Sunday, June 17, 2012

Brittany Counts on Race Relations



AH: Was that, has that historically been true in that community, in that town, or was there a period where there was a predominately Black upper class community?

BC: To my knowledge there was never a time where there was a predominately Black middle class. My neighbors were White for the most part and from the time that I can remember. Originally, when I was born we lived in the Black side of town and my mother and my grandma, we moved quite a lot around Inman and it seemed like we were always surrounded by White neighbors, I do not know if it was intentional or if was just where we could move, at times it was not as if they were any higher, in terms of financial status, but they would still look down on us. They could live in the trailer right next us the same single wide trailer, same size, but for some reason theirs would be better. I was called a nigger for the first time by my neighbor and until then, I had never heard the word in my life and it never occurred to me that I was one, until we were sitting on my front porch playing with my Barbie dolls and I asked her, why her older sister didn’t like me and why I couldn’t come to her house and she looked me dead in the face and said, “because you are a nigger and my daddy won’t let niggers in the house” and from that day forward it was just kind of like something switched in me, I knew of the word, I knew it was a bad word, but no one had ever said it directly to me and made me feel like I was less than I was because of the color of my skin. There were people who would like meet my mother and they had a hard time believing that I was her real daughter because my mother is really, really light skinned and we had variations in skin tone but most of the family seemed to stick within the same variation and my family is just kind of all over the place and so they were like “this is your real mother? Not like a cousin who is taking care of you?” and I am like “yes, this is my real mother” and because, there were people who said “your mother is so, so pretty” and when I looked in the mirror I did not see anything that looked like my mother so I am like, “am I not pretty?” because my father is very dark skinned and she would always tell me that when they first started dating, everybody was like “why are you dating him?, he is so dark skinned and you can do so so much better” meanwhile his friends were like patting him on the back and they were like “you got a light skinned girl, that is great” and so it was like I don’t know which way to go, I am closer to my dad’s skin tone and I look like my dad and so does that mean not only am I not attractive I am not considered a person either? Have all of these people I have been around my whole life calling me a “nigger” inside of their head and this little girl was the first one not to see anything wrong with saying that to me? And I never told a soul about that day until like two years ago, it just randomly came up.

AH: You didn’t go to your mom afterwards?

BC: No I didn’t, it was just something kind of like, I thought it went away after a while, but it just kind of like stuck with me and just dug deep into me and it never really left me. And I do not think that I brought it up willingly until I was ready to address it and not be drug down by it.

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