"Why Do You Talk So White?!!" - (Uh oh - it's a race rant...)

(I don't go here usually - so strap on in for a different and not-so-pleasant ride.) 

Listen - I have had just about enough of that shitty question myself and the attack it forms on my identity as a multicultural black woman born in Sierra Leone and raised in the Caribbean in a very African household by an anglo-Brit-raised-Afro-Czech-German mother and my Euro-educated-African-proud-Salone dad, only to come out into the world having to explain my unfamiliar accent/sound, or worse yet, being told that it bears no resemblance to my skin - a finding that has always perplexed me as the sound itself has rarely if ever been accurately identified anyway.  And all this has caused its own special issues -I will never live ANYWHERE where I'm not asked "where are you from?" Just happened again last week, in the country I grew up in!  Hence my lifelong and artistic focus on cultural identity and the soul journey.   But this race one is just nutty.  I've grown so accustomed to the look of consternation and urgent re-evaluation when I'm seen in the flesh after being first heard on the phone - the barely-there-yet-perceptible-withdrawal from an appearance that apparently fell to the side of someone's narrow estimation of me. And this has been, sorry to say it, a distinctly American experience.  

Oh how I suffered when I first came to America - trying to figure out how to straddle a set of permissible identities all having to do with race first, class and culture second, and yet having even fewer choices to fit in the latter by being black,  and dark skinned black at that - with, gasp(!), a nondescript foreign accent!  To have to hone my (Jamaican) patois and Salone creole skills just to make the point that speech in the diaspora is as varied as our hues.  And so,...so what if it took me a few years to come around to listening to hip hop, let alone understanding a darn word spoken in it; that didn't equate a rejection of being black - it just meant it didn't relate to my cultural experiences...yet ...as I wasn't American.  Simple right?!  Yeahhhhhh-not-so-much.   

This is an old gripe that's now weathered, beaten, and pretty much gone actually. There's no upset anymore really (I know it doesn't read that way above - hahaha); but there is the occasional irritating itch of it, and also lots of curious analysis and amusement.   And mind you, I'm now far more acclimated so I can cover myself and avoid creating confusion in my official home of America - nah'a'mean?  But I, we, foreign black nationals go through this.  Real, real talk.  

So...I love this woman for creating this poem. Dammit someone said it, and said it thoroughly, with the right levels of exasperation and appeals.  Mental Emancipation People!! Well done and thank you Maya Wegerif!!

NB: If you can't see video, please visit blog link directly. 

RELATED JOURNEY POSTS:

-What does it mean to PRIORITIZE!!! (March 2009)

-The Black List Project and the conversations it provokes (January 2009)

-A Response to DISPATCHES FROM (A)MENDED AMERICA (December 2008)