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.
you know it’s intereting that she nver took the time to answer her own questions about her culture. why is it that she can speak english yet most blacks don’t seem able to? why is it that most blacks don’t like to read? why is it that studying and getting good grades is regarded by most blacksas “being white”? why is it that black on black crime is enormously out of control? but the only crimes blacks ever seem to get worked up about is when it is, or spun to be, white on black crime? why is it that black on white crime is far more prevalent than white on black crime but that never gets the same coverage or outrage by blacks, or politicians, or the race-baiters? why is it that the norm in the black community is out of wedlock births, no dad around, and the woman having kids from multiple men, none of whom are around?
why not ask those tough questions.
She seems confused about a lot of things.
The same kind of whining, self-obsessed writing is found all over that article, too. Thanks for posting.
Well, grrrrl, unless you renounce US citizenship, be prepared to be hounded by the IRS for the rest of your life!
She sure sounds like an ungrateful ho. She comes to America to get an education. She gets one that was more than likely paid for by "creepy ass crackas" and then she whines about how bad America is. She can KMA. The ungrateful ho should not be allowed back in this country. America would be a better place without her being here. She's a race baiting whiner. We've already got enough of those.
“Why not ask those questions?”
Because then she might have to confront the fact that a lot of the fault lies within the community. Although that could be a good story..she doesn’t feel it will fit the current narrative.
I’m hoping she is just young and searching for Utopia. When she finds out there is no such thing...she is smart enough, hopefully, to do some good. (I’m in my optimistic mood tonight,)
‘As a black, I’m tired of loving a country that can’t love me back.’
She’s a poet. She don’t know it. But her feet show it.
Steel drum Longfellow. Hitcha, splitcha. Huevos rancheros baby!
exactly
Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries."
Predictably, this (rather embittered) expatriate does not see the George Zimmermann as trial for what it really was--i.e. a trial of an individual--but rather, as an emblem for some Big Picture story, such as race relations in America...
I wonder how she'd like living under Sharia Law? Not that Muslims aren't warm, cuddly people. Oh, yes, the Muslim population has grown since 1990, Ms Drayton.
I think it’s a shame that she is not down on her knees thanking her mother for everything she did to see that this girl had these chances to be somebody and she threw her mother under the bus. After all, she was just a ‘maid’. How denigrating.
It reminds me of the movie, “Imitation of Life”.
Bet she skipped out on her college loans.
Haiti is closer.
Is that a zit on her nose?
No, I believe it’s a diamond nose stud or whatever they call it.
Well, this little ‘Tiffanie’ job young’n piece of crap can return to this..(grabs crotch), and she can ‘hit the bricks toots’.....for a long time. Don’t let the swingin’ door slap ya on your fat ass on the way out of America either you little chippie bitch..
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