How to Be Black

by Baratunde Thurston

  I got black when I was like, “You know what, I see racism in a lot of things that people don’t like to acknowledge.”

  And they’re like, “Why are you so black?”

  And I was like, “Whoa, but I didn’t do . . . It’s institutionalized.”

  “Yes, Negro, we understand you’re militant, get over it.”

  “I haven’t even raised my fist. I like brunch! I don’t know why you’re yelling at me!”

  I remember my uncle said that I was trying to be a white boy, because I referred to my mother as “mother.” I would go, “But mother is saying so and so.” [He would say], “Why you try to talk like a white boy?” That’s stupid.

  In high school—I must have been in tenth grade—a classmate turned to me:

  CLASSMATE: Why do you talk like the teacher?

  ELON: What are you talking about?

  CLASSMATE: You try to talk like the white kids.

  ELON: What white kids? [I went to a black school.]

  I found myself constantly defending my place in the ranks of blackness.

  DAMALI AYO

  I am so black that the other day a black person asked me what race I am. That’s how black I am. I was like, “Excuse me?” I apparently am the switchy-changy black person. People like to see me as white or as black as they like to see me. I’m so black that everybody says I look like their cousin. I am so black that I don’t have to bring up the race card. I am the race card. I am so black that I grew up with a black history bulletin board in my hallway as a child. I’m so black that my father looks like Malcolm X. That’s how black my shit is.

  DERRICK ASHONG

  I am very black. I come in the more ebony shade of jet! I’m a little chocolate-flavored chocolate.

  I remember a kid in high school, who said to me once, “Yo, you’re not really black. You don’t have any slave blood.” And I was like, “Wow, you have not been going to enough school. And we need to stop talking, because I would like to get to college someday.”

  For me, I’m very Pan-African, I’m very much in touch with my African roots. I speak my father’s language. I get by in my momma’s language. When I was in college, I did Afro-American studies because I wanted to study African-American culture and see what the differences were.

  I was really interested in what happened in the African Diaspora and how you could think about diasporic identities and how having those identities, understandings of each other, could empower and strengthen your understanding of self, rather than feeling like, “You came up from this circumstance, and this is the length and the breadth of your history,” which is largely told by someone outside of your community, who may not have the same vested interest in you feeling good about yourself, or seeing the value in who you are and where you come from.

  I engaged in that kind of study, and that is where I think a lot of my idea of blackness comes from. And it’s an inclusive sense.

  In a nutshell, I am black insofar as I embrace the idea of a Pan-African and diasporic identity. But in my language, if you ask me who I am, I’m Ebebinyi. I’m an African. The word we use for a white person is Obrunyi, which is a non-African. The color thing, it does not compute.

  JACQUETTA SZATHMARI

  I don’t think I’m very black. It’s been a point of contention for other black people for a long time. People have always made it very clear to me that I wasn’t being black enough. Then I’ve had lots of white people [say], “I don’t even notice you’re black!” Which usually means you’re not poor and smoking a five-piece on the corner and trying to rob my sister. I don’t think I’m considered to be very black in the mainstream sense.

  However, [2012 Republican presidential candidate] Herman Cain* makes me a lot blacker. [He] wears a cowboy hat and just says ridiculous stuff that most black people wouldn’t say. I think characters like that make me blacker by comparison. [There are] shades of blackness, and I think that I was towards the lesser black, but then if you have weird people coming along, then that pushes me towards the center, which is where I like to be.

  I’m also from the country . . . I’m from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which is a wretched place . . . I always considered that black. Black people are country. That’s what I thought until I got older and then I met black people who were like, “No, black people [are] hood.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, now I can’t do that either, because I’m from a cornfield.”

  When I went to boarding school, I met a lot of African-Americans who were . . . legitimately inner city or playing it up to try to retain some kind of blackness. Their whole thing was about Do the Right Thing, urban culture, Spike Lee. And I’m like, “This guy just seems angry and disgruntled.” That was not my experience of blackness.

  I had never had to fight to make a space for my blackness, because on the Eastern Shore you’re black or you’re white, but more important, your family’s been there for four hundred years, and you’re from the Eastern Shore. If you come from another place, even if you’re one year old, and you died at one hundred on the Eastern Shore, [they’d say], “Not a local.” So it was more about that identity of being from Maryland and being from the Eastern Shore.

  I’d never had to prove the blackness thing until I got out and older and other black people were like, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m black, you’re not.”

  No, I didn’t ask Christian how black he was, but I did ask him about how white he was:

  CHRISTIAN LANDER

  I’m about as white as it gets. My family came over on the Mayflower and then left the United States to stay loyal to England and moved to Canada during the Revolutionary War.

  As his is the most expert opinion I could find on the subject, I also asked him about notions of “whiteness,” especially since most of the Stuff White People Like checklist is based on beliefs, values, and tastes, not phenotypical traits.

  At my high school, anyone who liked something on the list and was not white was called white, was accused of acting white.

  • A “coconut” is brown on the outside and white on the inside. You could use that for Indian, you could use that for Latino, too. It’s your choice of which ethnicity you wish to disparage.

  • “Banana” is yellow on the outside, white on the inside, which is for Asians. The Twinkie is another replacement.

  • “Oreo” is obviously black on the outside and white on the inside.

  • I actually would probably be called what is known as an “egg” in my high school, which is white on the outside, yellow on the inside. I mean, I live in Koreatown, I grew up in Chinatown.

  We have it all. We have a wide variety of food-people: coconut, banana, Oreo, whatever you want.

  My own introduction to food-people, to blackness as a mere facade for interior whiteness, came with a change of schools.

  Do You Know What an Oreo Is?

  According to DC’s school districts at the time, my graduation from Bancroft Elementary School in the city’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood should have been followed by my attendance at Abraham Lincoln Junior High School a few blocks south of our home. There was just one problem with this regulation as far as my mother was concerned: kids at Lincoln got stabbed.

  I’m not sure how often child-stabbings occurred at this educational institution, but the fact that Lincoln had such a reputation, coupled with my penchant for getting bored in the classroom due to finishing my work early, led my mother to look for alternate schooling. Because my older sister had attended private or at least specialized schooling (Catholic school, magnet school, and an arts public school) my mother felt that I, too, should have the benefits of a non-public education. Thus began my tour of Washington-area private schools.

  The first was Georgetown Day School. All I remember from my visit is making some really shitty pottery in an art class. I’m sure they did other things at that school, like math and English and the scientific method, but I just remember that shitty piece of pottery.

  The second school I visited was called Gree
n Acres, and it had three strikes against it.

  Strike One: the name. “Green Acres”??? That sounds like a rehab center for matrimonially challenged politicians. That name was just a bit too soft for a black kid from the city. Speaking of soft, my initial interest in the school was based entirely on the crush I had on a girl from my church, never a good reason to make a six-year commitment.

  Strike Two: building design. The school had no hallways. I don’t mean that the inside of the building consisted of dark matter or “The Nothing” from The Neverending Story. I mean the classrooms all had doors to the outside, and kids walked outdoors to get from one class to the next. I later learned that this is a common design in warm places like Southern California and Hawaii, but Green Acres was in Bethesda, Maryland, whose climate offers three full months a year with average low temperatures at or below freezing.

  Strike Three: the worst basketball game I’ve ever seen. The day I visited, Green Acres had a boys’ basketball game. I was shocked to find that the boys’ team had a girl starting (bravo), and she was the best player (what?), and Green Acres lost the game 50–2!! Even though I wasn’t a fan of basketball, I refused to go to a school that could get its ass so thoroughly whipped.

  With Georgetown Day and Green Acres failing to meet my standards, the remaining school was Sidwell Friends. The school is now famous for educating Chelsea Clinton (two years behind me) and Malia and Sasha Obama, but when I enrolled, the school’s reputation wasn’t quite as glamorous.

  I arrived a bit of a fish out of water. While I wasn’t from the deep hood of Southeast DC, by Sidwell standards I was about as hood as it got at the time. I was pretty black, for a black guy. I arrived suffering from a mild medical condition known as “Ebonics” or “Black English Vernacular.” This condition caused me to “axe” people questions and caused the other students to ridicule me. I knew perfectly well how to speak perfectly well, but around friends, I was used to a more relaxed linguistic style. Eventually, my Ebonics went into full remission, and I could be paraded before boards of trustees, donors, and parents with little risk of institutional embarrassment.

  Sidwell was such a foreign environment. First, there were just so many white people. They were everywhere! That wasn’t normal. My neighborhood and previous school were all black and Latino with the exception of two white students in my grade: a boy and a girl. The boy’s name was William. The girl was Willamena. Seriously. As far as I knew, all white people had the same name! But at Sidwell, I met Patricks, Bronwens, Julias, and Phillipas.

  My classroom experience was similarly inverted. At Sidwell, usually I was the only black student in the room, and this resulted in me being deputized as some sort of Assistant Professor X whenever anything black were to come up in the curriculum. Reading Harriet Beacher Stowe? Everyone looks at Baratunde. Watching Eyes on the Prize? Everyone looks at Baratunde. In science class, learning about Black Lung? Everybody looks at Baratunde. It’s as if everyone expected me to carry the knowledge of some sort of Negropedia* filled with answers to all things black for the edification of white classmates.

  While the introduction of massive quantities and qualities of whiteness brought landmark changes into my life at Sidwell, the biggest change was probably my discovery of new types of black people.

  The school had a buddy program for new students, and I was paired with a black kid who had been at the school his entire life. The name for such students was “lifers,” which is very death row–y, which should tell you something. In my first weeks at the school, I remember my buddy pulling me aside with a secretive look in his eye and a hushed tone to his voice. Clearly, serious extracurricular education was about to go down, and I was prepared to soak it up.

  “Yo, do you know what an Oreo is?” he asked me.

  I paused and stared blankly, thinking, “Of course I do. It’s a cream-filled chocolate wafer manufactured by the Nabisco Corporation since 1952, and it’s mad tasty.” What I actually said was, “You mean like the cookie?”

  “No.” He shook his head gravely. “An Oreo is somebody who’s black on the outside and white on the inside.” He then pointed to a student I hadn’t yet met and said that kid was an Oreo.

  I looked across the room and saw a skinny, slightly nerdy black kid hanging out with some white friends, and thought, “Why are you picking on that kid? Seems to me a perfectly legitimate way to finance an eventual presidential campaign!”

  After all, that kid’s parents were paying good money for Sidwell, and I doubt it was just so that kid could socialize with other black kids. White friends cost money! Roughly $30,000 per year plus books.

  Wealth-Related Horse Violence

  My father was shot and killed when I was six years old. He was involved in a drug deal gone wrong. He was the buyer. These facts have always annoyed me.

  No boy wants his father to die. Being a black boy in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, you especially don’t want him to die of drug-related gun violence. It’s too stereotypical. The only thing that could make it worse is if he’d not only been attempting to buy drugs but if the deal itself went down inside a KFC restaurant.

  This is where the annoyance originates. If he had to die in 1985, why couldn’t he have been competing in a Hamptons polo match and gotten trampled by a horse? That would at least give his child a story for the ages.

  FRIEND: Hey, Baratunde, how come your dad never comes to your soccer games?

  ME: Oh, he normally would be here, but two years ago, he was in the finals of the Mercedes-Benz Polo Challenge when Chad Worthington III’s horse, Barbaro, got out of control. My father was tossed from his own horse, Colonel Tabasco, and crushed. Sadly, he’s just another statistic in the epidemic of wealth-related horse violence striking down black men across the country.

  Despite having lost my father, I’m not bitter or overly sad about it. I never have been. In part, I was too young to have developed deep bonds with him. On top of that, he didn’t live in the house with us, so I wasn’t used to seeing him every day. In fact, I only have six memories of him at all.

  Memory #1: Remote-controlled Boat

  We were visiting someone’s house. I don’t know whose. I was probably five. Five-year-olds don’t care whose house they’re in, so long as there are toys to play with. I must have slept there, because my memory is of taking a bath. I don’t imagine you just bring your son over to someone’s house in the middle of the day and say, “Hey, mind if my kid takes a bath? He really likes to be clean.”

  So I was in the bath, and my father came in, and he watched as I played with a remote-controlled boat. I’ve always loved remote-controlled vehicles, but that boat was my favorite.

  Memory #2: Burritotunde

  My father worked construction. I recall my mother and him waking me up extremely early (pre-sunrise) one day and putting me in the car as we went to his work site. In order to keep me comfortable, allow me to stay asleep, and maximize the cuteness of the scene, they rolled me in a blanket like a burrito.

  I love burritos.

  Memory #3: Cousins

  I’ve been quite accustomed to having a small family: my mother, my sister, and whatever pets we had at the time. However, my father had a huge family, and I have an unknown number of cousins on his side. One Saturday, we went to the house of one of his relatives, and I was left in a room to play with my cousins.

  They were all far older than me, and as such, I was their entertainment system. Small child equals plaything to older children. Their favorite activity was to let me stand up and tell me to walk across the room, but then one of them would grab me from behind by my belt and pull me back down. They did this for a long time, this human yo-yo shtick. My father was nowhere to be found during this torture.

  I hate cousins.

  Memory #4: Beer

  I was in my father’s pickup truck as he drove somewhere. He had a can of beer open (gateway drug!) and offered me a taste.* It was disgusting, and since then, I’ve generally found all beer to be disgusting. Over
the past decade, I’ve found three types of beers I actually like:

  1. Lindeman’s Framboise, which isn’t really beer

  2. Chocolate stouts (mmmm, chocolate)

  3. German Weißbier and its derivatives

  I can pretty well tolerate Corona (great commercials) and Heineken (I have positive memories of Amsterdam). All other beer is ass, and I will not put in the work to acquire the taste for things that taste like ass.

  Memory #5: Presents!

  It was Christmas, and my father visited our house and delivered the biggest bag of presents I’ve ever seen, at least in proportion to my body size. I don’t remember any of the gifts. I just remember being blown away by the size of the bag and the number of boxes.

  I love presents.

  Memory #6: Death

  I don’t remember how my mother set it up. We were in the living room, which doubled as my bedroom in our Newton Street house, and the sentence “Your father is dead” fell from her lips. I hesitated briefly, sorting out what this meant. A few beats later I started to cry, but I wasn’t crying for the specific man named Arnold Robinson. I was crying over the idea that I was supposed to have a “father” and now my “father” was gone. The idea of losing him is what felt bad.

  She gave me a choice as to whether or not I wanted to attend the funeral, and I could see no point in it. Outside of my brief interactions with the torturous cousins, I didn’t know anyone on my father’s side of the family, and the idea of hanging around a dead body surrounded by crying strangers did not interest me, so I chose not to go.

  Some years later, I came across his death certificate in the family file cabinet. Death certificates are remarkably cold, analytical, and frightening accounts of our mortality. I would have understood “he got shot,” as that seems like the type of thing capable of killing a person. But the certificate offered extra detail: