Am I Black Enough?

“You need more black friends”

What my mom said in passing kept ringing in my head after I hang up the phone. I look around the room and see all my friends. None of them are black. In fact, when I think about all the schools I have been to, most of the time they were not black. Octavia, Yasmine, Matthew, Tavis, and Faith were the only ones I had and they were all from different schools. The fact that I can count all of the black friends that I have had on one hand for once was making me contemplate everything.

I remember times when I did talk to other black kids and they always made fun of how I talked. The next day, I tried to enunciate my words less to appeal more to the kids but I could not bring myself to. I sounded just like my mother and yet the majority of her friends were black.

At first I thought that I had white friends purely by coincidence. Everytime I had a white group of friends it was because they just so happened to be the first people to talk to me. However, recently I have been second guessing myself. There was always groups of black kids that sat together at lunch. I just never sat with them. Is it just me? Am I just an oreo? Another black white girl? Am I Black Enough?

Just like the title of the song, the meaning of the lyrics are not vague. After asking the listener “Am I Black Enough For You?” , Paul then goes on to say that the community is rising up “one by one until the work is done.” Needless to say the work that needed to be done at the time was easing the tensions between the black and white community. This song was written while the civil rights movement was still fresh and the sense of togetherness was stronger than ever. While the song can be easily seen as a classic especially for the time, I felt that it represents a different time period in African American history. At that time in 1972, it was important to be “unapologetically black” after hundreds of years of facing unequal opportunities.

After listening to songs that described black consciousness from different point of views, I wanted to ask around for everyone opinion on the topic. Unfortunately in my close circle of friends in San Francisco State University, I do not have someone that could offer the opinion on black self-consciousness. So, I reconnected with the members of a group project that I did last semester from the class Black Psychology. I managed to reach two members specifically, Destinee and Maya. Instead of asking if I were black enough, I decided to ask “What makes you black?” I figured that I should ask the community about the criteria to being black.

My first interview was with Destinee, after asking the question, it only took seconds for a reply.

“The only thing you need to be black is to be black. It is that simple.” She went on ruther to say that. “There is no one way to be black. Just love yourself.”

Next, I asked the same question to Maya.

“First of all if you’re black, you’re black. I also think it is about embracing your culture like being aware of history.”

Before coming into this I knew I was not the only one that experienced the same feeling of not being adequate for one’s race because you sound or “act white”. I decided to do research about this phenomena of sounding white and found that this accusation can affect the speaker.

What caught my eye about this article was what the writers describe as the “acting white trap”. This is described as a period in which a person focuses on what it means to be black and it can have a positive or negative experience in one’s life. To me this is a very interesting phrase because I find myself in this trap sometimes. This realization made me mentally highlight all the times I purposefully listened to rap music so I felt “blacker”, or times I would not wear certain clothes because I felt I would look too white. When I think about the measures I took in order to be “blacker”, I realize how irrational that kind of thinking is.

When you look around our community, you see different faces from different backgrounds and with so many shades there is no single way to be black. As obvious as it sounds, and what has been mentioned by Destinee and Maya, the sure way to be black enough is to simply be black. By being yourself and not reinforcing stereotypes can help broaden and change the expectations set for black identity. For example, I have to realize that “talking proper” is black and enjoying a Bee Gees record does not make me any less black. For some it can be tricky to realize this because they are ousted from their own race. But the view of what it means to be black needs to continually evolve. When people assume that all black people are all similar and listen to the same kind of music, speak with ebonics, etc. it can put pressure on individuals to conform to try and act ways that are not truly them and it can also influence the way that black people look at each other. Ultimately, one size does not fit all and I find that to be black is to just be me.

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