On Accepting My Blackness

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I was white for twenty-three years. Not by skin color. Nor features. Definitely not hair. But out of sheer power of will based off of my upbringing.

"We don't see color" was the motto in my white home.

So much so, that when my brother was five the first difference he noted in our family was that my sister is blonde, instead of the fact that I am Black.

It took me years to feel comfortable and empowered within my race. As a child, my black father wasn't in the picture to teach me about my culture, and even up until I was adopted at the age of eleven my white birth mother never learned the in's and out's of kinky textured hair. My adopted mom, raised on a farm in Iowa, is a middle American conservative, and my adopted dad, because he is Texan and therefore must, collects guns he never shoots. This collective recipe had me prescribing to the below mentality for a very long time.

I am a conservative.

I am a republican.

In my heart, I am white.

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I was so white in fact, that I took pleasure in being called an Oreo. And being told "I talk white" or was "the whitest black person" that someone had ever met. These compliments were considered a testament to my successful chameleon-ing.

How dare anyone say colorblindness doesn't exist. I, a black woman, surrounded by all of my white friends, putting on cowboy boots to dance on the field at football games every Friday night, and rooting for Mitt Romney to win against Barack Obama, was living proof of this.

This was my identity.

Until I heard about Michael Brown.

Michael Brown via NBC NewsMichael Brown who was only eighteen when he was shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, MO.

But, I thought to myself, he shouldn't have come up to the police officer so aggressively. The cop was probably justified.

And Eric Garner.

Justice for Eric Garner FacebookA murder first brought to my attention as I sat in a college lecture and heard chants of "I can't breathe" coming from the street outside. Upon arriving back at my apartment that day, I sat down to research.

Illegal cigarettes? I guess there are some bad cops. But if only he hadn't done a crime at all…

Looking back, my attempts at justification were astounding. I was so desperate to remain in my bubble with my colorblind glasses on that I refused to let myself believe that there was a problem with public servants in our country. And worse, I did this all without recognizing that those same public servants, would look at me the way they looked at the people they were killing.

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It was at this point, in 2016, when I was just starting to grapple with my self-identity, that a video appeared online.

It was taken by a woman in the passenger seat of a car. In the backseat was a child. Behind the wheel, a man. A cop was at the window. The father told the cop that while he had a firearm, he was not pulling it out, but did need to reach into his pocket for his wallet. Instead of allowing him to do so, the police officer put seven bullets into his chest.

Philando Castile, a black man, was murdered by a police officer in front of his four-year old daughter.

Philando Castile via ACLUIt was like a switch flipped in my mind. My colorblind world was immediately filled with hundreds of hues of browns and tans. Mocha was the color of my foundation. Fair was the color of my mother's.

The irony was not missed on me.

Met with an incessant desire to know more, I dug deeper. I found Tamir Rice. Alton Sterling. Eric Harris. Dozens of other instances where police had taken their power and abused it in a way that disproportionately took down people that look like me.

Not people who look like my white family.

People that look like me.

The shift in thinking happened so quickly for me that it would've been alarming if it weren't so freeing. I started to educate myself. I consumed books, documentaries, movies, and news stories about black culture and identity. I began to call out appropriation and veiled racism among my friends and families. This was five years ago.

Five years ago, I started living as a Black woman.

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And now, when I wake up and see an article about Breonna Taylor shot dead by police while asleep in her home or George Floyd murdered on camera while laying, without resistance, with a cop's knee to his neck, I wonder how I was ever blinded to the blatant mistreatment of blacks in America. How anyone in this country could possibly be.

The idea of not seeing color is one of America's greatest lies. An excuse to live in privilege and freedoms and luxuries without guilt. A counterproductive ideology that allows for those with the power to make change to remain unbothered to do so. But what it isn't, and what it never will be, is acceptable.

My name is Kelsea. I am Black. And for the rest of my life I will make damn sure that you know it.