Negotiating Racial Spaces, Part One

For those of you who do not know, I've grown up as a biracial man in predominantly white spaces. This is not recent news to me and this is hardly the first time I've thought about it. However, what I am realizing now is how profoundly that has shaped my self identity and my existence as a man of color. My childhood, my adolescence, and most of my young adulthood have taken place in predominantly white environments. I was unaware of my own internalized racism as a result of this upbringing until a few years ago. Until my recent experience working with City Year DC in an environment that was not predominantly white, I had no clue that my definition of myself only existed in white spaces.

In City Year, I was assigned to work at a school in Southeast DC with 99% black students. My team was the picture-perfect example of diversity (there were nine of us: four of us were black, four of us were white, and one of us was me), so for the first time in my life I was outside of Whiteville. I had no way of anticipating or even understanding how this would throw my carefully crafted identity into chaos. What I failed to realize until now is that my self image (of which my racial identity plays a large part) cannot remain constant to all environments.

Now, I am fully aware that I am far from the first to understand this fact. Code-switching exists for a reason. People of color have long been aware of the necessity of adapting their mannerisms and ways of being to different (read: white) spaces. Many are aware of the white-supremacist devaluing of their nonwhite ways of being and they learn to work around it. These people change their behavior to allow for white validation of not only their actions, but also their beings. This is not to suggest that all POC who code-switch do so because they want white validation. Many do so out of necessity. This is one area where code-switching POC and I differ.

I have long sought the validation of white people, since they comprised the majority of my peer circle growing up. For many many years, I sought to be white and act white and be read as essentially white. To me, only the tone of my skin separated me from all of my white friends. These are the years where my internalized racism came through strongest as I sought to distance myself from other POC. Of course, this was a plan doomed to failure. No matter how I struggled, my mostly white friends saw me differently than I saw myself. This disconnect shaped social interactions akin to swimming upstream, as my sense of self-worth always has relied on how others viewed me. Finally, in college, I found some peace of mind in finally coming to understand myself and the nature of white supremacy. While this was hardly a pleasant revelation, locating some explanation for my frequent difficulties with myself and my race was a breath of fresh air after many years holding it in underwater. I was able to have a reckoning with myself and my (white) surroundings, and I developed a solid sense of self-definition as a biracial man for the first time in my life.

Thus I came to City Year with a perfectly solid sense of self that could only ever be maintained in a white context; my racial naivete was the perfect setup for more of that good old upstream swimming.

Hello Again! A Re-Introduction (You can call it a comeback if you want)

Hello hypothetical readers,
It's me again! I took a long hiatus from this blog (part of which was due to a failed attempt at vlogging and most of which was due to City Year) and I really miss writing. I want to write more and I feel a powerful need to express myself in ways that I cannot or do not in person, so I am going to start posting again. My first post will be a trilogy about race and my experiences in different racial environments. The first shall address mostly my life up until City Year, the second shall cover my experiences with City Year, and the third shall deal with my return to one of the most formative spaces of my childhood in my summer drama camp.

Enjoy reading!