photo of the girl with 3C hair looked like me. She was black but mixed. Some of the girls with 3B hair were white. Others were nonwhite, maybe Latina or another ethnicity. Both hair types needed daily conditioning, deep conditioning weekly, and curl-defining products to look their best. I learned about the natural hair movement, how women of color were taking a stand against a society that wanted them to conform by wearing straightened hair and long straight weaves. These women proudly wore their hair the way it grew out of their heads, whether kinky, coiled, zigzagged, or corkscrewed. They embraced shorter, naturally styled hair, which was easier to keep healthy, instead of opting to damage their hair through heat styling, straightening, and relaxing.

  I wanted to be part of the movement. Through learning about my hair I began to form an idea of mixed identity for the first time. My hair revealed my African American and Italian heritage. When my hair was wet, I could wind a small section around my finger and make a perfect corkscrew curl. When it dried, I could separate those curls, but instead of producing layers of thick satiny springs like the curly hair I saw in conditioner ads, the ends would fly away, and the top and bottom layers hung at different angles. I wasn’t sure of what ethnicity my complexion and features showed, but I was familiar with my hair. It had been with me my whole life, and it was always the same. Most of the time, I related to my hair with frustration, but now I saw r
edefining my relationship with my hair as an opportunity to settle into my new sense of identity.

  As important as my hair journey was at this point, I realized my hair was not the only way I would be able to prove or affirm my blackness. Even though I was conflicted about what he meant to me, the only way I thought I could connect directly to my own blackness was to find my biological father. Only by standing beside an African American who was biologically related to me would I be able to show the world and myself that I was unequivocally black. Maybe then, my family would acknowledge it, too.

  This father I didn’t know, who used to be just an idea, a hint, a shadow, was becoming much more. He was becoming the only real way for me to truly know myself. Because I believed he’d raped my mother, I had mixed feelings about wanting to have a relationship if and when I found him, but I was still overwhelmed by curiosity. Would we like the same things? Would he look like me? Would I become part of a whole family I never knew I had? These questions and more kept me up at night, wondering. More than anything, though, I wanted to see him not as a menacing threat but as a real live human being. I regretted that, because of my mother’s experience, I never had the chance to decide for myself how he would be part of my life. My mother saw any hint of my wanting to know who he was as a deep betrayal. “How could you even think that after what he did to me?” she said. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help it. How much of her trauma was I supposed to take on as my own? I became obsessed with his reality, his blackness as my blackness. I thought that without him, I would always remain incomplete.

  Over the next few years, to discover what it meant to be black in America, I looked for the answer in books I could relate to, like The Book of American Negro Poetry and Creating Black Americans, a textbook by Nell Painter that traces the history of African American art. I read memoirs about wrestling with mixed identity and family secrets: Bliss Broyard’s One Drop, Danzy Senna’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, and James McBride’s The Color of Water. I had a lot of time and ignorance to make up for. I could hear my mother’s standard summation of race and racism—It just affects so few people—but these were real experiences of real people. No matter what their percentage of our country’s overall population, their experience and mine mattered.

  But I couldn’t learn what it means to be black from a textbook.

  I always knew I could pass for black, but that’s all I thought it was. Now, years later, I began to realize that light-skinned and mixed-race black folks had passed for white throughout our country’s history, often as a means of survival and to take advantage of privileges like interracial marriage, jobs, and education that were denied to those classified as black. I learned about the one-drop rule instituted during Jim Crow that required anyone with even one black ancestor to identify as black, so as to keep the white race pure. I learned about the brown paper bag test, a measure for determining whether or not an individual was allowed certain privileges based on whether or not their skin color was lighter or darker than a brown paper bag. I learned how that engendered colorism among African Americans, leading lighter-skinned men, and especially women, to be considered more beautiful, desirable, and upwardly mobile. I began to realize that because my complexion was light enough and my features European enough, it was easier for my parents to let me pass for white than to be honest about my background, and when anyone asked about it, they simply didn’t answer. It occurred to me that maybe ever since I was an infant, their desire to start a family of their own, despite the odds, was so strong that when they looked at me, they looked past the parts of me that didn’t match up with their ideal. They didn’t look at me and see me. They looked at me and saw themselves.

  Once I made it clear that I identified as black, old friends came out of the woodwork to write to me on Facebook and talk about the fact that they’d always known, or suspected, that I was adopted. They had known I didn’t look like the rest of my family members. I had been conditioned to think I didn’t look “black enough,” and that’s why I could have gone for so long believing I was white. I had been mistaken for so many different ethnicities over the course of my lifetime that it was difficult for me to accept that I looked identifiably black, even though that certainty was something I’d always longed for. Now I had to develop a sense of black and mixed identity that accounted for both my European features and my African ones.

  I became hyperaware of how others perceived me, and it became more difficult for me to shrug off comments directed at my racial difference, comments which, growing up, I’d simply tuned out. I recalled the time in high school when the other school’s track team taunted me; it hadn’t registered to me then that they were all white and the words they were yelling were racial slurs. But the knowledge and the anger that came with it that was stuck somewhere deep in my subconscious now lodged free. Now, when a white grad student asked me why someone like me would be interested in studying Slavic literature, or when the lecturer for whom I was a teaching assistant told me he was glad to be teaching with someone “less male and less white” than he was, I felt the same way I did back then, an anger I didn’t know how to counter or express. But I was now at least aware of that anger.

  Twenty-five

  In the months after I learned about my biological father, I had to do something more decisive than change my hair to break with the version of myself that had been hurt, disappointed, and betrayed by my family.

  I decided to change my name.

  I wanted my new name to reflect my African American identity, something that belonged to me and wasn’t determined by my family. I thought about changing my first and last names, but I immediately discarded that idea. Changing both my names made it seem like I was a fugitive, someone who wanted to bury the past and build a new identity from the ground up. There was something furtive about it. I didn’t want to become another person; I had already become one. I didn’t need to erase my entire identity to know that.

  I always liked the name Kenya, which I came across in college as the first name of one of the Spanish professors, Kenya Dworkin. She was white (or looked white), but to me, her name was evocative of African heritage. The problem was that I didn’t know where in Africa my ancestors were from. After I took the paternity test with my dad, I ordered another DNA test on my own that would show me the breakdown of my ancestry. The results showed I was 45 percent European, 45 percent sub-Saharan African, and 10 percent Asian. Unfortunately, the pie chart graph of my genetics was not more detailed and only showed origins by continental region, not by ethnic group or even country.

  Could I change my first name? Could I get used to going by a different name from the one I’d had my whole life? I wasn’t particularly fond of the name Sarah when I was younger; I thought it was too common. There were always one or two other Sarahs in my class. Some spelled it without the h, and they always struck me as imposters. As I grew, I came to identify with the name. After all, my father would remind me, Sarah meant princess. The biblical Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was originally named Sarai, which meant quarrelsome. I thought both meanings fit me well.

  When I thought about it, Kenya seemed a bit on the nose. Even though I loved the sound of that name, I knew I would feel like I was trying too hard to impose an African identity on myself. It felt like other people would realize that, too. Should I change my middle name to Kenya? My middle name was Elizabeth, the name of my father’s mother. It felt too stuffy, and lately when I was asked on forms to fill out my whole name, I would drop the Elizabeth and just write Sarah Dunn. Changing my middle name would be too safe, I decided, since it was a name you could choose to use or not. I wasn’t going to require people to address me as Sarah Kenya—which sounded pretty terrible anyway—so the only one who would know I had a different middle name from the one I was given would be me.

  That left only one option: to change my last name. It was the name that tied me most to my family; my father’s family name, the name my mother took when she married, the name I shared with my brother
s. If my parents insisted that the revelation didn’t change anything for our family, then changing my last name should not, either. It was a way of signaling my independence to help me move on emotionally and psychologically. It was a way of differentiating myself from the little girl who believed what her parents told her and wanted nothing more than to be a good daughter. That girl was still a part of me, but it didn’t embody who I was today. I could hold the “before” and “after” parts of myself in one whole by giving myself a new last name.

  I couldn’t change my last name to reflect my biological father because I didn’t know who he was. I wasn’t sure I would take his name even if I did; changing my name wasn’t about adopting a new family. I wanted to become fully integrated with myself, with all the complexities and inconsistencies that would entail.

  * * *

  I visited the Tretyakov Gallery during my first semester abroad in Moscow. I lived in an apartment in the southern reaches of the city just inside the third ring, a few blocks from Danilov Monastery. My metro stop was Tulskaya on the gray line. I trekked to the metro and took the escalator down into the large, empty station. Tulskaya didn’t connect to any other stops, and most of the time there were few, if any, other people on the platform. I knew I looked strange to my neighbors, who were mostly old Russians, but after living in the massive city for five months, I learned to ignore the stares, or stare back. I carved out my own routes and routines, getting around via the metro, the trolley when I was downtown, the elektrichka when I wanted to go to the far outskirts, and on foot. That day, the platform was empty except for an old woman sweeping the already gleaming marble floor with a handmade broom. These women, bent and kerchiefed, were eternal denizens of the subway stations, keeping them spotless with only a coarse straw broom and sometimes a rag on the end of a stick despite the millions of feet that traversed them each day.