“Be yourself” seems insufficient at times like this. I know from my experience with integration that it takes a long time to own your identity. In an all-black elementary school in Cleveland, I carried around a dogeared copy of “A Little Princess” and listened to Bach on my transistor radio. Nobody paid attention. When my family moved to Shaker Heights, an affluent suburb known for its successfully integrated schools, I encountered the war over who was authentically black. I had hoped that when I raised my own children there wouldn’t be any more litmus tests, that a healthy black identity could come in many styles. But the impulse to pigeonhole each other endures.
As I considered what to say to Spenser, I recalled my own struggles over my accent. In seventh grade, I was rehearsing a play after school when a group of black girls passed by. “You talk like a honky,” their leader said. “You must think you’re white.” In the corner of my eye, I could see her bright yellow radio, shaped like a tennis ball, swinging like a mace. A phrase I’d found intriguing flashed through my mind: “The best defense is a good offense.” I stepped forward and slapped her hard.
I was suspended for that fight, but I felt I deserved a medal. My true reward came later, when I heard two girls talking about me in the hallway. “I heard she’s an oreo,” one said. “Don’t let her hear you say that,” the other replied, " ‘cause she’ll kick your butt!"
I hesitate to tell Spenser to be himself because I know it’s not that simple. From integration, I learned that you have to fight for the right to be yourself, and often, your opponents have the same color skin as you. My sons will discover, as I did, that you can feign a black accent, but your loyalty will continue to be tested as long as you allow it.
In high school, I enhanced my reputation as an “oreo” by participating in activities that most black students didn’t: advanced-placement classes, the school newspaper and the debate team. Mostly, I enjoyed being different. It put me in a unique position to challenge the casually racist assumptions of my liberal classmates. I remember a question posed by my social-studies teacher, “How many of you grew up addressing your black housekeepers by their first names?” Many students raised their hands. “And how many of you addressed white adults that way?” The hands went down. One girl moaned: “That’s not racist. Everybody does that.”
“We never addressed our housekeeper that way,” I said. In the silence that followed, I could feel myself being reassessed. I’d challenged my classmate on the fairness of a privilege she had, like many whites, taken completely for granted. I had defied the unspoken understanding of how blacks in white settings are supposed to be: transparent and accommodating.
If black students inflicted upon each other a rigid code of “blackness,” liberal whites assumed that the blacks in their midst would not dispute their right-mindedness. Being myself, I found, could be lonely. In high school, I grew weary of walking the tightrope between black and white.
By college, I was eating regularly at the controversial “black tables” of Harvard’s Freshman Union. I talked black, walked black and dated black men. My boyfriend, an Andover graduate, commented on my transformation by saying that I had never been an oreo; I was really a “closet militant.” I laughed at the phrase; it had an element of truth. I had learned that people–black or white–tend to demonize what they don’t understand and can’t control. So I sometimes hid the anger, ambition and self-confidence that provoked their fear. Integration taught me to have two faces: one that can get along with anybody and one that distrusts everybody.
I’ve seen both sides, now. I’ve “hung” white and I’ve “hung” black, and been stereotyped by both groups. I choose integration for my children, not out of idealism, but a pragmatic assessment of what it takes to grow up. When it comes to being yourself–and finding out who that person is–you’re on your own. Experimentation is a prerequisite, trying on various accents and dress styles, mandatory. Diversity is the best laboratory for building individuality.
I am about to explain this to Spenser, when I see him change, like quicksilver, into someone else. Playfully, he stretches his arm out toward my face, turns his gap-toothed smile in the opposite direction and, in a tone as maddening as it is endearing, he says, “Mom, talk to the hand.”
