Ta-Nehisi Coates on the “not black enough” phenomena:
When Obama himself asserted that a kids in black neighborhoods who read are assailed as “acting white” it really annoyed me–mostly because I’ve been that kid all my life, known kids like that all my life, and I’d never heard anything like that. I certainly heard “nerd” a lot, but not “acting white.” I still think that it’s a really sloppy formulation, but I also think that it’s worth taking some care in judging other black people’s experience through your own.
The fact is that while I read a ton, and got teased for it, I lived in the neighborhood and talked like people in the neighborhood. I was in gifted classes at school, but I didn’t have the kind of parents the penalized for using a word like “irregardless.” Moreover, I was, if not particularly cool, still really well liked. My particular and specific black experience was that as long as you had some familiarity with the language, you pretty much were free to do whatever you wanted. That notion was reinforced when I went off to Howard and met black people from all parts of the globe united under the capstone. But what has become clear to me, is the limits of personal experience–there are black people who had to deal with this coming up, and you can’t simply laugh and say “Well it wasn’t like this for me, so it didn’t happen.” [Emphasis mine]
That sounds about right. In my experience, whether or not you were “acting white” had everything to do with your cultural capital. Among the black kids at my middle school (and high school, to a lesser extent), If you “lived in the neighborhood and talked like people in the neighborhood,” you could do whatever you liked with little scorn or harassment. The “acting white” charge was exclusively reserved for kids like me, whose parents lived in different neighborhoods and who, for whatever reason, sounded more like their white peers.
I’m not exaggerating much when I say that the label was a middle school equivalent of the Mark of Cain. Once you were branded an “oreo,” black life in school was effectively off-limits to you. And at a school where a scant 12 percent of the population was black, this could get pretty lonely. You could adjust by building friendships among the (geeky) white kids, but that would only exacerbate the problem, as your association with white kids was taken as prima facie evidence that you had no interest in “being black” (of course, this wasn’t a problem if you were part of the tribe, so to speak).
I still don’t have a great grasp on why this happened. Given that it mostly calmed down by the middle of high school, my best guess is that it was your standard bullying and exclusion, with a racial tinge. Still, speaking from experience, it is incredibly lonely to spend your middle school years rejected by the people who are “supposed” to be on your team, whatever that means. To be sure, this isn’t particular to black people; I’ve heard of similar things happening to kids at schools with small Hispanic or Asian populations, and it sucks all the same.
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