Day 2
Favorite class of this semester: Africana Studies. Today, we discussed the Atlantic Slave Trade—briefly, of course, because no one can cover 400 years in two hours of a class lecture. She always asks for questions and comments at the end. There’s mainly participation from my classmates who are not of African descent, which is about three-fourths of the class. Not sure why yet, maybe it has something to do with the atmosphere of the classroom. Although the majority of the students are white, our professor is a black woman. She’s very proud to teach this subject, she encourages honesty in the classroom, and it seems she has the answer to every question asked. Today a white girl asked, “When the Emancipation Proclamation was made, did it consider black women?” My professor answered basically that no documents during those times considered any women at all. More questions are asked and I start to notice an elephant in the room when we begin to talk about reparations. She wants to know our opinions. A black girl in front of me raises her hand and says, “Yes, WE do.” I mean, who was really going to say no: We all said yes.

Now, as I sit in my room and reflect on my class, I wonder where society is heading. Pushing progress in whatever I do has always been important to me. I think I finally see that reflected in popular culture with the release of movies like Get Out, Black Panther, or the Netflix series Burning Sands. These works give a clear message for the need for progress and growth in our specific social, political, and economic climate. Learning about the evolution of the status of black people in the world makes me think about who is responsible for it. I feel I have an obligation to my identity but am also ambivalent about speaking too broadly. I want to be more than just my identity.

Often I find that identity is used as a limitation when it should be used as a battery. Being a black girl from Harlem at a PWI in Upstate New York makes a big difference in my encounters with other students who do not come from the same background. I met someone from Plattsburgh in my film class the other day, and she asked me if I knew Cardi B personally. I said no, but I was equally shocked that she even knew who Cardi B was. What I’ve realized is that commonality is more complex than just shared backgrounds. I never had much in common with my peers from Harlem. We didn’t dress the same, didn’t like the same things, didn’t have the same hobbies. I wore baggy sweaters with skirts or excessively ripped jeans, often with low-top Vans or Converse.

Everyone has always expected me to be a certain way because of where I’m from. There’s this idea of what a black girl from my neighborhood should act like. I felt like all of these qualities were just the results of being on defense from all of the possible consequences a girl could face from just being black in Harlem (or whatever other “black” neighborhood you want to pick). I found it hard to be a girl who listened to trap, rock and R&B all in the same playlist, as if everything had to have its own category. That’s what I felt like majority of my highschool years, like I was being questioned about who I was always. Why are you so different my peers and teachers would ask? And all I always thought was, Why aren’t you?

After reading “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates with my Africana Studies class this semester, it all makes sense. There’s one passage in his memoir where Coates talk about fear. He tells his son,

When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away.”

I always wanted to understand why everyone’s personality where I grew up seemed so similar. Everyone wanted to be “fly,” everyone had to listen to the same music, and everyone wanted to be “tough.” I think Coates articulates it here: in the hood, there is a fear of being rejected by your peers, especially since you have already been rejected by the world. The tougher you are, the less you have to worry about being rejected. The more designer you have, the more you are praised. The fear in Harlem of not being enough for society is so overwhelming that everyone strives to be SOMETHING. Possibly because of this legacy, everyone aspires to dress and act like anyone who’s ever made it out of Harlem. I’m thinking about Diddy, A$AP Rocky, and Teyana Taylor.

But I think a lot of my peers don’t get that the “look” was not what got these people out of our hood. It was determination. Effort. Confidence. Exultation. Not an outfit. Everyone tries really hard to reflect what they think is “lit,” and everyone follows the same ideology of how to get lit. A lot of the boys I grew up with admire the young black men in the 2002 movie Paid in Full who grew up broke in Harlem and made it rich. As a result, those boys followed the same blueprint: sold drugs to support their household and beefed with other boys who lived less than 20 blocks away. See, the boys I grew up with, I watched them all drop out of high school with no guidance from anyone but each other. Now they sit in court facing conspiracy and attempted murder charges. And I sit here, in this dorm, thinking about a classroom.