What Kind Of Black Person Are You? Part I

On Race, Identity and Relationships. 

 

When I was about 15 years old I started going through a bit of an identity crisis. I was a black girl, going to a predominantly black institution (PBI), and I didn't like almost everything that the other black girls liked. I hated Afrobeats, and could only tolerate it in small amounts. I was not big on Gqom or House or eventually amaPiano. I liked 'sad white girl' music and a lot of alternative indie stuff. For context, I was simultaneously going through a pick me crisis but I grew out of that quickly, thank god. 

 

Anyway, I liked Pink Floyd, The Beatles, BRONCHO, Atlas Genius, Tame Impala, Cage The Elephant and so on, you get the gist, liked reading (but not Nora Roberts, Harlen Coben, James Patterson etc, think more Lev Grossman, Neil Stephenson, Neill Gaiman) and was into stuff like fantasy. I could speak and understand Ndebele, which was the dominant language quite perfectly, but because I have and had anxiety I was too afraid to speak to others in it. As a result, I felt really disconnected from my blackness. I didn't feel like I fit in with the other stereotypically African black people, and sometimes felt a bit other-ed. This was somewhat of a common sentiment amongst black kids who liked Anime (not me), or 'white people music' or any of that other stuff. 

Eventually, I understood that black people are not a monolith, and that blackness is expressed in various different ways, and each expression of our blackness is beautiful. I'm not very sure when I came to be comfortable with my blackness but it definitely came from learning to love and speak my native language more. I had one friend from my first high school, we'll call it St. Dominic's, who I spoke with in Shona almost all the time, and that helped me become more comfortable with that identity. We still message each other from time to time in very traditional Shona, which is good practice. Another thing was, I moved from a PBI at the end of my O Levels to a real white people stronghold. We will call this school Gorilla Club, and if you make this an acronym, you'll know which school I'm talking about. If you know anything about Zimbabwean private schools, Trust and ATS schools more specifically, you know that they are the place where pro-black sentiments go to die.

 

I never much liked St. Dominic's, it restricted one's spirit; was very strict, and had a lot of strange anti-black rules considering that there was only ever one white girl when I went there, and she was a German exchange student who left at the end of the year. The rest of the whites made a dramatic escape when a black headmistress was introduced, long before I got there.

So, January 2020 comes and I enter this new school, excited for the future and my prospects, until I saw the way the white girls related with the black girls and realized I'd jumped from one anti-black hell to another. There was no black spirit at Gorilla Club. At St. Dominic's, regardless of the anti-blackness of the administration, we embraced being black people very fully. We sang gospel hymns like we were in a Pentecostal church, spoke to each other in our native languages, and had all manner of accents, from the deep Ndebele and deep Shona, to the typical British influenced private school accent. We were never self conscious about blackness. I was only conscious of race when I went to places with white people at them. 

 

At Gorilla Club, a lot of the black girls I observed would change their mannerisms when interacting with white people (not their fault for code switching) and in some there was an overt desire to be white. There was not a single interracial friendship where I could say 'these two are meeting each other in the middle culturally', one always had to give up a bit of themselves, and obviously the one who was more influenced by the other would be the negro. Usually when a white person is the one being influenced, like one white man I know, they end up wearing a caricature of blackness, and saying "nigga" a lot. This type of caricaturist culture was very common at another private school, which we will call Peter College. The white kids said nigga a lot, loudly cheered on by their black peers (typically boys), who never saw a problem with fake Shona/Ndebele accents and gross use of the N word. Peter College leaves our story for now, but it will be back soon.

Anyway, many of the white girls at Gorilla Club were coming to school with bags packed full of microaggressions, such as the iconic, "You're not like other black people," to their black friends, or "Why are you people so loud?" Because the environment suited them, that school was built for the purposes of creating a safe heaven for the little white babies after the black savages took over the country and the schools were made public, they could essentially do and say whatever they wanted without repercussions. Everybody had a white influenced accent, even some of the teachers, and what I found really disgusting was black teachers with indigenous surnames having to shorten them or "baby-fy" them to make it easier for white people (who could speak that guttural Afrikaans language) to pronounce. So you see the picture, it was not the best environment to be black. Because of this I became a super negro, I began to absolutely love that I was black, spoke in Shona at every given opportunity, and broke the racist hair rules in whatever capacity I could. I was more determined than ever, to hold fiercely to my identity.

 

Since then, I've had a special relationship with being black, I love history, and have read an obscene amount of books about African history, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and general race relations. I became pretty secure in my identity; I like my sad white girl alternative indie music, but I can also speak two native languages fluently and hold a conversation with my grandfather in Manyika and have fun when I go to the rural areas. While I still struggled with issues to do with my identity, I ran the risk of turning into a coon. A lot of black people who feel as though they don't fit in with other black people, tend to hop skip and jump to "white people get me better" and the infamous statement, "I'm not like other black people." Now, not only do you not fit in with other people, but you are anti-black as well. Now usually people like this end up having a disproportionate amount of white friends, and end up so disconnected from blackness they can't even pronounce their own indigenous names. I know a girl who botched the pronunciation of her own Shona name, said it the way white people who are secretly racist would say it, and to nobody's surprise all her friends are white. I was saved from coon-ness by the fact that I went to a school with no white people, and they had always made me faintly uncomfortable; it might be inherited generational trauma, my grandmother has such terrible memories of the war that she would die if I brought home the descendant of colonisers.

So that we're all on the same page, the definition of a coon I will be using is from 'What Should Black People Do With The Word Coon?' written by Brandon Simeo Starkey: 'Black folk have repurposed coon, transforming it into an interracial slur to castigate a certain type of Black person who betrays the race.'

 

Now, extraordinarily enough, I met someone whose identity issues were incredibly even worse than mine had been. This guy, once told me he kind of believed in reverse racism, until I broke it down for him that it is impossible for black people, who have no systemic power nor prejudice, to be 'racist.' Racism is systemic, not just insults and words. It is the ability to call someone the N word and still get opportunities to succeed. This guy was black, and had a lot of white friends, who rest assured, weren't racist, he was absolutely sure that he had a good vetting system, and could sort the wheat, decent white people, from the chaff, racists. Make of that what you will. 

 

Like myself, he had felt a bit ostracized from his peers, however whereas I ended up understanding that blackness isn't a monolith, and my peers might have other-ed me because I was already other-ing myself and made more efforts to connect with my blackness, he made friends with the people he felt understood him. He did have black friends, but one sometimes got the impression he was more at home with the white ones than the black ones. Like I said in the beginning, black kids tend to speak to each other in vernacular languages, and he couldn't speak them, so that created a barrier. Now something funny happened, where before I had felt like I wasn't black enough, around this man I felt like I was too black. Which was really saying something because I am not a really a super negro like that.

 

As someone who suffered through identity issues, and also has a thing for broken and damaged men, I was determined to help him find his blackness. I was ready to teach him Shona, but he gave up on it quite quickly. I can understand why a lot of people have trouble learning their native languages, there is a fear of being made fun of, for your grammar, you pronunciation etc. But I wasn't going to do these things. After a certain point it becomes your fault, and only your fault that you are so disconnected from your culture. If the people around you are making efforts to include you, and you refuse those efforts...

 

I realised with a lot of black youths who were like this man, they had come from environments where anti-blackness was already prevalent. Certain parents who were alive during the Chimurengas and experienced systemic racism, tend to react the way victims of abuse may react. With guilt. They might feel as though it is by some natural shortcoming of their blackness that they were victims of racism. To make up for this shortcoming, they try their best to become good black people, befriend white people, send their children to activities with white children such that they may benefit from the opportunities. They want to be different from the other black people, who are lazy, greedy, corrupt etc. This is a trauma response. In extreme cases, they actively prevent their children from learning their native languages; they want them as close to whiteness as possible. This wasn't the case with his parents however. On a lesser end, the parents do not actively pursue that their children be bi-lingual, and this results in children who can understand their native languages to a certain extent, but cannot a speak a word of them. 

I am somewhat of an African romanticist, and so I believe it is everybody's duty to be able to speak the language of their ancestors. We should try as best as possible, to avoid identifying with the colonizer's language before our own. It is one's duty to try to connect to their blackness as much as possible, whatever that may look like.

Now, Peter College re-enters our story. This man, or boy rather, went to Peter College, which is as I said before, a stronghold for white kids who perform minstrelsy and wear caricatures of blackness. As an unfortunate result, he, like so many other black boys and men who went to these private schools, had awkward sentiments about the use of the N word from white people. He was against it, and didn't appreciate being called that, but was not so radicalized to cut ties with a non-black person who called him a racial slur. I also realized that black girls were much faster radicalized than black boys, for some reason. His efforts to connect with blackness were quite lackluster, and as a result he just is fighting a continuous battle with understanding blackness.

There are two types of coons that private school in Zimbabwe produce. And if you are uncomfortable with me using the word coon, or feel you might be under attack, I will quote Brandon Simeo Starkey, "We should pressure people not to behave like coons, not pressure Black folk against calling out people whose behaviors meet the definition." There is more danger to yourself, and to other black people, from you being a coon, than from you being called one. The first type of coon is the most typical, black youths who overtly hate other black youths and their own blackness. This was much more common in the boys and men, but a few women were coons too. Typically in males, this guy plays Water-polo, Cricket or Rugby, sometimes Hockey, calls his friends 'bru' and doesn't like black girls. He will happily settle for his white 'brothers' sloppy seconds, and his tail wags like a dog when they scratch his ears and say "You're not like the other blacks bru." We all know these guys. The girls relax their hair, not because it's easier to maintain or a preference, but to mimic their girlfriends' limp hair, and try to pretend they're not hurt when the white boys they have crushes on pretend they don't exist. They shit on other black girls, gladly.

Now the second type of coon, is one who straddles the half and half line of blackness and whiteness. They want to relate to their black peers but can't, and understand blackness in theory but not in practice. Their self hatred is very implicit, so much so they cannot notice it themselves. They are easily taken in by whiteness and European-ness, and have no sense of foundation. They will not bash nor bring down other black people, unlike the other type of coon, but they will also not defend black people if their white comrades are insulting or degrading them. I knew a black guy with white guy friends who openly and confidently would say things about how unattractive they find black women, or would engage in secret relationships with black girls because of a fear of being shamed by their white friends for having 'jungle fever.' This black guy never once spoke up to his friends that they were being racist, and never openly defended black women against such microaggressions. This type of coon, desperately believes in the idea of good white people, and feels no strong kinship with other black people.

In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to feel bound to people of your race simply because of race, but sadly this white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal world of ours doesn't allow that, so even if all your best friends are white, because racism exists and white privilege exists, you will never really be on the same level, unless you escape to the woods and live in a commune.