Abrams - Black lotus: a womans search for racial identity

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Gallery Books

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Karen Hunter Publishing

A Division of Suitt-Hunter Enterprises, LLC

P.O. Box 632

South Orange, NJ 07079

Copyright 2016 by Sil Lai Abrams

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Distributed by Gallery Books. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Karen Hunter Publishing/Gallery Books hardcover edition August 2016

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Jacket design by James Perales

Jacket image: lotus flower Robert Llewellyn/Getty Images; background paper long8614/Shutterstock

Author photography by Che Williams

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4516-8846-7

ISBN 978-1-4516-8848-1 (ebook)

F OR A MANDA

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and recreate yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in factthis may sound very strangeyou have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

JAMES BALDWIN

A FTER A COUPLE OF MINUTES of small talk, I knew. I knew it was going to happen, tonight. I was about to cross the threshold from just a girl to a girl with sexual appeal.

I was on the verge of my first French kiss and I had absolutely no idea how the hell to do it. Matt began to lean in toward me. Everything was moving in slow motion as our faces came together with expectant tension. My mind raced over how I was going to execute this foreign dance of tongues, when he suddenly pulled back to a comfortable distance and said:

You arent black, are you?

No! I said in a loud stammer. Im not black!

Okay, cool.

He leaned back in and pressed his mouth against mine. Instinctively, I opened my mouth and allowed his tongue to slip between my lips. My mind was buzzing with fear that he would scratch up against my braces. Holding my breath, I did my best to follow his lead. His tongue entered my mouth, then mine his seven times, then capped off with a peck on the lips. I literally counted each stroke of his tongue, and with each touch wished that it would end. The uncertainty of my technique was killing me, and I didnt want him telling everyone that I was bad kisser.

As our bodies moved apart, I felt an instantaneous disconnect from the boy I had fantasized for months about kissing. With the sexual tension gone, we were once again two relative strangers facing each other in the shadows of the skating rink. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Matt said, Well, I gotta go. Ill see you around.

Yeah, see you was my quiet reaction. I watched as he walked away and reconnected with his best friend and fellow skater boy Robbie, who had just emerged from the back of the rink with his latest sexual conquest. Rushing to the building entrance, I waited for my friends Marideth and Wendi to come outside so we could catch a ride home together.

I saw them smiling and waving as they exited the rink. Their faces were a relief. Where did you go, Sil Lai? Wendi asked. I hesitated for a moment, then told them both what had happened between Matt and me. Leaving out his question about my race, of course.

Good for you! You finally had your first kiss! Did you like it? Was he a good kisser?

I didnt know if Matt was a good kisser or not. After all, I had no frame of reference. But I laughed and said, Yeah, he was good, as we watched my mom pull up in our familys eight-passenger van.

I didnt say much during the brief ten-minute ride home. Once we pulled up into our driveway, I hugged the girls goodbye and ran into my house. After brushing my teeth and washing my face, I went to my room and lay on my bed. Doing as I had done so many times before, I stared up at the ceiling in the dark.

My mood was disturbed. A first kiss is supposed to be a happy teenage moment, or at the very least, a triumphant one. Yet mine was overshadowed by the fact that I had to lie about who I was in order to achieve it. Had Matt asked me the question about my race three weeks earlier, it would have been an honest answer. As far as I knew up until that point, I was Chinese, white, and Hawaiian. But I had just found out the truth about my racial identity and paternity, so what I had told him was a conscious lie. It sullied our already awkward interaction with shame. My takeaway from my first kiss wasnt sexual. It was social. I learned that if I ever expected any boy to touch me, I would have to lie about who I was.

Passing describes the choice to identify as a member of another racial group rather than face social prejudice. Passing has been practiced in other cultures, such as Jews seeking to avoid persecution from Nazis during World War II who passed as non-Jews in order to survive. But today the term is used almost exclusively to describe black people who consciously adopt a white identity.

The origin of this practice stems largely from slavery and Jim Crow: the systematic economic, educational, and social degradation forced on blacks in America by law. The system of Jim Crow, which legislated segregation, enabled the disenfranchisement of black people, and institutionalized white superiority led a significant number of light-skinned brothers and sisters to assimilate into white society. Civil rights activist and NAACP leader Walter White wrote in his Saturday Evening Post feature Why I Remain a Negro that approximately 12,000 blacks vanished into white society on an annual basis. This article was written in 1947, but the message of white supremacy and anti-blackness has been perpetuated for centuries. Fear, shame, and the desire to escape the burden of blackness continues to lead some black people to pass today.

In late 2010, I gave a lecture at Tuskegee University on the subject of colorism, which is the discrimination between members of the same race based upon the color of ones skin. During the question and answer session following this discussion, many students shared views sadly showing how these ideas persist, even among young people who were among the descendants of those who actively participated in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.