Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,25
me.
I tell this story because of what knowledge it began in me—the complexity of love, the shape-shifting heaviness of grief, and the possibility of tragedy. I tell this story because she left before the end and I’m trying to find her in the darkness. And with her, a piece of myself. I tell this story because I believe that somewhere, still, two teenagers are standing outside a library, and their eyes are ringed with tears. And in this place, she hugs me, and I whisper in her ear, and anything is possible, for anyone. Forever.
Historically Black
When I started getting into colleges just before my eighteenth birthday, each big acceptance package was accompanied by a separate, smaller envelope inviting me to the special weekends designed for students of color. The names were always different—Minority Student Weekend, People of Color Acceptance-Fest, Juneteenth, Super Predator-palooza…I’m kidding about some of them. I think. But one college legit called theirs Third World Weekend. It was the late nineties. Things were wild.
The objective was always the same: to give you a taste of what it was like to be a person of color at Cornell or Brown or Yale or wherever. This was odd to me. Like, how black was this experience going to be? Would there be a mac and cheese bake-off? Was it just going to be forty-eight hours of church? The only thing I knew for sure was that we would definitely be singing the Stevie Wonder version of “Happy Birthday,” aka “the only version of ‘Happy Birthday,’ actually.”
(Have you ever been to the birthday party of someone who has a really mixed group of friends and the white people start singing the “regular” version of “Happy Birthday,” which, honestly, rivals “Streets of Philadelphia” for atonal glumness, and the black people launch into Stevie’s version and then everyone gets really confused because the white people have no idea what just happened? That’s my FAVORITE thing, because I like to imagine that for a brief second the white people think that they’ve slid into an alternate reality and they have to question everything they know to be true and, honestly, that’s reparations. A split second of reparations.)
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I’m just saying, there are a lot of black identities and experiences. And I needed a lot more information, as a nebbishy, sheltered high school senior, about what kind of black experience I was signing up for during the Kunta Kinte Kollege Kampout. Would there be a place to self-disclose my particular racial experience on the RSVP card? At the time, I considered my racial identity to be “Vanessa Huxtable.” So that’s a “yes” for jazz, black history, and small moments of dancing, but a “no” on Tyler Perry films and grills (mouth or backyard). I am not against them; I just don’t know how to do them.
And besides, I wasn’t aware that my race was going to come into play during this process. Getting into college went from being a hazy, amorphous next step to the goal that I put all of my feelings of self-worth and my parents’ hope into. It was a source of pride but I didn’t realize that it was also a source of Black Pride. That was a horse of a different colored.
I thought my success was dependent on my brain and not my skin. After all, that’s the thing that my parents applauded me for. It would be weird for one’s parents to congratulate them on being especially black today. But maybe that’s how other families operated. I wasn’t sure but I began to wonder.
If it was a competition (and I wasn’t sure it was a competition but it probably was a competition), I knew I wasn’t the blackest member of my family. I mean, my mother had been involved with the Panthers and my father had taken over the student center at MIT in a civil rights protest during undergrad. Meanwhile, I spent most of my high school years memorizing quotes from Steel Magnolias. I’m just saying there’s a spectrum.
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When I started getting all these invitations for Ivy League race parties, I got really nervous. Was I the black they were looking for? I wanted to just go to the white weekends, which were always separate. I mean, everyone could go to the white weekends, so they weren’t technically white. They were “neutral.” It seemed like less trouble, to be honest. I’d been hanging out with white people my whole life; was I suddenly