I don’t remember how old I was, maybe I was eleven. Maybe older, but I was young. I was walking home from middle school and it was spring time, the walk home wasn’t that far but I hadn’t eaten all day and I needed something to drink. There was a fast food restaurant that everyone thought had shut down but just had bad business right at the bottom of the hill I lived on. I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to walk up a three block hill so dehydrated and walked into the restaurant. I’m sure I got food, I was a growing girl, and I sat down to think about whatever boy problems I was having at that age without the interruption of my everyday life. There wasn’t anyone in the restaurant and the woman who took my order sat down a few seats away from me and stared as I meekly ate my fries under the pressure of her gaze. She was an old woman, dark hair, skin hanging off of her face and the restaurant’s uniform made the color look surreal in juxtaposition to the royal blue visor on her head. I tried to eat quickly and avoid eye contact but eventually I gave up on eating and got up to throw away what I would to have liked to eat but she stopped me before I could pass her table. “What are you?” She asked with no hesitation. My first instinct then is what my first instinct is now which is to ask, “Why the fuck is that any of your business?” But I opened my mouth and let out a defeated sigh, “Well, I don’t know, my mom is White and my dad is Black.” She nodded and said, “Okay,” as if I needed her approval to be breathing and I left slightly stunned by the experience. As soon as I got home I went upstairs to my dad’s office and relayed the story with added emphasis on how perturbed I was that someone would feel comfortable asking me that. My dad loves talking to me about being Black, it’s one of his very favorite subjects. There’s a pride there when his eyes gleam and he talks about the tone of his skin; he sees being Black as a blessing. I’ve always been confused about my body, my skin color changes every time I go out into the sun. My skin color to me matches the shade of a new tree planted in a crowded city. But I do remember him looking me in my eyes, I remember that my eyes matched his and a sense of familiarity warmed me. He said, “If anyone asks what you are, you tell them that you’re Black.”

Being Black to me is more than my skin color, I know that I’m light skinned (I’ve been “jokingly” called high yellow all of my life), and maybe judging solely off of that I would be “passing” but I have those features. The controversial ones, the type of body that everyone on the TV was taking diet pills to avoid, the lips that I would see on a someone doing Blackface. I had the features my barbies were always missing, there’s an aisle in every store with products that promise they can fix my hair and I can say I’ve invested in almost every one. They’re all the same – my body is undeniably Black and because it is Black it is political.

That’s never been a secret in my life. I don’t remember the first time my mom or dad sat me down and said, “Now, Gabriella, you’re Black and here’s what that means,” it was more like an ongoing discourse between my family members. I do, however, remember the first time it became real to me. I was probably six or seven years old and my family was living in White Center, a suburb a few miles away from Seattle. My brother had a best friend who lived across the street from my Grandma’s house, I’m not sure what his name was, probably something like Aaron. CJ (my brother), and Aaron really hit it off, I mean the kid was over at our house all of the time playing video games. They would walk to and from school together and I remember thinking he was so much softer than the rest of my brother’s rowdy friends. My mother, however, would speak in hushed tones about how his mother was racist, about how CJ could never go to Aaron’s house. Then one day CJ came home upset which wasn’t unusual, but then he told us what happened. CJ was walking home from school and he passed the Aaron’s house. His mom was in the driveway and he told my mother that she just started driving at him. Fortunately he ran out of the way in time and wasn’t harmed but it was the first time I had heard of someone hurting someone just because they looked like my brother and me. I couldn’t believe that that had happened to someone I loved, I didn’t want to believe it, I thought it was mistake. But Frantz Fanon captured my sentiments exactly, “I was not mistaken. It was hatred; I was hated, detested, and despised, not by my next-door neighbor or a close cousin, but by an entire race. I was up against something irrational (p. 97).

Race is something I’ve always been conscious of but I had to ignore it for a while. Growing up Black and having primarily White friends really did something sick to my psyche because I started to see other Black people as beautiful but me as flawed. I saw the beauty in my family members but I was lighter than them but then there was everyone else, skinny, White, short, nothing like me. No one pointed out that I was Black to me, race wasn’t a topic of conversation amongst my friends (who were primarily White “skater boys” who, when race was brought up called me a “mutt” and told me to stop talking); I couldn’t find any reflection of myself, not in the books I read or shows I watched, there was nothing of myself. I was experiencing dysphoria but not consciously, I didn’t know where the roots of the resentment I was feeling where and no one really helped me with that. I had my father of course, to tell me stories of growing up in Louisiana in the 50’s when the land was so flat he thought he could see the curve of the earth and he couldn’t’ve drank out of the same water fountain as my mother but that all felt so removed from where I was standing. I couldn’t believe that being Black in America could be psychologically damaging, that it was something that persisted and wore down your morale with age.

But then I got older and the things my father had always told me about being Black were suddenly coming into play in my own life. Like being watched when I walked around the store with my cousin, or being stopped by police officers just for them to ask what I was doing walking down the street. Men started to tell me, again, that I “wasn’t like other Black girls” and that they liked me for that. They compared me to my people and told me I was an outsider still and expected me to take it as a compliment. Then there were the men who treated me like they treated other Black women, backing me into corners and telling me they’re going to fuck me, following me off of the bus and talking about my body as I walked away. Those men treated me like an object whereas the former type of man treated me like an animal – I learned to see the difference. To add to the mess were the White women – friends, friends of friends, strangers off of the street, just White Women – approaching me and touching my hair without permission because they’ve always wanted to know what “my kind of hair” feels like. Their obsession with Blackness mixed with the fact that they would evade the subject of Blackness all together was almost as sickening as their anecdotes about being seven and wishing they had an afro. But then their mother told them that they were beautiful the way they were. And they had a whole society to back them up on that.

The resentment grew and grew until I stopped going to school and stopped leaving the house. I still wasn’t sure what the cause of my complete disinterest in society was about, it was hindering me but I felt like I was grasping at straws when trying to figure out why. I knew that what I was experiencing with people – the comments on my body, on my identity – all of the words said to me were a part of my life that wouldn’t go away. Racism was never presented to be as solvable, but simply a fundamental part of Western society which has caused it to thrive. But it didn’t feel real. I wasn’t an “Other” in Tacoma; light skin Black girls weren’t an oddity, White people were. The idea of “The Rich Man” was more exotic than my hair.

One day I got bored and applied to Evergreen, I got in, and then moved to Olympia. My brother went to Evergreen and he tried to warn me in so many words but I didn’t really get it. He told me by my Junior year I would be ready to leave and never come back. I made friends easily enough however by week three of my first quarter I was crying on the phone to my cousin explaining that I needed to leave Olympia immediately. See, being Black in Olympia feels a lot like telling a joke that no one understands; there’s a strong sense of “Why did I just do that?” mixed with, “Why don’t these people get it?” Evergreen is considered liberal because of the fact that they’ll allot a $5000 a quarter budget to the Shellfish Club not because of their diversity. I’m pretty sure that I know the majority of the Black people on campus and we wave and smile at each other like we’re beacons of hope. It doesn’t matter whether it’s intentional or not I’m almost always the token Black friend simply because there are so few of us. Every time I walk onto campus I know I’m going to be witness to something upsetting, someone is going to say something to me that offends me, and that I’m going to want to go home as soon as I can. It seems pessimistic but I can safely say that it’s true. It’s hard to continue going to school when you know most encounters you have will be psychologically damaging.

Then I went to Europe.

Now, while I was there my head was occupied dealing with the fact that I had to speak another language and that I was far away from home and I didn’t fully recognize the way I was being treated and why. There were a couple incidents where shopkeepers wouldn’t look at me or speak to me, a French drug dealer referring to Black people solely as “niggers”, and all of the street harassment was jarring but I thought it wasn’t out of the norm for me. When I got back from France I read a book, Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon which completely changed my perception of what I experienced not just in France, but back at home.

In chapter five, The Lived Experience of the Black Man Fanon begins recounting the remarks he’d received simply walking through the streets of Paris and how raw they made him feel. When a young child with their Mother cried, “Look, Maman, look, a negro!” and the mother responded with, “Ssh! You’ll make him angry. Don’t pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are,” Fanon was at a loss. He wrote:

My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this White winter’s day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly; look, a Negro; the Negro is trembling, the Negro is trembling because he’s cold, the small boy is trembling because he’s afraid of the Negro, the Negro is trembling with cold, the cold that chills the bones, the lovely little boy is trembling because he thinks the Negro is trembling with rage, the little White boy runs to his mother’s arms: “Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me.”

The White man is all around me; up above the sky is tearing at its navel; the earth crunches under my feet and sings White, White. All this Whiteness burns me to a cinder. (p. 93)

That sensation of being gawked at, of having your body discussed and ridiculed by strangers, even children was something I had experienced over and over. When I was in Galway at a coffee shop, a child hid behind her father and began crying and when he asked why she pointed at me. She was confused and her father was embarrassed but I just wanted coffee. Even with all of my knowledge of the politics of being Black I still don’t expect my body to be verbally mangled when I’m simply trying to be. All I wanted was coffee. Fanon writes a lot about wishing to simply be able to exist without the ignorance of others constantly bombarding him and my wishes for myself aren’t far off.

So, how do I feel about being myself? About being Black? I see myself in Spirits Swirl by Levoy Exil in 1991. He’s an artist from Haiti who used abstraction to capture dysphoria.

In the center is a Black girl, in a circle that resembles the sun, but with eyes. Around her women surround her, twisting around each other with their languid, brightly colored bodies. The girl in the center is visually overwhelmed by the activity outside of her bubble. All of the eyes in the painting are staring at the viewer, there’s a flatness to their faces and bodies and yet one feels as if they could plunge into the scene if one looks too closely. It’s ghostly and mystical but not in a horror film way; the figures around her are spirituality and ancestry floating around this Black woman constantly. Her ancestors call to her, and even though she appears intimidated, there’s also a sense of openness and possession as the spirits reach for her.

That’s the best way I can describe what it feels like to be me. My history doesn’t just follow me around the store, I carry my Blackness in my heart every day. I make sure not to forget my history, to stand up for the people who died in the process of making it so I could attend schools and apply eyeliner in the same bathroom as my White friends. Despite the process of demonization we’ve experienced, despite slavery and other forms of systematic racism that hinder my daily life, I’m still inclined to agree with my father. Being Black has given me a valuable perspective on the world and features I have grown to admire in myself. And I’m proud of that. If anyone asks me what I am, I tell them I’m Black.

When you see a Black person, what do you see? If I asked you to picture a Black person in your head, which features would you accentuate to let yourself know that you’ve imagined an accurate representation? Have you ever stopped to think about why it is that you’ve developed whatever associations are coming to mind now? Have you considered the external influences on your perception of people?

I can’t tell you where it all began; there’s always been a prejudice against darker people throughout history. I’ve never been in a World History class where the instructor says, “Now, such and such year is when the prejudice against dark skinned people was conceived by this dude”. That’s not really how it works. Throughout my studies it seems like shadeism of some sort has been incorporated in cultures all over the world, but I’m not here to make an argument for universal biases being a natural tendency because I’m almost positive I don’t believe in that being inherent. What I can do, however, is look at the way the image of us has transformed over time creating a depiction of us in the mainstream media that doesn’t even begin to capture the brilliance I see.

I never really had to think about these things when I lived in Tacoma. I went to a school where it was rare for there to be more than three White people in the school. Whiteness was reserved to the highly resented staff, the only White authority figures respected by the students were the ones who proved their ability to speak our language and break up a fight. It’d been like that in elementary and middle school, too, so it’s safe to say moving to Olympia, Washington was a culture shock. I went from a classroom setting where we learned about code switching and talks about how I won’t be received well by professionals because of my skin color to a place where I could go hours and hours without seeing someone who even vaguely resembled me.

The first group project of my Evergreen career was a presentation on a cult in ancient Rome. I was in the basement of the library in a study room with two people who were nice enough; I don’t remember how we got on the subject of racism but as I would learn it would be a topic that got brought up frequently in my presence, because of my presence. The man sitting across from me fidgeted with his baseball cap and casually told me that I’d never experienced racism because I wasn’t from the south. See, he was from the South and that fact apparently made him an expert on the subject of terrible biases. He said that I was lighter than his Black friends back home who have experienced “real” racism and I couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to truly be Black. He then began talking about my features and asked if my hair melted when I straightened it. I told him that I didn’t understand what he was asking. He said, “When I see my friend’s girlfriend straighten her hair it melts. Your type of hair melts when you use a flat iron, I’ve seen it.” It did not matter how much I objected to this idea of our hair being this magical, exotic substance growing out of our heads that melts when it gets too hot, he dismissed my narrative in favor of his distorted White supremacist ideals. I can’t count how many times strangers have walked up to me and began petting my hair because they had an idea that my body was open game. It became immediately apparent after my first few weeks in Olympia that the concept of Black people’s bodies being objects was deeply ingrained in the mainstream psyche, revealing itself in various ways.

What happened? I can’t believe that we’ve always been seen only as objects in the eyes of White people. There’s proof, look at Peter Paul Rubens one of the greatest Renaissance painters. The Four Rivers created in 1616 depicts the God’s of the world’s greatest rivers: Nile, Tigris, Ganges, and Euphrates. Surrounding them are cherubs wrestling with alligators effortlessly while a tiger hisses at divinity toying with nature. Each River God is paired with nymphes who act as feminine power for the river’s flow.

In the center of a painting is a Black woman as a Nymph accompanying Nile, there’s no distortion of her features – she is just as beautiful and alluring as the rest of the Nymphs. She’s the only person engaged with the audience, looking us directly in the eye as if she were inviting us into the painting, to submerge ourselves in the depth of the dark blue tones. While they didn’t make Nile Black (even though he was the one God typically represented as a Black man [p. 348 Black People in European Art]) the association with the people living on the land that the Nile river flows through is represented with the Nymph. She is not an accessory in this painting. She serves a role on conveying a theme and works together with the other deities depicted to do that effectively. She was not portrayed as a caricature of her Blackness; she had a central role that involved her personhood and heritage as opposed to reducing her role to her race.

There are countless depictions of Black people within Renaissance art, and while it might be due to the realism of the era, I could not find any racist or tragically distorted representations of Black people in Europe during the 1600’s, which is coincidental since the first colony came to Virginia in the beginning of that century. Depictions of Black people transformed from the beginning of the century to the end.

The French Encounter with Africans by William Cohen documents misconceptions and prejudices created and perpetuated by Europeans. Cohen writes, “In Europe the color Black denoted evil and depravity and, in an age that believed in symbols, some meaning was attached to the fact that some humans were Black.” (p. 13) What did this meaning consist of? The theories as to why Blackness existed varied from one xenophobic perspective to another. Everything from Black people being descendents of Cain (our skin was turned Black by God to show our affiliation with Satan), to the idea that Africans were born White but turned Black by the sun, dirt, or paint. (pg. 13) The Europeans had negative associations with Blackness from their first encounters. Cohen notes that, “Frenchmen saw the Blackness of Africans as symbolic of some inner depravity, since they thought the color aesthetically unappealing. They followed a tradition rooted in the classical doctrine of physiognomos, which held that what was not beautiful was somehow depraved.” (p.14) In short, because the French and other Europeans went to Africa and were confronted with the antithesis of their societal standards they began to look for “Rational” reasons as to why Blackness existed. The conclusions they came to were that Europeans were blatantly superior simply because they didn’t understand the differences they had with Africans and could not accept them as equals because of their polarity.

Behind the Eurocentric Veils by Clinton M. Jean is titled effectively; this 100 page book covers a span of history from the slavery era to the Vietnam war to evaluate the systematic racism perpetuated by Europeans and how it affects the identity of minorities, specifically Black people. He argues that because Reason is the new God in the Western world, this powerful ideal has othered Second and Third world countries which are seen as primitive and painted in a negative light for the European public. He uses specific examples of important philosophers and sociologists to emphasize the fact that oppression is an inherent part of their ideological structures. One person Jean believes is integral in the process of White supremacist motives being incorporated into modern thought is Hegel. Jean wrote, “Hegel himself described the aboriginal Americans as vanishing at the mere breath of European presence. His stripes on African culture were even harsher: cannibals, traffickers in the sales of their children, primitives (heathens, too) needing the civilized schooling of Western slavery.” (p. 15) The European attempt to understand African culture was a massive failure. Mainstream thought drastically transformed along with the rise of colonies. I suppose it’s easier to support terrible things when there’s widespread propaganda telling the gun-toting majority that the people suffering are less human than they are, especially when the rhetoric is supported by popular philosophers. It’s probably easier not to think about why you have what you have when someone bled for it. And with popular philosophers supporting and creating a rhetoric of White superiority.

Paintings like Her Mistress’s Clothes by an anonymous artist in 1815 effectively boil down the apparent agenda of White supremacy. In this painting is a woman standing in front of the mirror with a menacing hand clutching the face of her Black servant. The Black woman is wearing an ill fitting necklace with flowers, her White dress is pearly  compared to her skin. Her face is flattened and compressed, her hair is done in the same style as her Mistress – a cheap, thinning version at least. The comparison one’s mind makes when looking at this painting is jarring; the emanating quality of the White woman’s skin dominates the photograph. The woman is holding her servant’s head in place in front of what I can assume is a mirror. It’s a dialogue – she’s telling her servant to look at herself while she’s submerged in the Western in that moment. She’s telling her that in order to be beautiful her servant must look and dress like her, something truly unattainable.

The message of White superiority is blatant. The body of a Black woman has been controversial since the conception of this country and has been distorted and skewed under the White male gaze. Our bodies are not seen as beautiful or valuable, but rather as an instrument for pleasure. Our bodies are not seen as strong regardless of the fact that the prosperous life White Americans revel in would not be possible without our sweat and our blood. Here you see the Black woman’s body displayed by a White woman as flawed, only acceptable because of her temporary subscription to Western dress.

Another point of tension between Africans and Europeans were their drastic differences religious practice. In The French Encounter with Africans, Cohen explains, “The Africans’ animism piqued Europeans’ interest, as perhaps their most prominent feature next to coloring.” (p. 15) Missionaries attempted to transform Africans into Christian but weren’t met with great success. The association with Africans and Blackness to hedonism were deepened using Biblical morality. Cohen writes, “… After 1700 Africans were depicted as responsible for their lack of Christianity, a conclusion due, it was said, to their moral failings and to their bestiality.” (p. 17) The African failure to complacently conform to European Christian morals made them sinners.

While the demonization of Black people and Black culture insisted, the fetishization of non-Western culture grew and flourished. The relics which were once used as evidence against African humanity are now being sold in Sotheby’s catalogues for hundreds of thousands of euros. Europeans can appreciate what Black people create (for example: our art, our music, the United States of America,) however when it comes to us as people there are moralistic differences which have greatly hindered unity.

Cette tête commémorative royale, Edo, Royaume de Bénin is item 109 in Sotheby’s Art Africain et Océan which is a catalogue of two patron’s personal collections. They describe the statue, “Cette tête représente un oba, indentifié par la couronne royale, le bandeau frontal et le très haut collier à 28 rangs composé de perles de corail. Chaque côte de la téte est orné d’un motif en forme d’ailette, au born ajouré. Le visage présente des traits naturalistes travaillés aves une très grande finesse, les sourcils signifiés par des hachures réguliéres, de trés fines cercles gravés sous les yeux dont ils suivant la ligne courbe, le front orné du motif classique de triple scarifications.” (p. 26) But what they’re failing to mention when regaling all of the ways which art historians deduce the meaning of these ancient pieces of art  is how these pieces of art were procured. What they’re failing to mention is that the selling of sacred art of another culture, specifically Black culture, that has been demonized and degraded they are further perpetuating the idea that our culture is valueless. These pieces of art were not made necessarily for Western consumption and yet Europeans insist on placing value on our art as opposed to our livelihood. This phenomenon in and of itself is evocative of the dehumanization of Black people and how only valued for our usefulness.

The representation of Black people in Western art and in the media has rarely shown our true colors. There is no exploration of our depth, only our fetishized backgrounds and the disfiguring of our identities. However, while the Western world has created this depiction of us which is simply offensive and wrong, it’s caused Black people to create a counter narrative. Now, this narrative may be ignored by Western media, but it’s still alive. We are actively trying to reshape our image and prove that we are more than slaves in their mistress’s clothes.