A Black Girl Growing Up In An Anti-Black World
I try not to think about grade school much. My school was predominantly white…around 70%. Poor white people who hated Black people with gleeful violence. I grew up a smart, sensitive kid who learned to hide my intelligence and sensitivity because my peers were predators in training and the adults were predators on the prowl. My parents protected me as best they could with the tools they had, but the rules of survival are not generous and humane treatment is a luxury. Survival mode means the least damaging option may be the only “good” option.
School was where I learned that any information would be weaponized against you — by your classmates, teachers, administration. Every single person was a hazard and I sought to make myself the smallest target possible. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I failed. Being invisible carries the risk of being forgotten and sometimes that bit me in the ass.
I was too smart to be ignored but that did not mean I was encouraged or supported. Being a poor Black girl meant I was likely to be punished for both participating or not participating in class. I was punished for following the rules because I was supposed to give more than was asked. I was punished for doing more than asked because I made assumptions about what was wanted. Being in class was constantly trying to anticipate the mood of the teacher and then modifying my behavior to meet their expectations because the moment I didn’t, I was a problem that needed to be addressed. An error that needed to be corrected. An exception that needed to be eliminated because I was fucking up the natural order.
Failure was not an option. If I wasn’t already able to do something, I was not given space to try. Failure meant is was not meant for me and I was discarded in favor of someone more promising — whatever that meant as “more promising” was often only described as something I was not. I watched classmates who barely understood what was going on receive educational opportunities for which I had to fight for consideration. I sat in workshops where I could only work on the projects that everyone else had already rejected. I learned never to express interest in anything because that gave the teacher or the other students the opportunity to take it from me. I learned to wait quietly in the back, feigning disinterest until everyone else committed to something. Only then could I show my interested.
My instincts were constantly questioned and my abilities constantly tested. I would naturally solve problems and then be forced to prove how I did it under intense scrutiny. That proof it was solved didn’t matter, especially when everyone else failed — I had to repeat the accomplishment under exponentially more stressful circumstances to be believed.
My questions were insubordinate. My speed of comprehension and understanding was a hindrance. I learned to stop engaging with the work in class because I could anticipate the next steps weeks before schedule and revealing that was interpreted as disobedience. I was heavily encouraged to silence and suppress myself because of how it would affect my peers. My interests, rather than nurtured, were marginalized to accommodate the largest cohort. Besides, they reasoned, would I really need any of this when I’d probably get pregnant at sixteen and never finish school.
Nobody knew me. Nobody knew I was a writer, despite constantly over-producing work for class assignments. If we were assigned one poem, I wrote three. If we were assigned one story, I wrote two. Over time, I learned I could earn a little side money by selling my extra work to classmates who struggled to meet the deadlines. I wrote about depression, AIDS, life, love, death, fear and now, thirty years later, I struggle to write a short story for an anthology that wants my work. I struggle to tell the imagined stories in my head because when you’re a poor Black girl, that shit won’t get you a job or help you survive. Creativity is a luxury you cannot afford unless you learn how to use it to make a rich white person happy. The times when my abilities were encouraged, supported, or appreciated were so far between that I started seeing them as mockery. I stopped believing in myself because even if I was good, nobody would believe the work was mine. And even if they did, it was made by a Black girl and nobody thinks it’s worth shit until a white face does the same shit with less flavor.
I have always been a writer and for too long I let other people tell me what that was supposed to look like and that I wasn’t it. I’ve always been quick to understand things and for too long I’ve told myself that maybe I don’t really understand and should just be quiet. I’ve always been humble but now I see humility as a hobble in a world openly chooses to erase me. I’m no longer doing that work for them. I am the shit and if you can’t handle it, that’s 100% not my fucking problem — even when you try to make it my problem.
This life is trash for poor, fat, Black womxn and we are blamed for the misogynoir of others until we look in the mirror and hate who we are because everything tells us that we are the problem. We have never been the problem. We’re the fucking cure for a people who have convinced themselves that they’re not sick. I am openly refusing to make myself seem less so that you can feel good about your “not enough”.
Fucking with me means taking your medicine and sometimes you’re going to choke on it.
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Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on December 8, 2019.
