Dear Friends, I've Been Black For a While Now...
and I am subject to change
Dear Friends,
You haven’t heard from me in a while because I needed some solitude “pounding along roads” open air etc.1 I planned in November, then in December, and in January too to write a gripping Substack about my life so far. Welp! *ish got real and as always I had my thoroughest girls with me (shout out Adwoa and Little), so naturally I continue to thrive!2
I am in the full swing of my first year PhD program, I am having the best time even though stress and life’s indifferences persist. All of last year I worked on a very exciting project with the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre here in Kingston and I am proud to say I will have something very exciting to share with y’all soon! I have also been learning how to swim this winter and as of yesterday I can, for the most part, splash about in the deep end. Your girl had a life jacket on and panicked a few good times, but eh! I did IT.
For the past few months, as hinted in my last Substack, I have been thinking a lot more deeply about lip service activism and many a broken promise of progress. More recently, I have been thinking about the role/trope of the “black friend.” This week, I meditate on Adrian Piper’s apt and forever timely work Calling Cards (1986) and Pat Parker’s poem “For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend” (1978).
Hopefully yours,
Ol’ Sister Killjoy 🌟
I live in Kingston, Ontario. It’s a small city and it is, as of 2021, 82.4% white. I live in a small city, 82.4% white and I am an unambiguous Black woman. Safe to say, it is alienating and at times soul crushing to walk into a store that has the “Hate Has No Home Here” sign on their window and have multiple staff members follow you and watch you. To go get groceries and have someone stand behind you and rearrange things on the scale to make sure you don’t make off with $4 worth of apples and maybe a pint of milk. To constantly be on edge, hypervigilant, even when your ass is at home. To never feel safe and be told you are paranoid/overreacting etc. This is my reality, day in, day out, and not just in Kingston. I rant to my family and we always end on the note of “same ol’ shit, different day.”
When my supervisor showed me Adrian Piper’s Calling Cards – in particular– the one that is titled (I am black) I was like holyshit! I need this! I want this! And maybe I should/will make something like this to leave at all these anti-racist establishments. The lines that resonate with me are : “I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort that your racism is causing me.” When I read this card and held it (my prof. has one), small and perfect, I didn’t feel that heat rush of alienation of self deprivation, I felt, and still feel relief. These calling cards of course reminded me of Pat Parker’s poem, written a few years before Piper’s calling cards were made, “For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend.”
I have, for a while now, been Black.3 And almost all of my waking life has been lived in predominantly white spaces. So…I have been “the black friend” almost all of my waking life. The friend people have around for the flavour (O.G DEI pizazz!)–mute and mutable at will– a palate cleanser for a tongue too lashed and dripping with masticated ideas of supremacy and majority importance. After a while you forget who you are, you forget how to take up space, to allow yourself to make mistakes. You resist being your Black self. Sooner rather than later, the mask of the silent personable token sticks.
You/I
lose/lost
your/my mind.
Parker starts her poem with the instruction:
“The first thing you do is to forget that I'm black.
Second, you must never forget that I'm black.”4
I couldn’t agree more. One thing that non-Black people are going to let you know is that you’re Black but not like that, more of an “oreo,” a yummy but empty treat. Oh! and also that “they don’t have a racist bone” and that they are, in fact/a strong strenuous fact, “colour blind.” It’s a bit of a doozy, but ultimately the role of “the black friend” requires that you also forget you are black and NEVER forget that you are BLACK.
The resulting reality is that you/I become a schizoid of dissonant identities that spin and twirl, dizzy with the will to please. You/I, we become distracted and unable to hold steadfast to any unique and expansive views of Blackness outside the one that has been eagerly assigned to us. Here we are, at the end:
“... if you really want to be my friend -- don't
make a labor of it. I'm lazy. Remember.”
from the diary of Virginia Woolf, I forget which one.
from “‘03 Bonnie and Clyde” by Jay-Z and Beyoncé.
This is a Bernie Mac reference from his many comedy routines lol
From Movement in Black by Pat Parker. Copyright(c) 1978 by Pat Parker. https://condor.depaul.edu/mwilson/multicult/patparker.htm