Token.

The melanin chronicles.

“How many other black kids were there?” my mother asked my older sister after her first practice with the community youth orchestra. She sighed and rolled her eyes.

“I don’t know.”

“Were there any other black kids?” she probed further. At this, my sister blew up. 

“You do know that nobody pays attention to that kind of thing, right? Nobody cares except you,” she said, pointing a finger at both of our parents. “It’s honestly really racist!” 

An argument ensued that I can’t recall the details of twenty years after the fact, but I do remember my father saying something along the lines of, “You might not think about it, but the world around you does.” 

At that point in our lives, my sister and I really didn’t know much about the world around us. Our window to it was just our family unit of four with the tiny TV in the kitchen playing the evening local news. At the top of each new crime report, my father would say, “Please don’t let it be a brother,” like a prayer before a mugshot of a disheveled black man would be flashed up on the screen. With a collective sigh, we would continue eating our food. 

My school and athletic life were largely white. My home and church life were exclusively black. My sister and I were in an upper middle class family who had traded out the inner city life closer to relatives for the suburban life closer to the private school that would set the pace for our entire existence. And unlike my parents who grew up in an extremely segregated southern environment, my sister and I had not known a time where the color of our skin would ever be mentioned or acknowledged except during those instances around the dinner table. Like my sister, going to a new place and counting the number of black people around me was simply never something that would occur to me to do. For my parents, it was an automatic survival reflex like looking both ways before crossing the street. 

People who knew my sister first would never guess that I was, in fact, her sister. And the people who knew me first would never guess that my sister was, in fact, my sister. Katherine is what, by the 2010s, many kids would call “basic.” She has a loud voice she always pitched higher whenever she’d bippity-bop around school with Abercrombie sweatpants under her uniform skirt, is a Uggs and Starbucks pumpkin spice latte loyalist, and had posters of the Backstreet Boys and Leonardo Dicaprio all over her bedroom walls that she later swapped out for inspirational wood-carved in cursive quotes from Etsy. She joined a white sorority, got a few dainty tattoos of things like birds, constellations, and music notes, and took the array of sexy Halloween options available at the store as a personal challenge. She’s what my mother calls a “young soul” even now in her mid-thirties living peacefully in a recently constructed apartment complex on the nice side of the river with her wine collection, pet cat, yoga gear, and paint by numbers sets. 

Katherine has her crowd. She’d called home from college in tears after barely two weeks because the other black women there were calling her an Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside), and loudly announced over dinner much later in the timeline that she wasn’t interested in dating black men. Full stop. The spirit of my mother’s melanin drained from her face in horror. 

I travel in a larger circuit. Despite being a nerd with a “plain Jane” presentation (something familiar to all shades of people), I’ve been told I’m good company. Preppy white country clubs, hip-hop nightclubs, fundraisers at the blackest of churches, networking parties at five-star hotels, game nights at the local pizza joint, the depths and heights of New York City, the comfortable quiet of the Georgia countryside, weddings, funerals, senior citizen activity days, chaperoning for children, chaperoning for intoxicated adults, study groups, any brand of committee, Bernie Bros, Trumpers, in charge of everything, or walking into a wacky situation totally blind. You name it, I can probably roll with it. For a decent amount of work environments I’ve been in, the primary language wasn’t even English… and I only speak English. My mother says I am the “master code switcher.” 

I think I’m very consistent in my presentation and am just good at picking up on a mood. Everyone quickly learns what I’m about. But I do sugarcoat or, quite the opposite, say honest things so bluntly people think I’m joking. And while I do love collapsing into bed for a nice quiet night at home like my sister, I’d be the first to open the door for female friends, family, or coworkers needing a place to crash for a day or a whole year. Every roommate I’ve ever had has told me that I’m the best roommate they’ve ever had. No one enters Katherine’s place except for cat sitters and the various white men in uniform she grabs from Tinder. Katherine still disagrees with what our father told us twenty years ago feeling like her blackness is exceedingly inconsequential behind fancy degrees and designer accessories. I’ve experienced what he was talking about and adjusted accordingly, but also scratch my head at many conversations surrounding race that have defined the present round of the Roaring Twenties. However, despite how my sister and I may differ, one thing remains true. In our lives, more often than not, we are the token. I alluded to this a little bit in Lucky. 

While in school, I was never big on class participation. But not raising your hand would never save you from being called on. Our desks weren’t in rows either. They were in a circle. Some classrooms didn’t have desks at all. We’d just be seated around some giant antique wooden table discussing Jane Austen. Small class sizes were a school selling point. That’s why it was always such a large and obvious contrast any year we had a unit on slavery or any of the related struggles that followed in the United States. Suddenly in our circle arrangements, everyone tried their hardest not to look at me while the teacher was talking. And coincidentally, I’d never be called on without my hand raised to offer an answer or a thought. 

In a humorous precursor to what we see today, my sophomore year of high school saw the introduction of Multicultural Day. In preparation, we were handed sheets on which we were to write our names and check off one of the following boxes: White, Black, Hispanic/Asian/Pacific Islander/Other, Jewish, or Gay. Yes, you read that correctly. 

A few days later, a sign was posted by the school entrance with instructions on where in the school to go (the boys high school was also involved in this exercise which meant the hallways were getting set to become a bit crowded). It said all the black students should go to the girls' library. The white groups, of which there were sixteen, all had separate room assignments. All the weird (white) art girls… I mean… “the gays”… piled into the art room. And yes, it was just girls. All the in between shades of brown, a group of maybe five, went off… somewhere. And the Jewish students which included my two closest friends, had the main auditorium until they were asked to relocate to the hallway because the white groups needed more space. 

Our black party in the library started off quite chill. The other girls and I were primarily amused by the whole situation but the boys began painting a much different picture of their school than ours. It turns out that in the hierarchy of boys, jabs targeted race, age, wealth, height, and neighborhood. Inside the school halls was a no-combat zone, but outside these factions were one error in judgment away from becoming gangs. The rest of the girls and I stayed quiet save for the ones who voiced anger on behalf of the black boys in our brother school. And it’s those same girls who took charge in writing down their complaints and demands that we’d show the school in the form of a presentation held later in the day, organizing the generalized frustration.

We filed back into the auditorium with all these other groups who had been divided (mostly) by race to talk about each other all day. We went back to sitting side by side in awkward silence. Part of me wondered what the other girls said. A larger part of me wondered what the other boys said. Soft pretzels were handed out and the boys went back to their side of the street. Within a couple of days, the girls had moved on. It was at this point when I first began to associate race conflict with something stemming from something that was distinctly male. 

The student resource center was housed in one of the biggest buildings on my college campus. Upon walking inside you’d be faced with a tall and wide staircase opening up to lounges and cafes. It was at the bottom of that staircase when from high above, I heard someone shout, “HEY YOU, BLACK GIRL!” on my first day. I stopped, looked around me at all the white people, then looked above to see a black woman waving directly at me and beckoning me closer. 

She described herself as being on the hunt to find all the black freshmen to make sure they joined the Black Student Union. And since she’d never seen me before, she assumed I was a newbie of some designation. She said there would be an off the chain mixer the following week that I absolutely could not miss. It really hadn’t occurred to me at that point that there would be a club for black students. Clubs based on race or ethnicity didn’t exist in my high school. But when I told my parents, they were overjoyed saying how great it would be for career networking.

At the mixer, I gravitated toward a group of relaxed looking women who welcomed me to their table. They were all upperclassmen. We got to talking about music at which point I said my favorite band was Linkin Park. One of them put her hand on the table as if meaning to calm me and said, “That’s amazing. Be proud of it. Liking Linkin Park doesn’t make you any less black.” I put on my default smile and the conversation continued. On the inside, I wondered how the hell listening to Linkin Park would impact the color of my skin. But then I recalled my sister’s Oreo saga.  

That first BSU event was not the only time music came up. For those of you who may not know, rap music is often debated within black circles. Is it good for the community? Bad for the community? A product of the reality of the community? A self-fulfilling prophecy for the community? Should we really be calling each other nigger all the time? If we’re calling ourselves that all the time in our own music that is now widely popular around the world, should we really be surprised when other races do the same? Anything from the gangsta rap era onward was explicitly banned in my house growing up as was MTV which my father described as the “people behaving badly” channel. He also called all the women on it “floozies” which I always figured was an old-timey word for “slut” which, in hindsight, was a very inappropriate thing for him to call my sister whenever she’d prepare to leave the house in spaghetti straps or anything emulating Britney Spears. 

Later in that year, a survey would be sent asking for female respondents. It contained questions that essentially boiled down to what degree the way we styled our hair was a political statement. This was all going on during the growing resurrection of the “natural hair movement.” That is, letting your hair grow from your scalp without getting a perm or a weave or straightening it with heat for it to behave more like the average white person’s hair in an attempt to look more “appropriate.” At the time, I got my hair straightened with heat every couple of weeks and would later keep it completely natural before shaving it all off. Why the changes? Money and time, both of which were chronically in short supply. I still rock a shaved head and, personally, I think it’s the best look for me particularly as someone who was always terrible at taking care of their hair. I feel like I could write a whole other essay just on hair. 

[Update: Read Ladies Hair - The XX Curl Pattern]

Overall, my time attending BSU meetings mainly highlighted two things: 

1. The insecurities of black women trying to pull off this balancing act between our culture and their culture which included quite a juicy clash between the Black Student Union, African Student Union, and Carribean Student Union that culminated in a combined mixer with spectacular catering so… totally worth it. 

2. The unbreakable connection between the concept of race unity and this expectation that black men had an almost righteous claim over the bodies and fates of black women that should be both encouraged and celebrated. 

I am going to dig a lot further into that second point… at a later time. But let me get back to tokenism.

I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist, but I will say that I’m quite prideful and it is damaging to my sense of pride if my work isn’t notably spectacular. So when I got my first job at a dingey literally underground nightclub that was in all likelihood financed by the Turkish mob, I was determined to be the best coat check person they’d ever seen. That quickly evolved to being the best ticket taker they’d ever seen, merch seller they’d ever seen, and all around door person they’d ever seen. 

By the time I was twenty, I was the go to person for any party of significance. The sold out ones where the booze would be flying off the shelves and the “big boss” would be coming in with his crew dressed to the nines and handing out hundred dollar bills to staff like they were mints before secluding themselves in the back room for “private business.” And aside from the bouncers headed by this guy - Daniel - tall and built like a football player, always packing heat, and would routinely talk my ear off about philosophy at 2am, I was the only black employee. The rest were fresh off the boat Eastern Europeans who had a tendency to be conventionally attractive. 

But I always knew I’d be put on the frontlines when it was going to be a black party. Not only would I work the door, but I’d be asked to greet the artist, get them situated, and even settle their end of show finances which on one occasion involved the actual flipping of a table sending big bills flying everywhere. Luckily working at this place was an extreme exercise in conflict resolution. An invaluable skill. 

My first tour ever was with a hip-hop artist who happened to be Korean and a few days before it started my boss called me to ask what I had packed to wear. Black polo shirts, black denim jeans, black sweatshirts. But apparently, this was not acceptable. “You’ll be getting photographed at airports next to these artists,” she began to explain. “And they’re used to their entourage looking a certain way. So I’m going to need to ask you if you can look more hip-hop. Fashion streetwear. Maybe change your hair.” It made me think back to my freshmen year roommate from China who was obsessed with the Madea movies and told me she was surprised I was so different from what those movies had made her expect of a black woman. It reminded me of a white woman I had worked with quite extensively on a Japanese concert series who opened up to me saying that I’m great to work with, so competent, smart, and articulate, so unlike the other blacks. 

And that became the motif of my career: The gentle bigotry of low expectations. This knowledge that, for whatever reason, there would be an us and a them, spoken or unspoken, the admission at the end of every project that in being twice as good as everyone else, they no longer needed to have any concerns about me operating in their space. Anything less and my chances of getting called back for more would be uncertain. Many times, I’d be called in late to fix the mess someone who fit the bill of a typical hire with connections to the inner circle made. And yes, there were probably other factors at play. I was black, I was a woman, and I looked so young that police patrol units unfamiliar with me would stop me outside the clubs where I worked and inquire about my age. But by the time I was done with almost anything, everyone would be happy and I’d continue on my way. I found my work highly fulfilling, but it was nonetheless a path of solitude that was not a component of my school days growing up. Did I just not sense the wall back then in my female bubble? Was I only imagining it now actively navigating a male world? 

I couldn’t tell you why the George Floyd murder in particular set off the white people around me so much. I’d stumbled across a Black Lives Matter protest a few years before in Manhattan when I was on the verge of running late for work (late in my book means less than fifteen minutes early) and actually got stopped and searched there by cops who took my jogging with a backpack to be an imminent bomb threat. Former classmates took to social media to describe how they were in shock, horrified, and reduced to tears for days after watching this video (a video I never actually watched and found the repeat watchings spoken about by others to be very odd). It was what I’d expect if the old ladies in church caught the spirit of the devil during a sermon instead of the spirit of god. I was familiar with the concept of white guilt (the aversion of eyes when speaking about slavery in school) and for a while assumed this Shakespeare-length death monologue of a performance carried out by many a person all over social media was spurred on by the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC. A big part of me still thinks it was. Maybe for younger people, it was as genuine as the religious fervor in which they assert that there is such thing as a female penis. But for me, these “on the down low” tokenism tropes took center stage and became lauded as progress. 

“Usually it is common when meeting someone to ask them where they are from,” the professor began on my first day of grad school in the fall of 2021. COVID had shut down my entire industry so I figured I may as well make the most of it. “But because for some students their ancestors did not come to this land by choice, let us ask each other where our spirit comes from.” I was the only person in the class who was not white. A stack of copies of How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi were stacked by the professor’s side. This was supposed to be a theater curriculum. That semester, there was hardly a week that went by where my blackness was not brought up by other students or faculty members. They wanted my perspective. They wanted to hear about my suffering. In my mind, they wanted to experience straight from the mouth of the oppressed the gut twisting zing they probably got from watching videos of black men getting killed by cops. 

At home, I expressed to my parents how angry this social dynamic was making me. Their general confusion at the current state of affairs was similar to mine. The George Floyd incident they described as “terrible but not surprising.” My father described his white coworkers as people who “just figured out that the sky is blue.” The evening local news still put up mugshots of disheveled black men on a daily basis. My parents and grandparents still criticized the culture for leading so many black men astray, for making black neighborhoods that had always been poor but clean and relatively safe into neighborhoods the police wouldn’t even show up in because they knew they’d be outgunned. 

In regards to the police, I was raised to keep my distance. I’d say the goal was for me to never have a reason to interact with them at all. And if I ever did, I was to speak with them with the utmost clarity and respect and pray nothing went sideways. I’ve interacted with law enforcement officers who were on power trips and went along with whatever temporary humiliation they decided on that day. It just seems logical that because most of them were men with guns and a license to kill in a world where unhinged things happen daily, you’d handle those interactions with some level of caution no matter the color of your skin. Relying on men to protect you from other men is always a hazardous game to play. And men going up against each other, more often than not, just like those boys way back in high school,  seem like they have something they’d like to prove. 

I do not know how I’d like to end this piece. It will be followed up with pieces on related topics that were touched on above. I suppose I’ll end by saying that I have learned to count the number of black people in a room and I’m not sure how I should feel about that.