Aries and Hou and Black Enough

I always thought I was black.

Bullied for my fair skin, "good" hair, and inability to become sufficiently ashy, as a child I ardently defended my right to call myself black. My more richly hued "friends" and family insisted my black wasn't really black because my light-skinned complexion would have earned me a coveted spot in the master's house. It seemed as if they believed my lack of pigmentation were some magical shield against racism. I fought back with the horrors of being a "house nigger" during slavery, an outcast during the civil rights movement, and an outsider even today. Still, more often than not, I walked away from those debates feeling like I didn't belong in my own body. I didn't feel like I belonged any where.

I was black once, though.

At a small cafe in rural Texas, at the age of twenty-three, I learned for the first time what it was like to be hated for the color of my skin. This "white racism" was different from my experiences with black people who somehow missed the irony in shaming me for not being darker. These complete strangers hated me. They stared me down until I truly feared for my life. Their hatred rolled off of them in waves, and I drowned in it. A piece of me died that day; a piece I never even knew existed until I watched it succumb to a flood of rage I still don't understand, more than a decade later.

I'm black enough now.

With age comes perspective. I can see now why there are black people who don't think I understand what it truly means to be black. They weren't there with me that day in Bandera, Texas. They don't know what I saw, what I felt. And yet, for many of them, that kind of racism can happen any where. It happens every where. But I've had the luxury of living hatred-free every day before, and every day since I left that red-neck, podunk, backwoods town behind me. So, the way I figure it, I'm black enough; black enough to understand what it means to be black in America even if I may not have to suffer the indignity of racism every day. And I understand that, for some, I will never be black enough. I'll never be enough of anything for those people. Still, in a way, they're right. Well, they're half-right.

The fact of the matter is, I'm black and white.

Being bi-racial is a different experience than being black. For me, it's been a lot like being Mexican. I look Hispanic, I know. Being from California, a state with a large Mexican population, it's an easy assumption to make. I also spent a few years being Portuguese in Hawaii. I don't think I've ever even met a Portuguese person but, apparently, I bare a resemblance. In the years since I left Oahu, I've been Hawaiian a few times too. It seems my race has always been a matter of how people treated me, instead of a culture to which I belonged. I still don't belong any where. I identify more with my astrological sign, even the Chinese Zodiac, more than I do with my race. Still, knowing who I am has brought me a long way toward being comfortable in my own skin, no matter what color it happens to be.