Posted on 08/02/2013 9:12:24 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A photo of the author
On the day of college graduation, I told my friends and family the news: I was leaving the country I had lived in since childhood.
“I just need a change,” I told them, but they knew there was more. Was it some romance gone awry, they wondered? Some impulsive response to a broken heart? And I was running from heartbreak. My relationship with the United States of America is the most tumultuous relationship I have ever had, and it ended with the heart-rending realization that a country I loved and believed in did not love me back.
Back in the ’90s, my mother brought me from our home in the Caribbean islands to the U.S., along with my brother and sister. I was 4 years old. She worked as a live-in nanny for two years, playing mommy for white kids whose parents had better things to do. She took trips to the Hamptons and even flew on a private jet to California as “the help.” My mom didn’t believe that nanny meant maid, but she did whatever was asked of her, because she was thirsty. She had a thirst that could only be quenched by the American dream. One day, she thought, her children would be educated. One day, they might have nannies of their own.
That was our path. Get a “good education.” When the neighborhoods with quality schools became too expensive for my mom to afford as a single parent with three kids, we traversed the United States with GreatSchools.net as our compass. New Jersey, elementary school: decent, mostly Hispanic school, even though my gifted and talented program was predominantly Indian. Texas, middle school: “Found a great school for you guys,” my mom said while rain poured into our car through the open windows where the straps of our mattresses were tied down. It had an “A” grade and was 70 percent white. Florida, high school: “Hey, Tiffanie, you should have this egg. It’s the only brown one like you!” my classmate told me during AP biology. Philadelphia, Hawaii, North, South, East, West. Car, U-Haul, Greyhound, plane, train. New York City, private university: “I really want to write an essay on being the gentrifier,” one courageous young man pitched in a journalism class. I was one of only two people who were disturbed.
For a long time I survived by covering myself in the labels I’d accumulated over the years. I plastered each one to my body with super glue as if they were Post-It note reminders that I was someone. Sports fanatic (hot pink). Feminist, beautiful, writer, comedian, fashionista, friend (fuchsia, yellow, blue, purple, red, green). I hid behind them; they were my only shields.
Green covered my eyes when a childhood friend’s family banged down my front door and demanded their daughter get out of the house full of blacks. Blue protected my heart when my black peers ostracized my enjoyment of complete, complex sentences. Yellow blocked my ears when whispers floated through the air at my ex-white-American boyfriend’s home like haunted ghosts: I can’t believe he is dating a black girl. The words passed like a gentle breeze barely creating flutter.
I existed right there on the fringe of ugly, ignorant and uncultured. Black but not black enough for my positive attributes to be justified. “Where are you from?” potential dates asked when they met me. “I am from Trinidad and Tobago,” I said. “Oh, that’s why you are so beautiful and exotic — I knew you couldn’t be all black.”
“Black people don’t really know how to swim,” my co-worker once told me when I worked as a swim instructor at my neighborhood’s pool. “What about me?” I asked. “Oh, you aren’t black. You’re from Trinidad,” she said.
“The black children don’t like to read very much,” I overheard one librarian discussing with another while I sat down reading a book a couple feet away. They passed right by me with smiles.
I was the model minority — absent, yet present. The yardstick to which other minorities were measured. If I could finish high school and college, why couldn’t so many African-American people find their way out of their hoods and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If I could speak English without using a single ebonic slang, why do others call themselves “niggas”? If I managed to make it through 23 years without contracting an STD or getting pregnant, why do black women have the highest statistical risk of disease and teenage motherhood? Daddy America looked to me to prove that he did something right. After all, one of his children turned out all right. The others must simply be problem kids.
I survived because I was never able to make America my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments. No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,” “rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of emptiness.
In that empty, dark space I found my blackness. I stripped myself of the labels, painfully peeling them off one by one. Beneath them there is a wounded, disfigured colored woman who refuses to be faceless anymore, remain hidden any longer. My face may be repulsive to some since it bears proof that race continues to be a problem.
Still, I count myself lucky. Where my open cuts remain, eventually scars will take their place and those scars will fade with time. For many, their wounds will never heal. Gunshots bore coin-size holes into their chests that will never close. Their chained wrists and ankles will continue to bruise. Their minds have collapsed under the weight of a failed education system.
I was already back in Trinidad and Tobago when the Trayvon Martin verdict came down last week. I wasn’t surprised, but I was speechless. My hope is that it will force Americans to reexamine their “post-racial” beliefs. A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “You made the right choice.” I think I did, too.
I have found freedom by leaving the land of the free.
I will buy her a ticket to Saudi Arabia... one way.
LLS
I’d tell her to not hold her hand on her ass waiting for THAT to happen.
In my lifetime I have known, have worked with a number of first class human beings who happened to be black. When with them you wouldn’t even see color.
But the black community, as a community, has become much lesser than they used to be. Perhaps it’s urbanization, I don’t know, but with the break up of families, the 72% child birth to unwed mothers, the criminal mind-set, their victimization mentality, etc., I don’t feel as comfortable around many of them as I once did. I wish it it was not so.
Her problems come from being liberal: atheist, sexually permissive, contemptuous, intellectually arrogant/stupid, and on some as yet undetermined level, mentally ill. My money is on some kind of sexual conflict.
They already tried that in Liberia. Just like the rest of their history they could not make a go of it there either.
I teach at a Christian prep school.
Our minority population is about 20%.
I also taught in public school, so I know what makes the difference, no matter the race:
1) Strong Biblical Christian families
2) INTACT families
Wow, another racist demagogue purports psychic abilities (mindreading, gift of prophecy) and blames other people for her own racism.
Five scary charts and facts about who’s working and not working in this economy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3050649/posts
Black Unemployment Rate Closer to 37.9%
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3050611/posts
President Obama Versus President Everyone Else
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3050641/posts
Surprise! The presidency actually requires some skills
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3050617/posts
It continually surprises me how much the sheltered youth of America don’t know. And this article makes my point.
I guess my world travels, some 30 plus countries, has overexposed me.
While I agree that we have problems at multiple levels on multiple issues our Republic has a much better chance of solving them than almost any other nation.
So, I have two questions for America’s disgruntled youth:
First, what are you going to do, personally, to solve the problems you find so intolerable? Having a temper tantrum and running away because you didn’t get your way don’t count.
Second, and where do you think you are going to find a better deal at your age?
“The melodrama, ignorance, tribalism, and racism of the black community over the Trayvon matter is the most pathetic thing I may have seen in my life.”
Reminds me of the old Tarzan flicks.
Native sneaks into a camp of white hunters. Murders someone while trying to steel a trinket, gets themselves shot in the process so the whole tribe attacks the white hunters camp.
Tarzan has to send in the elephants to step on the tribe.
Got to hand it to Tarzan.
Crude but effective.
Let me explain something to you, you damned silly cow: Once you leave America you won’t have any one to bash or grovel in self pity over. WTF are you going to think or write about then?
I defy any honest white person, I especially defy the liberal apologists to walk into a black urban neighborhood today and not feel the “apprehension meter” begin to spike. This is not racist; this is common sense. Those are the places where crime runs rampant, where there exists a culture of victimization and resentment for not receiving “40 acres and a mule,” where frustration turns to anger at living on the outside of society looking in, a frustration perpetuated by the chronic droning of race hustlers who liken life in America 2013 with Jim Crow and lynchings. Young black men in these communities (and some of the young women, as well) have been conditioned to strike out instead of how to figure out how to improve their lot.
Heck, you don’t even have to go into a black neighborhood for this. Walk past a group of young black teens sporting the angled baseball hat, the “wife beater” t-shirt, the sagging pants with the plaid boxers poking out the back, the $200 Nike’s, the gold—walk past these folks and I dare you, I DARE you, make eye contact (for just a moment, nothing sinister, just look) and see what comes your way.
I have not traveled the world, but I have heard that same thing many who have. The one I recall the most is a black women who was in the Air Force. She apparently had a culture shock to find out what real racism is and that American "racism" was something other countries should strive for.
Nah, Liberia.
Oh, she graduated from the New School? That explains a lot. Now I know that she probably wrote this piece to please the white leftists who would have been her main experience there. She has included all the right tropes, metaphors, and self-obsessed melodrama to make them happy.
Attitude is the problem, race is the excuse.
Have you noticed that all of the places in the US she went to, except Texas, are liberal strongholds? Even Florida has become a blue state since I moved out, alas. Maybe she would have felt better about us if she spent more time in “Flyover Country,” and less time around “Progressives of Pallor.”
Three children in this family and she never mentions a father? How does that happen?
Oh yeah we know!
Adios honey.
Yeah, the piece is clearly a result of white liberal conditioning. The corny self-obsessed metaphor about sticky notes really can’t be explained otherwise.
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