If you didn't watch the Presidential Debate on Sunday, or perhaps you live under a rock, let me frame my following remarks for you with a quote from the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump:
“I’m going to help the African-Americans. I’m going to help the Latinos, Hispanics. I am going to help the inner cities. [Hillary Clinton] has done a terrible job for the African-Americans.”
Yikes. Where to start with that doozy of a response? Let's start with the part that interests me the most. "The African-Americans." Grammatically speaking, saying the African-Americans implies that there's only one type of African-American, right? Double yikes. Next up, "the inner cities." So, only Latina, Hispanics, and African-Americans can live in inner cities? Triple yikes.
But, so what, right? What does that mean to me?
To me, that means being thirteen and told that I wasn't black enough to hang out with the other little girls at school. To me, that means struggling to force my tongue and my lips to form and pronounce words in a way that was foreign and difficult to me, because I'm a black girl. This is how I'm supposed to be. This is how all black girls are supposed to be. To me, this means trying my hardest to dampen down the intellect that was too white to get me black friends, while I struggled to prove to all of my white friends that I was still good enough to hang out with them, because I wasn't like "them" — I wasn't like the other black kids. Because there actually was an "us" and a "them", among people who were supposed to be just like me. There was a good kind of black person and a bad kind of black person. While my brand news eyes were still trying to learn the world, and me, and myself in this world, I was being told that I had to choose, to pledge allegiance to the image of blackness, as it had been demonstrated to me, or the image of goodness, as it had been demonstrated to me — in terms of whiteness.
I barely knew who I was or who I wanted to be, and I was forced to choose a side. I had to become "The African-American" that Mr. Trump speaks of today so that I could still feel like I was black. I had to force myself to be a representation of a foreign image, to be someone else. Because there was only one type of black person, it was all or nothing. I trained myself to resent parts of me, and made decisions I wasn't proud of. Because I had to be "The African-American" in order to just be me, a little black girl who just wanted to succeed, and have her parents say they're proud of her.
The tears that burn in my eyes right now are not bitter. I weep with joy over the fact that I have come to love every single little bit of me because all of those things make me an African-American, a black girl. A black girl who is proud to be just that. The blood in the veins of my people is full of struggle and strength, heart and hardship, love and loss, forgotten wounds and fortitude, and although we are unified by our experience of this America, we can never be just one type, one entity.
We are many, we are diverse, we are powerful, and we are here. We are here, we are here.
We. Are. Here.
You cannot ignore us, and you cannot oversimplify us. Just because the only way that you can understand my people and our culture is through grouping us all together with basic, thoughtless language, Mr. Trump, doesn't mean that we are one uniform, single person to be referred to as an inner-city dweller, or a problem to be solved.
