Untitled: A Story of Ethnic Ambiguity
By Damieka Thomas
“That white girl got a black girl name.”
This is the first thing I hear when my name is called out in tenth grade geometry, and I raise my hand, shyly correcting my teacher’s inevitable mispronunciation of my name. Older white folks don’t know how to say my name, especially now that I live in Kentucky. Their brows wrinkle, tongues turning, unsure as they sputter out “Dam-e-eika.” I always just smile politely and correct, “Dam-ee-ka.” Sometimes they care enough to learn how to pronounce it the right way. Other times they say it wrong all year, but I’ve learned to stop correcting people after a certain point.
It’s not their fault, really. It’s not something they were ever taught in college, this whole figuring out a slightly ethnic name from a piece of paper. It doesn’t help that I was born before Google, and since my mom had only ever heard my name said aloud, she spelled it a bit strangely when they handed her the papers.
I look back at the girl who made the comment about my name. Her ebony skin shines. The girl’s edges are done perfectly, the way my little sister spends hours trying to fix hers in the mirror and tells me I should do mine. Her full lips are painted a brilliant shade of red. She is beautifully and unambiguously black—the way I sometimes wish I was.
I laugh awkwardly at her comment. She turns to her friend, whose wig of long honey-brown hair is immaculately placed atop her head. Her brown shoulders peek through an off-the-shoulder blouse, and her skin glistens the same way as the other girls.’
“She got a black girl laugh, too,” the girl adds in an accusing tone.
Her friend nods in agreement. “She do.” She eyes me suspiciously, and I look down at my paper.
I do not blame them for their suspicion. For centuries, white women have stolen from black culture and profited from it without acknowledgment. I know that my struggle has not been the same as these girls. I know that people do not look at me and automatically see a black woman, and people think that my opinions are more valid because of it. My voice is not too loud or aggressive for white people because I can pass as one of them. My skin will never put a target on my back. I will never know some of the struggles that these women face, and that makes me more sad than angry.
Unaware of the muddled thoughts raging within my head, our extremely white, extremely Southern teacher fumbles their way around this awkward exchange and onto the next person. I don’t tell the girls that I am black, though my silence feels like a denial of sorts. I don’t tell them that my dad probably looks a whole hell of a lot like theirs. Maybe a bit lighter, with sharper cheekbones because of the Native blood in his veins. But still the same afro, the same big lips and wide smile, the same skin that means that people eye him suspiciously in Walmart and we never call the cops for any reason.
I don’t laugh again in geometry class for a few weeks.
* * *
It’s official: racial ambiguity is in. Meghan Markle is a part of the royal family. Mixed-ish is a thing. Rashida Jones—a.k.a. Ann Perkins from Parks and Recreation—is universally acknowledged as beautiful; Leslie Knope has infamously dubbed her a “beautiful, tropical fish.” Ariana Grande is the world’s number one pop star, and though she is Italian, everyone seems to think she is either Latina or mixed. A YouTube video titled “Ariana Grande really, really wants to be mixed” has over 700k views. Wow. A pop star who is worth more than I will ever see in a lifetime wants to be just like me. We’ve really made it, huh? In this video, the YouTuber proposes exactly what the title suggests. Ariana Grande wants to “look like a grown-up North West.”
According to her, this style is very in right now: the bronzed skin with white features, full lips, thick brows, and big butts. All very in style. What a world we’re living in. Women are wasting a fortune in order to attain perfectly bronzed skin. They are filling their lips every six months and getting silicone injected into their asses. Funny how traditionally black features are suddenly popular when white women start paying for them.
In the fifth grade, I remember biting my lips down in hopes that they would shrink after being made fun of by the white girls. I’d lie there late at night and dig my upper teeth into my bottom lip until it bled a little. I don’t know why I thought this would work. I had gotten it into my head that it was the only remedy to my problem. I remember wishing my skin was paler, my eyes lighter. I remember thinking this lack of ambiguity would make my life simpler. Would make me simpler.
I wonder what Ariana Grande looked like back then. Did she look like the girls who bullied me? Pale white with pencil-thin lips and no hips?
It’s crazy how much can change in a decade. Skin color included.
* * *
Rashida Jones may be a beautiful, tropical fish, but she is not immune to the struggles of being mixed. One day, when my little sister and I are hanging out watching videos, I make a Parks and Rec reference.
“You gotta see this video!” my sister says.
She types in a few keywords to YouTube and the video pops up. In it, Rashida is speaking with one of those overly peppy, blond TV announcers.
“Wow, you look very tan. Did you just get off an island?”
There is a familiar look in Rashida’s effervescent eyes. Annoyance, shock, tiredness. She smiles, awkwardly answering, “Oh, you know, I’m ethnic.”
The blond, blue-eyed announcer laughs awkwardly. That’s one way to sum up the whole exchange: awkward.
“Oh, me too!” she announces.
Rashida laughs but doesn’t meet her eyes. I know the feeling.
* * *
My first week in Davis, my roommate asks me the million-dollar question: “What are you?”
I smile patiently, the way I have grown used to doing when approaching this question. I say my age-old mantra: “Black, white, and Native.”
She looks a little confused for a moment, brows furrowing together.
“Yeah, but, like, what do you identify as?”
I don’t know what to say to that. I know I confuse people. I know people tend to categorize me into one or two things, and black usually doesn’t make the list since my features are not “black enough.” But I have never had this question so plainly put. People usually skirt around it. I am unsure of how to respond.
“All of it,” I say.
My roommate looks a little confused. She doesn’t understand that to lose one part of myself would be to deny a whole line of ancestors.
I have been to powwows on the res. I have danced around a warm fire while inhaling crisp mountain air and listening to chants in a language that we lost long ago. I have eaten fry bread that warms me to my core. I have laughed at stories and jokes when the night comes to its close, the smell of the trees and warmth of the fire combined with a full belly lulling me to a state between sleeping and waking.
I have been to cookouts and eaten soul food, danced to rap music, and watched my sister get her weave done. My stepdad says “Nigga, please” in the same way that most fathers say “I love you.” He says it over the barbecue each time my brother, sister, or I do something endearing. He says it when he is annoyed or angry and when he is deliriously happy or excited. My grandma makes sure that we get plenty of fried chicken and piles my plate high with mashed potatoes and collard greens since she knows I’m vegetarian.
I sat on my Great Grandpa Otha’s lap a lot doing my early childhood and listened to his stories about sharecropping in Mississippi and later coming to California, the long arduous journey that once was. He had a thick Southern accent, and he always smelled of lingering sweat from long days working in the yard. How disrespectful would it be to pretend his journey was not also mine?
I have been to white family dinners, eaten fried okra with my Okie family, and listened to Hank Williams records on repeat. I spent half my childhood in my Okie great-great-grandma’s house where she fed me, read me stories, and tucked me into bed. The politics of my white family have been challenging for me at times, but I love them to my core. I cannot deny any of these people. Why do people want me to?
So, when my roommate looks a bit confused, I add, “I can’t choose a side. If people don’t like that, it’s their problem, not mine.”
It makes my first day a little awkward, but it’s worth it.
* * *
My second week working at the library, a man comes up to me. He smells of musk. His white hair is half-balding, and his pot belly sticks straight out like the barrel of a gun, pointed directly at me. I want to move from him, but I continue shelving. From the corner of my eye, I see him smile at me. I pretend I don’t see and hope that it will deter him from speaking. But I have met his kind before. They are not easily deterred. I move down a bit to shelve a new book. He moves with me.
“You working hard?” he asks.
I want to roll my eyes at the clichéd greeting, but instead I smile politely, hoping this interaction will be fast. But they never are. Brevity is not in the nature of men like this.
“Trying to,” I reply quietly.
“Are you from India?” he asks me abruptly.
I shelve a book to a stall.
“No,” I say simply.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
I have grown so sick of this question. It makes me sick. There is always an accusatory air to it. The feeling that I don’t belong. That I stick out like a sore thumb. I am tired of always being nice about my answers. Tired of grinning and playing the game with people who don’t really give a shit anyway.
Lately, I have taken to playing stupid a lot of the time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I haven’t figured out a better response to this incessant interrogation from strangers.
“Live Oak,” I deadpan.
He sighs, frustrated. This approach always frustrates these kinds of men. Apparently, they deserve a straight answer. It’s their birthright.
“No,” he says. “Like culturally?”
I don’t feel as though I owe him an answer, so I just say, “I’m mixed.” He can do with that what he will.
He looks offended that I am not cooperating. That I’m not smiling and blushing like a lady. As though I should be flattered by this. Or maybe I should whip out my fucking Ancestry DNA test results and give him a play-by-play. Much to his chagrin, I do neither. I just keep shelving books.
“You know, that was a compliment,” he says defensively. “Indian women are the most beautiful women in the world. You’re very exotic looking.”
I clench my jaw. I want to tell him that fish are fucking exotic, not people. But I don’t. I just look at him for a moment. I look at the thinning, dandruff-filled hair, the watery blue eyes, the pot belly. I’m done with my cart of books. I force a small smile that I’m sure doesn’t meet my eyes.
“Thank you,” I tell him through gritted teeth.
He smiles back, self-satisfied that I have apparently accepted the compliment he has so graciously bestowed on me.
I want to punch the smile off his face. I want to tell him to fuck off, that this is not a compliment, and to stop bothering young women he finds “exotic.” I want to tell him that he is creepy, and he smells like a dusty attic. I do none of this. Instead, I quickly push my cart away.
Later, I tell my coworker the story of the creepy old man. It’s a tale as old as time, one all women are intimately familiar with. We laugh about it.
* * *
All these small things pile one on top of the other. The surprised eyebrow raise after you say your dad is black. The side-eye from across the room.
All of these things weigh heavy on the bones.
The brain forgets but the bones remember. There is a heaviness that wasn’t there before.
The cop that pulls over your stepdad. He was driving a car that he wasn’t covered on under your mother’s insurance. The cop makes you get out of the car. He impounds it. The fee increases $300 a day. He says that you, your little sister, and your stepdad must walk from the highway into town. He will not give you a ride. Your stepdad has to call your mom to pick you up from the cold New York highway, and you stand there shivering for nearly an hour before she can make it to you. Later, your friend tells you that her dad got into trouble for something similar a few months ago. The cop gave him a slap on the wrist. You don’t wonder what the difference was. The bones know. They always know.
Your uncle goes to prison and becomes involved with a white nationalist gang. When he gets out, he calls your mother a “nigger lover.” When he comes to his senses a few years later, he offers a half-hearted “sorry.” You try to move on, but the bones remember. You no longer talk.
Every kid who told you that your dad looked like a monkey. Every schoolyard game of cowboys and Indians where you were the Indian who was only good dead. Every white woman who injects herself in the hope that she will find your rhythm without ever having to acknowledge your blues. Every man who said you were “exotic” as a compliment. Every man who asked you where you were from as if it was his right to know. Every time you said nothing.
The woman who told your sister, “I would not have let you in my house if I knew you were black.” The call your mother received at her apartment from a white neighbor threatening her, calling her a “nigger-loving bitch” who was “bringing too many blacks into the apartment complex.” The man who told you that he loved Indian women, and when you tried to avoid him, he laughed, the sound of a colonizer conquering an indigenous body. He told you that you should be complimented. Every person who wanted you to choose a side, as though the blood flowing through your veins could shift and become one. You laugh these things off as just a part of life, as an unfortunate result of living in the in-between.
But the bones remember. The weight has become so sagging that you fear your back may break from carrying it from one place to another.
How can a body so small carry so much weight? There is not enough room for it all.
Still, I carry it to bed with me at night. This weight. I wrap my arms around it and cradle it like a baby. I soothe its cries. I shush it until we both manage to slip into fitful sleep.
When I awake the next morning, my bones are still tired.
Damieka Thomas
6/3/2020
I wrote this piece in my lower division nonfiction writing class during Fall 2019. That was my first quarter as a transfer student at UC Davis, and being in a whole new environment with lots of alone time gave me the space I needed to engage with and understand my identity as a mixed race woman of color. This piece had been growing inside of me for twenty-one years prior to the actual writing of it, and I know there are still vital pieces of my story and the generational trauma in my family that I am just beginning to uncover. It was one of the most difficult things that I have ever had to write, but I feel much more free for having written and released it into the world. I would also like to acknowledge that as a mixed-race, white-passing woman, I have privilege in my community. Most of the racism that I have experienced has been somewhat tangential, and comes from having dark-skinned family members. As such, I have benefited from colonialism and colorism. I am still learning, and I am still unlearning.
Please read this rarely publicized story from Damieka’s community:
