Our Oldest Family Recipe
Anti-Blackness is my oldest family recipe. Tucked away amongst the Adobo, coriander, and turmeric paste, it sat in the crook of our spice cabinet. I watched my father whisk its amorphous contents into the cast iron skillet on Sunday mornings; he’d fold it, lovingly, into his famous omelets as my mother stirred English Breakfast Tea in our mugs. I’d grow up with anti-Blackness woven into my haphazard braids, its aroma smoothed into my knobby knees with heapings of cocoa butter, and watch my mother adorn her mocha-colored skin with it like her favorite perfume. We’d break bread at family gatherings and take seconds, and thirds, of it at the buffet table. I’d hear its harshness in my abuela’s broken English as she’d scoff at my sunscreen-less face and drink its contents to wash down dry pieces of roti. As a mixed-race person, anti-Blackness is the confidence of bypassing “Black/African American” to swiftly circle “Other” on forms, the flushing of one’s cheeks when complimented on exotic beauty, the steady beating of your heart when walking past police, and the deafening silence behind closed doors where Black men and women are caricatures of humanity.
Issues of race and anti-Blackness in communities of color are pervasive and well-maintained. I have felt the heat of embarrassment after my mother clutched her purse on an L train full of Black people, and that same flush of shame when I catch myself, years later, doing the same. Memories of gatherings, social and professional, are mixed with laughter and unease at each joke at the expense of a Black colleague or the absolute statements that wheeew chile… the ghetto is ghett-o. In my years as a diversity educator, I came to see the remnants of anti-Blackness in all areas of life; its insidious presence can be found in my communities’ music, creole slang, recipes, and in my own reflection. It is an inheritance – the rich and often unassuming power of being seen as a person of color, but not Black. “Othering” became a relation of power and one that I feel the weight of constantly.
Willful ignorance of the ways in which violence against Blacks is a constant companion for the pride of being the model minority. A surviving tool of White supremacy, anti-Blackness serves as the vehicle for my own sense of self. The smoothness of my 1B hair, the swiftness of my code-switching tongue, and my racially-ambiguous features became safeguards against being read or labeled Black. While I may never be understood as White, my brownness protects me from the universality of anti-Blackness. A deeper delve into the role of anti-Blackness in communities of color, in my own life, requires a look into the intergenerational protection of Whiteness and complicity among folks with faces much like my own.
Our family profited off of the subjugation of Black people in the United States because as long as we did not, and do not, feel the pain, then all is well. Excellence meant studying diligently and offering silence when teachers asked volunteers to tutor other kids of color in class; pretending you were busy when invited to sleepovers and parties outside of Jackson Heights; it meant pretending you were ok and choking down anger when your friends put their hands in your hair. Overtime, being perceived as non-Black replaced being Guyanese, being immigrants, and being individuals. The newly acquired “Other” nomenclature distanced them from our Blackness, but also themselves. Even now, the reward for collusion includes a facsimile of power that continue to fuel the choice of silence in the face of racism. To be the model minority is intoxicating and we knowingly or unknowingly adopted silence as speech. Dismantling our family’s manifesto of collusion means unlearning the “rightness” of anti-Black behavior and decoupling my sense of excellence, or success, with suppressing my own hurt with silent affirmations of Whiteness. As I delve into pages of research, narrative, and story-telling truth bombs, I see the beginnings of a new recipe to replace anti-blackness in my cookbook.
It remains, despite the introduction of new perspectives and voices, a staple ingredient in many of our oral histories and learned modicums of behavior. The future, for me, entails confronting what lies beyond closed doors and deepening tones of my voice to claim a Blackness long ignored, and shed the safety of a colonized mind - to remove it from my palate.
