Forget about the stupidly misleading title this is an article I feel.
Again, my story is more complex than that. I have never felt not-black even with zero black people in my life growing up. One of my earliest memory is my foster family smiling and yelling that those people on TV? They are my people.
It was a bunch of black dudes rotating on their backs, on the floor. Probably NYC around 1983-84. And it was immediately cool and felt right even though from that time to the first black friend I would have, over a decade would pass.
To me it was just like “OK, I see my face in the mirror I’m black, black culture is mine. Now, I’m living with white people. Let’s study this shit”. Which I did. In some ways it was super liberating to go anywhere my mind wanted to go. No boxes.
Of course I was the token black friend too, but I wasn’t actively searching for that. With black people it could go from weird disconnection like Danielle is writing about or it would just feel right.
So pretty fast I thought that black identity was an easy thing: are you black? Yes so you have that identity. The end. What you do with your life ain’t nobody’s business. If only it was that simple, though it is. Anyway.
Society later in life wants you to fit a damn box. Or that at least at some point, you fitted a box. I never fitted one, probably never will. I have read so often about the Nerd VS Jock thing but I was both, launching DOOM.EXE AND working on my fade away jump shots after school. It never occurred to me that you kind of had to choose one activity. I mean no, I kind of saw that but it just didn’t seem smart. I wanted it all. Carpe Diem, YOLO all that shit.
The thing is, social relationships happen in a much more efficient way when you are sharing completely an experience. I see it with work all the time, the core element in game development is to have been the nerd at school, shy and getting abused. I wasn’t the bullied nerd and I wasn’t the jock bullying either. I was shy but I could make the entire classroom laugh too. I was enjoying everything I could, avoiding negative bullshit.
And now I’m a unicorn trying to be low key, getting people like “the fuck is this guy about is he real?”. Of course I am.
Maybe I should write a book. The older I get the more I see how unique my point of view is. Like, damn unique.