My Brown Skin
I rarely write about race because it is such a contentious topic. I prefer to have conversations with people I trust and are willing to encounter me where I am. In this short section from my book, I share my thoughts about how race affected me as I was growing up.
My black skin felt uncomfortable, so I ignored it. I had been programmed to believe that every bad thing about me because I wasn’t black enough. There was always a fundamental difference between how I thought about myself and how I assumed everyone else thought about me. The combination of studying human behavior in graduate school and living with friends forced me to think about how my body was defined by myself and others.
People were always telling me,
“Well, you’re not like other black guys, you’re….you’re just different.”
There are all sorts of words that people use to describe black men who aren’t black enough or man enough and at some point, they had been used on me.
Soft. Oreo. Faggot. Wanna-be. Pussy. They all meant one thing: Different.
At one and the same time, it meant nothing and everything. Even though I was able to compartmentalize what other people thought, those words haunted my subconscious. I knew that I’d never had a girlfriend, but I never figured out how to care enough to go about getting one. Even with Roosevelt, I knew that if I just got worse grades, was less curious, and did as I was told that everything would be better. I just couldn’t force myself to make changes that didn’t resonate with who I felt like I was. I could only ever be true to myself—no matter how painful it was. Somehow it all revolved around sex and skin color. I felt like an outcast because I didn’t act like a normal black man. It was a really fucked up way of thinking, but it was handed down to me through song lyrics, music videos, movies, and—most importantly—Roosevelt. The reality of normal, everyday life, that I struggled so mightily against, suffocated me.
Thanks to a friend , my mindset was transformed by a conscious hip-hop artist from the Bronx named KRS-ONE. In his song, Brown Skin Woman, he yells at the listener to recognize that their skin is not black. I looked at my left arm and was shocked to see brown skin. I had never thought about my body in any way other than I was taught. I was a black man. It seemed embarrassing, but I had never thought about the difference between my skin color and the color black, but in a moment, it explained the discomfort I had with how I had been defined throughout my life. And like every other major realization in my life, I made an instantaneous change: I declared that I no longer identified as black, male, or straight. It was just the kind of extreme reaction I needed to reject a reality that had weighed so heavily on me.
My behavior didn’t change; I didn’t start wearing women’s clothing, sleeping with men, or being white. I wasn’t trying to change who I was, I was trying to force people to accept me for who I had always known myself to be. It was meant to change the way I was willing to let people talk about my body. The more I rejected those terms, the freer I felt. More free than I could have ever imagined by rejecting three little words. It’s exactly what KRS-ONE said, he wasn’t screaming at his audience to intimidate them, but to protect himself from a world that tried to force its labels on him.