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.
vaffanculo Tiffanie.
For our Italian speaking friends you know what I just said.
After traveling the world several times over I laugh every time some idiot tries to tell me America is racist. Boofreakinhoo.
I hear the making of a country song. You just can't say 'country' in a country song, that would be redundant, say instead 'woman'.
She needs to kiss my A$$. If she’s looking for respect, you have to earn that...
Touche!!
The only good things I can say about this writer is that she is a pretty good writer...and she put her money where her mouth is...and left this horrible country. The one that gave her an education.
Help the Sudan. Go where you are most needed. Now.
Think she will vote absentee? Her ilk will vote 5 or 6 times for her. Bet her mom could kick her in the ass. All that work for a spoiled brat to leave.
.
.
"Just as soon as I can find one....."
This image makes more sense than this screed....
“She should go to Egypt”
________________________________
No, she should move to Kenya, home of her faux messiah.
I’m seriously questioning some of the racist acts against her. Don’t sound realistic. Gives some names tiffanie. If those events were so traumatizing to you then sure you could remember some of these people. Surely you didn’t make these up, did you?
"yada, Yada, Love Ya...There.. sincere enough for you? Bye"
Funny that she identifies with Black Americans even though they in her owns words, ostracized her.
Bless her heart, Tiffany wants to be a .... VICTIM!
She’s not black enough in her own mind.
Shame on us Americans.
She was accepted, but her ebonic speaking, unwed, welfare sistahs and hoodie, gangsta brethren were not.
when you are part of a culture that believes that beat downs on whites by gangs of blacks - or even one black - are totally fine, and black flash mobs stealing and breaking stuff and stealing things is just part of the entitlements for having dark skin,
why do you find it so hard to understand why America doesn’t “love” you?
Miseducated, ending up being confused.
“A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “You made the right choice.” I think I did, too. “
Was that FB friend Trayvon’s dad?
There was some of that, but most of her commentary was whining about self-selected recollections of bad, largely racist, things done to her in her young lifetime in America. She strikes me as completely unappreciative of what others have done for her: her mother who no doubt sacrificed greatly for her education, and pointedly unnamed teachers along the way who lent her a helping hand. She has the gall to pick out a few "racist" events, very mild ones, in her short life, and paint America as evil as a result.
She is not completely responsible for her selfishness. The socialist mindset in America's schools taught her to carry a chip on her shoulder. Obama was given all the advantages as well. He chose to resolve his "conflicted sociology" by becoming more black than the blacks, though not black himself. He became more radical than the radicals, etc. This gave him street cred and allowed him to Mau Mau honky, which continues to be his MO. This is a tough act for a white Arab!
This young lady needs to make the right choice and emphasize the positives, not the negatives. The left wants her to take the Obama route and whine on Salon. If it's not too late, she needs to do a 180 and get out of that mode. She's smart, so there is still a chance, however small.
Me too. I knew many girls from Trinidad and Tobago. They were indeed very pretty and worked hard in school. Funny that a smart girl such as this writer could draw such an erroneous conclusion based on her experience. Most of her problems seem to come from her not being a stereotype. That should make her happy, but instead she resents that there is a stereotype and that people don’t see her as one. Being raised in America, she will soon find that T AND T is like every other place in the world — full of stereotypes. The stereotypes may differ from place to place, but they exist all the same.
FYI
*chuckle*
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.