How to Be Black (5 page)

Do You Know What an Oreo Is?

A
ccording to DC's school districts at the time, my graduation from Bancroft Elementary School in the city's Mount Pleasant neighborhood should have been followed by my attendance at Abraham Lincoln Junior High School a few blocks south of our home. There was just one problem with this regulation as far as my mother was concerned: kids at Lincoln got stabbed.

I'm not sure how often child-stabbings occurred at this educational institution, but the fact that Lincoln had such a reputation, coupled with my penchant for getting bored in the classroom due to finishing my work early, led my mother to look for alternate schooling. Because my older sister had attended private or at least specialized schooling (Catholic school, magnet school, and an arts public school) my mother felt that I, too, should have the benefits of a non-public education. Thus began my tour of Washington-area private schools.

The first was Georgetown Day School. All I remember from my visit is making some really shitty pottery in an art class. I'm sure they did other things at that school, like math and English and the scientific method, but I just remember that shitty piece of pottery.

The second school I visited was called Green Acres, and it had three strikes against it.

Strike One: the name. “Green Acres”??? That sounds like a rehab center for matrimonially challenged politicians. That name was just a bit too soft for a black kid from the city. Speaking of soft, my initial interest in the school was based entirely on the crush I had on a girl from my church, never a good reason to make a six-year commitment.

Strike Two: building design. The school had no hallways. I don't mean that the inside of the building consisted of dark matter or “The Nothing” from
The Neverending Story
. I mean the classrooms all had doors to the outside, and kids walked outdoors to get from one class to the next. I later learned that this is a common design in warm places like Southern California and Hawaii, but Green Acres was in Bethesda, Maryland, whose climate offers three full months a year with average low temperatures at or below freezing.

Strike Three: the worst basketball game I've ever seen. The day I visited, Green Acres had a boys' basketball game. I was shocked to find that the boys' team had a girl starting (bravo), and she was the best player (what?), and
Green Acres lost the game
50–2!! Even though I wasn't a fan of basketball, I refused to go to a school that could get its ass so thoroughly whipped.

With Georgetown Day and Green Acres failing to meet my standards, the remaining school was Sidwell Friends. The school is now famous for educating Chelsea Clinton (two years behind me) and Malia and Sasha Obama, but when I enrolled, the school's reputation wasn't quite as glamorous.

I arrived a bit of a fish out of water. While I wasn't from the deep hood of Southeast DC, by Sidwell standards I was about as hood as it got at the time. I was pretty black, for a black guy. I arrived suffering from a mild medical condition known as “Ebonics” or “Black English Vernacular.” This condition caused me to “axe” people questions and caused the other students to ridicule me. I knew perfectly well how to speak perfectly well, but around friends, I was used to a more relaxed linguistic style. Eventually, my Ebonics went into full remission, and I could be paraded before boards of trustees, donors, and parents with little risk of institutional embarrassment.

Sidwell was such a foreign environment. First, there were just so many white people. They were everywhere! That wasn't normal. My neighborhood and previous school were all black and Latino with the exception of two white students in my grade: a boy and a girl. The boy's name was William. The girl was Willamena. Seriously. As far as I knew, all white people had the same name! But at Sidwell, I met Patricks, Bronwens, Julias, and Phillipas.

My classroom experience was similarly inverted. At Sidwell, usually I was the only black student in the room, and this resulted in me being deputized as some sort of Assistant Professor X whenever anything black were to come up in the curriculum. Reading Harriet Beacher Stowe? Everyone looks at Baratunde. Watching
Eyes on the Prize
? Everyone looks at Baratunde. In science class, learning about Black Lung? Everybody looks at Baratunde. It's as if everyone expected me to carry the knowledge of some sort of Negropedia
*
filled with answers to all things black for the edification of white classmates.

While the introduction of massive quantities and qualities of whiteness brought landmark changes into my life at Sidwell, the biggest change was probably my discovery of new types of black people.

The school had a buddy program for new students, and I was paired with a black kid who had been at the school his entire life. The name for such students was “lifers,” which is very death row–y, which should tell you something. In my first weeks at the school, I remember my buddy pulling me aside with a secretive look in his eye and a hushed tone to his voice. Clearly, serious extracurricular education was about to go down, and I was prepared to soak it up.

“Yo, do you know what an Oreo is?” he asked me.

I paused and stared blankly, thinking, “Of course I do. It's a cream-filled chocolate wafer manufactured by the Nabisco Corporation since 1952, and it's mad tasty.” What I actually said was, “You mean like the cookie?”

“No.” He shook his head gravely. “An Oreo is somebody who's black on the outside and white on the inside.” He then pointed to a student I hadn't yet met and said
that
kid was an Oreo.

I looked across the room and saw a skinny, slightly nerdy black kid hanging out with some white friends, and thought, “Why are you picking on that kid? Seems to me a perfectly legitimate way to finance an eventual presidential campaign!”

After all,
that
kid's parents were paying good money for Sidwell, and I doubt it was just so
that
kid could socialize with other black kids. White friends cost money! Roughly $30,000 per year plus books.

Wealth-Related Horse Violence

M
y father was shot and killed when I was six years old. He was involved in a drug deal gone wrong. He was the buyer. These facts have always annoyed me.

No boy wants his father to die. Being a black boy in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, you especially don't want him to die of drug-related gun violence. It's too stereotypical. The only thing that could make it worse is if he'd not only been attempting to buy drugs but if the deal itself went down inside a KFC restaurant.

This is where the annoyance originates. If he had to die in 1985, why couldn't he have been competing in a Hamptons polo match and gotten trampled by a horse? That would at least give his child a story for the ages.

FRIEND:
Hey, Baratunde, how come your dad never comes to your soccer games?

ME:
Oh, he normally would be here, but two years ago, he was in the finals of the Mercedes-Benz Polo Challenge when Chad Worthington III's horse, Barbaro, got out of control. My father was tossed from his own horse, Colonel Tabasco, and crushed. Sadly, he's just another statistic in the epidemic of wealth-related horse violence striking down black men across the country.

Despite having lost my father, I'm not bitter or overly sad about it. I never have been. In part, I was too young to have developed deep bonds with him. On top of that, he didn't live in the house with us, so I wasn't used to seeing him every day. In fact, I only have six memories of him at all.

Memory #1: Remote-controlled Boat

We were visiting someone's house. I don't know whose. I was probably five. Five-year-olds don't care whose house they're in, so long as there are toys to play with. I must have slept there, because my memory is of taking a bath. I don't imagine you just bring your son over to someone's house in the middle of the day and say, “Hey, mind if my kid takes a bath? He really likes to be clean.”

So I was in the bath, and my father came in, and he watched as I played with a remote-controlled boat. I've always loved remote-controlled vehicles, but that boat was my favorite.

Memory #2: Burritotunde

My father worked construction. I recall my mother and him waking me up extremely early (pre-sunrise) one day and putting me in the car as we went to his work site. In order to keep me comfortable, allow me to stay asleep, and maximize the cuteness of the scene, they rolled me in a blanket like a burrito.

I love burritos.

Memory #3: Cousins

I've been quite accustomed to having a small family: my mother, my sister, and whatever pets we had at the time. However, my father had a huge family, and I have an unknown number of cousins on his side. One Saturday, we went to the house of one of his relatives, and I was left in a room to play with my cousins.

They were all far older than me, and as such, I was their entertainment system. Small child equals plaything to older children. Their favorite activity was to let me stand up and tell me to walk across the room, but then one of them would grab me from behind by my belt and pull me back down. They did this for a long time, this human yo-yo shtick. My father was nowhere to be found during this torture.

I hate cousins.

Memory #4: Beer

I was in my father's pickup truck as he drove somewhere. He had a can of beer open (gateway drug!) and offered me a taste.
*
It was disgusting, and since then, I've generally found all beer to be disgusting. Over the past decade, I've found three types of beers I actually like:

1. Lindeman's Framboise, which isn't really beer

2. Chocolate stouts (mmmm, chocolate)

3. German Weißbier and its derivatives

I can pretty well tolerate Corona (great commercials) and Heineken (I have positive memories of Amsterdam). All other beer is ass, and I will not put in the work to acquire the taste for things that taste like ass.

Memory #5: Presents!

It was Christmas, and my father visited our house and delivered the biggest bag of presents I've ever seen, at least in proportion to my body size. I don't remember any of the gifts. I just remember being blown away by the size of the bag and the number of boxes.

I love presents.

Memory #6: Death

I don't remember how my mother set it up. We were in the living room, which doubled as my bedroom in our Newton Street house, and the sentence “Your father is dead” fell from her lips. I hesitated briefly, sorting out what this meant. A few beats later I started to cry, but I wasn't crying for the specific man named Arnold Robinson. I was crying over the idea that I was supposed to have a “father” and now my “father” was gone. The idea of losing him is what felt bad.

She gave me a choice as to whether or not I wanted to attend the funeral, and I could see no point in it. Outside of my brief interactions with the torturous cousins, I didn't know anyone on my father's side of the family, and the idea of hanging around a dead body surrounded by crying strangers did not interest me, so I chose not to go.

Some years later, I came across his death certificate in the family file cabinet. Death certificates are remarkably cold, analytical, and frightening accounts of our mortality. I would have understood “he got shot,” as that seems like the type of thing capable of killing a person. But the certificate offered extra detail:

bullet wound of chest, lungs, spine and spinal cord, followed by paraplegia and bronchopneumonia

In other words: he got shot.

Why Are You Wearing That White Man Over Your Heart?

Never point a gun at anybody. Never store a gun under your pillow. Treat every gun as if it were loaded. Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. Keep the action open when not in use. Know where your companions are. Know your gun and ammo. Be sure of your target and what's beyond. Alcohol and shooting don't mix! Put on the safety switch.

—March 2, 1991, Mead Composition notebook of
Karanding
Baratunde Thurston

I
n the absence of my father, my mother was always searching for men to add to my life. The whole effort had a “Who's Your Father Figure?” game show feel to it. One week, I'd be hanging out with James West, an old family friend, musician, and photographer. He taught me how to use a camera and encouraged my musical interests. He worked as a bicycle courier, owned massive fish tanks, and lived one block away. He was on the top (fourth) floor of his building and had no buzzer. This was pre–mobile phones, so when we went to visit, we simply stood on the sidewalk on 16th Street, aimed our heads high, and yelled, in concert, at the top of our lungs, “Yo James!! Jaaaaaames West!!!!” Every. Time. Some children are discouraged from hollering in the street. For me, it was a regularly scheduled family activity.

In another week, I might spend time with Pepe and Pinky, the Latino owners of a local bike shop called Brothers & Bicycles. They gave me extra bass lessons and sold my mother my first bike. When we went to pick it up, my mother made me sign a handwritten contract witnessed by both Pepe and Pinky, stating that I would never let anyone else ride my bike, and if I did, I would have to forfeit it to her. I wondered what she would do with a bike made for a ten-year-old boy, but I never tested the terms of our agreement to find out.

The individual men my mother brought into my life rode, sold, and fixed bicycles. They played all manner of instruments. They were photographers and booksellers, and one was even a Buddhist. All of them served to subconsciously round out my definition of what black and brown men could be and do, and I owe part of my present-day love of cycling, music, photography, and books to these men. But my mother's most significant attempt to fill the man void in my upbringing was my enrollment in the Ankobia program at the same time as she enrolled me at Sidwell Friends.

“Ankobia” is a term from the Twi language of Ghana, which means “vanguard” or “those who lead in battle.” It is also the name of an Afrocentric “rites of passage” program I completed during my early teen years in DC. I like to think of it as a counterweight to the elite private education I received five days a week on the other side of town. It was Hebrew school for blackness.

Established by Pan-African black American activists, Ankobia was designed to help black children make the transition into adulthood and withstand the assaults and temptations of life in the crack-ridden city in the 1990s. Think of it like an extended bar mitzvah minus the dance party, expensive gifts, and belief in the one true God. Then add an element of Scared Straight. Every Saturday from seven a.m. until just after noon, I would gather with a dozen or so other black boys (we were called
karanding
, which is Kiswahili for “student”) at the Nationhouse Watoto School in Northwest Washington. There we would engage in rigorous physical exercise, practical life-skills training, and black history education.

The physical training was intense. It was led by a massive and fit man we called Baba Mike.
*
He led us in a routine that included a thousand jumping jacks, scores of push-ups, martial arts techniques, and an agonizing abdominal exercise involving us lying on our backs and lifting our feet six inches off the ground for several seconds at a time. In the bonus round of this latter exercise, Baba Mike would yell, “Six inches up!” and then
walk
on our abdomens.

The life-skills education covered the practical. We got lessons in carpentry and electrical work, and we were taught how to operate firearms safely. When I look back, there's something potentially horrifying about this latter lesson, but at the time, it felt as natural as the former. The odds were high that we would be exposed to guns at some point, and we might as well know how to handle them.

The primary education we received, however, was mental and cultural. We had a reading list that included the work or biographies of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner. We were exposed to West African elders, who explained their religious and cultural traditions. We learned to dance to the drum. We ate couscous! And we were pushed to question the values of the mainstream society around us.

I remember one Saturday sitting in the classroom, possibly discussing
The Isis Papers
by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, when one of the
baba
s called out a boy from Baltimore. The kid was wearing a Los Angeles Raiders NFL Starter jacket. These were the height of cool at the time. The
baba
, referring to the team logo on the front of the jacket, pointedly asked him, “Brother, why are you wearing
that white man
over your heart?” None of us thought of Starter jackets that way. We then all got a lecture on economic self-determination, trans-Atlantic slave trading, and the importance of symbolism.

As I mentioned, I was in this program at the same time as I was enrolled at Sidwell Friends. I think my mother loved the idea of combining two extreme educational influences that would, in fact, check each other. Too much exposure to Sidwell's culture, and I might forget where I came from, start to value things foreign to my upbringing, and end up a total disappointment to my community by joining the Republican Party—this was unlikely, given Sidwell's Quaker origins, but still. Too much exposure to the Ankobia world, though, might have me thinking black folk were only kings and queens, and white folk could never ever be trusted. This is clearly not true, as I trust some of my best white friends to help me get cabs on a regular basis.

The whole Ankobia experience felt like a Black Power boot camp with young brown men trained in self-defense and the handling of firearms, given books that told a more complete version of their history, and shown that they are beautiful children of the universe. The combination of these Saturday sessions with my Sidwell experiences would lead to tense and hilarious results on occasion.