“Being black is like having a second job,” tennis-great Arthur Ashe once said. Learning to define and to sustain one’s identity in a scoiety that views you not as a person but as a category demands extra energy on top of whatever else you are doing. Du Bois called it our “twoness.” To Ralph Ellison, it was being an “invisible man.” For me, the second job of being blak has formed my identity in profound ways.
In the segregated world of rural Kentucky, where I spent my early childhood, we rarely encountered white people. Of course, there were the whites on television, and the president, but they were not real to me. I lived in the coffee-colored world of my family and extended community. There I felt safe, accepted, and relaxed. It was a calm bay, sheltered from the outside by the sheer will of my elders. The white world was an ocean that lay beyond my border. There, real white people, like mysterious but powerful sea monsters, could surface unexpectedly to wreak havoc in my life.
Racial identity came to me in small waves. The first time, I was about seven years old—American apartheid had officially ended three years earlier. My family and I were going to the drive-in movies. The driver, Uncle Client, was a very “fair,” that is to say, a white-looking, African American with azure-colored eyes, pink-white skin, and sharp features. He was our front. But the gatekeeper looked at the rest of us and said we couldn’t come in. My aunt said it was because we were black.
For the most part, my parents and grandparents protected me form the hostile white world with facility. When we packed huge cardboard boxes full of cheese sandwiches and chicken for the long trip from Kentucky to Chicago, I thought it was simply our family version of a picnic. It was years before I realized this ritual was a preemptive strike to avoid segregated restaurants along the way.
When we arrived and moved into the integrated University of Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, I was shocked to learn that there were more than eight real white people in the world. But when I began attending the Laboratory School, the waves came in succession.
I remember entering fifth grade, seeing one other black girl in a sea of white and running over to sit by her. There we sat, sticky fingers laced together whenever they talked about slavery in class. In a defiant moment, I penciled over the lower case “n” in Negro with a capital letter in my social studies book. How stupid could they be, I thought. I realized I was in the middle of the forbidden ocean. In music class, for some unfathomable reason, the teacher decided to play Dixie. To my shock, many of the kids stood at attention, as if this were their national anthem. That my peers could identity at all with this song of segregation, I took as a personal insult.
The most painful aspect of this early loss of innocence was realizing that the “land of the free and the home of the brave” did not welcome me. I loved the ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality and was proud to be a part of such a noble nation. But as each experience of bigotry washed over me, I began to understand that, regardless of my personal abilities, my color was always an intervening factor, and how the forces of law, education, public policy, and custom have been actively engaged to keep me, and all people of color, in a second-class status.
This realization has infused me with the passion to work for change so that, in the words of Langston Hughes, “America will be.” In my work as a host and producer of Lawson, Live! a national call-in talk show on the Odyssey cable television network, I have taken “the road less traveled,” to bring issues of justice before the American people. My cohost is James Lawson, the man Martin Luther King, Jr., put in charge of education and strategy for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In this way, my second job has, in fact, become my first one.
Meaningful change, however, is slow. It pains me, in 1997, to have to tell my thirteen-year-old son not to run down the street. “The police don’t care if your great-grandfather got his PhD from Yale and both your parents went to Harvard,” I say. “To them you are just another black young man, guilty until proven innocent.” These are issues my white counterparts don’t have to think about.
But in exchange for all the frustrations that go along with being black in America, I get a truer piece of reality. My color has become the onyx stone from which I care my life—smoothing the rough places with fortitude, polishing the bumpy surfaces with passion. Working it, shaping it, and finding its beauty has given shiny luster to my inner life. For the trouble of maintaining my integrity and dignity in such a world, I am forced to develop humor, grace, generosity of spirit, clarity of purpose, and a connection to values that go beyond sheer materialism. Being black in America has shaped my destiny, and I am the better for it.
Originally published in the Radcliffe Quarterly in the Fall/Winter 1997 issue.