I spent a week with a dear friend who is one of the few people I could actually say understands what it is like being me. She is also 31, immigrant, female, black, a professional, single and christian living in America. We have both made mistakes in the past and are quite self sufficient.
We discussed many things and one of the things that saps a lot of the pep from our sails is the feeling of being the token black person in predominantly white spaces. There are conversations you just don't have when you are the only black person in white spaces. You decide that it isn't worth constantly explaining why some things are never ok. You decide that there is a line you won't cross in sharing your personality or what interests you for fear of appearing 'too good' or 'too bad' in the eyes of your colleagues. You laugh less, because often your jokes/ what is funny to you is colored by your personal experience and you can't be bothered to explain that there is no good translation for why you are giggling. Most of all, you are tired of subtle or unsubtle micro aggressions against you or those who look like you and are stuck in the same position as you.
In the last 6 months since Trump has been president my parents call me weekly... in my entire adult life my parents have never seen the need to call me this frequently and I should remind you that I went to boarding school at 15, They know how to live without me. They are constantly concerned about if I am being treated well. I reminded them this weekend that the incidence of racism hasn't changed because Trump is president. The change is that people have been emboldened to stop pretending that they are ok with people who do not look like them having the same opportunities as they do.
Being the token person means sometimes that you aren't allowed to be drunk or fail in any way because your entire race is seen as fallen, failures, ne'er do wells at baseline. You start to ask yourself what parts of your personality are real and what parts are the ones you put up to cope with the whiteness and its pervasiveness about you. I read an article about a lady who adopted two black children and how she had to change churches because of the overt and often covert racism directed at her children. I laughed out loud in my care. First of all, why, does she have to be the one to tell this story!!!! Why is this a thing in 2017? It is a thing that black bodies have known forever. Being good enough is entirely relative when you are seen as subpar because of your skin. So now she knows what it is like to feel like every black mother in America. Welcome to the club. As a Christian it pained me deeply because church for me has always been a safe space. But here, in the US I am still a minority in my church and that isn't because this is a town without minorities, it is because and rightly so, there is often a deep distrust of majority white spaces by black people here. I didn't have to think about this in England, even though it (my church) was probably, statistically made of mostly people of european heritage with smatterings of east asians and africans, bound by the forgiveness Christ gives of the sins of colonialism. My thoughts here are something I wish I could share with my fellow American Christian sisters but I don't know that I can. I probably can with my friend Jess who lived in England with me or Jo who was the same because they have been 'radicalized' .
Back to the church thing, I didn't feel 'normal' in the first church I attended here even though it was solid on bible teaching.
