I'm tired of being the token Black person
Or why I won't be sending my children to a majority white school
Today I opened Facebook for the second time in the space of 2 weeks (which is a lot for a younger millennial) and found myself on a page created by a guy who was in the year below me at my primary school. The page was one of those generically named unofficial school pages started by nostalgic ex-pupils - “St Hughe’s On the Hill is the best school ever!!!” complete with spelling and grammatical errors that someone obligatorily pointed out …“btw you spelt Hughs wrong mate” - and I had told myself that I would avoid it. But here I was, back again, lurking on the page, scrolling through posts and clicking on profile pictures.
I came across one post that caused me to clench my first. One of the girls who had bullied me relentlessly for 3 years had posted “omg lol as if wot a legend school need to come back and visit one day good times xxx”.
I sat there, phone in hand, shocked and annoyed at the fresh wave of anger and sadness that combined to form a lump in my throat. Good times. Good times! “Fuck off!” I said out loud. Then “Sorry Jesus’’ (although I theoretically know Jesus probably could care less about my sometimes potty mouth - remember, I’m a recovering fundie).
I’ve been the token Black person for as long as I can remember. I don’t remember the first time when I was acutely aware of the fact that I was 1 of no more than 10 Black children in my small private school, but I do have an acute memory of my Yr 1 teacher trying her best to plait my hair with the aid of a wad of multicoloured elastic bands after the other children had laughed at me when one of my little afropuffs had snapped a hairband that morning. That was the first time I felt ashamed of my hair.
The year after that, the sports teacher at my school would make me run against the boys at sports day while the white girls ran separately because, as it was calmly explained to me “Black people are naturally fast” - this happened without my parents knowledge. In year 2, everyone in the class was invited to a birthday party apart from me and another Black boy whose parents were both told that there simply wasn’t room for us, A game of kiss chase in year 3 confirmed that I was definitely not pretty, and though the one mixed race boy in my class defended me when the girls made fun of the “horrible, sticky grease” I had to use after swimming, he promptly went on to declare the ring leader as his girlfriend. Those 4 girls would continue to bully and ostracise me for 3 years, to the point that I told my parents in year 5 that actually, I did not really want to be alive anymore, if that was ok?
I could document a long list of events in my 7 years at primary school that will never leave my memory, that racialised and demoralised me in ways that no child should ever experience, and that frankly, radicalised me.
Because when you’re the token, you really have two choices - you can try your best to ignore the racism and assimilate, or you can decide to see the world as it is and determine that you will resist. But resisting requires effort. And persistent effort is exhausting.
Until I started my current job, I had had a brief reprieve from being the token Black person by doing my 3 years of specialty training in a diverse area of London. My workplace was a United Nations - my direct supervisor was a white English man married to a South Asian woman, the other staff I worked with were Greek, Nigerian, white Jamaican, Ghanaian, Pakistani, Indian, Iranian, Egyptian, Zimbabwean - an endless list of diversity. That didn’t mean that racial micro aggressions weren’t a part of my day, but it’s a lot more comforting when you know that you have a choice of colleagues that won’t gaslight you or minimise your experience.
I had almost forgotten the feeling of being on constant high alert, of feeling acutely aware of your skin, of the continuous self surveillance, of being hyper sensitive to comments and body language. Is it because I’m Black? Am I being paranoid? That was racist, right? Do they just not like me? Maybe I’m just not good at this job?Am I being oversensitive? They said that because I’m Black right?
The past 2 years have been emotionally and mentally draining for a number of reasons, but one of the main ones is that being the token Black person literally sucks the life out of you. In addition to the stressors of an already difficult job, you have to contend with not only racism, but the fact that no one around you understands your experience, and many of them are deeply invested in believing that your lived experience is a figment of your own imagination and victim complex. As a token Black person you exist as a magical negro - a smiling and wise figure whose very presence in their workplace, school or church confirms the lie that they, and the world they have created, is racially accepting, diverse and ‘doesn’t see colour’. In order for them to accept that the racism you experience in their world is real, they would have to tell the truth about other white people, but also about themselves.
I’m tired of code switching. I’m tired of the cultural references I know to use at dinner parties because the films, TV shows and music that are ‘classics’ to Black people are unknown to them. I’m tired of explaining what a microloc is. I’m tired of feeling that my mistakes aren’t just attributed to me personally but to US as a collective, I’m tired of being the first. I’m tired of being told I’m ‘refreshing’. I’m tired of #blackexcellence. I’m tired of being told that my packed lunch smells ‘wonderful’ (and I’m already tired of the people who don’t understand why I’m tired of that, and it’s not because the people telling me it smells wonderful don’t mean well ). I’m tired of the people who feel the need to talk about the Caribbean every time they speak to me. I’m tired that almost everything I know about white middle class British culture is entirely against my will and entirely out of a necessity to navigate the majority white spaces that were forced on me from the age of 4.
My parents made the best decision they could at the time. The choice between the poor prospect of our local but diverse state school, and the white middle class private school a drive away was seemingly a no brainer. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t ask them to change their decision, but the Nigerian name they gave me, the constant reinforcements of the beauty of Blackness, and the exposure to my Caribbean culture via friends, family and weekly church services, weren’t enough to inoculate me against the side effects of being the token Black person.
I don’t have children yet ….but if and when I do, the thought of them having to experience the same thing terrifies me. And the fact that 30 years later I might still have to face the same choices my parents did, angers me.
The way this resonated with me is crazy. I grew up as the only “black in the village”
Quite literally. My primary school consisted of three black children. Myself, my older brother ( who was sporty so everyone loved him) and another girl who was adopted by a white family and basically did not know she was black! 30+ years later and as someone who works in education I still often find myself being the token “ethnic”. Recently attending a annual SEND conference in London of over 300 delegates and the only other person of colour was serving the sandwiches.
Thank you for writing and sharing this with us, we hold it and stand with you, sister. I navigated white religious church and higher educational spaces for quite some time in Texas and Alabama and can resonate with much of what you wrote. I am still working in the fragments of what was broken and lost within me in those spaces. You are not alone, Shade.