A Moment That Changed Me: A Play Taught Me I Wasn't Unwanted - Just a Black Woman in a White World
I wasn't a particularly pretty or popular teenager. I wasn't a "sexy girl". Yes, I would occasionally go to a party and kiss the occasional boy, but mostly I stuck to my books and my self-righteousness. I laughed at being too busy with exams and lunches at the library. I didn't have time for boys or trivial, silly things. I was serious, an academic, a scholarship holder; I must not be distracted. But inside, I was filled with a kind of low self-esteem that erodes your identity like bile.
When I was 14, I chemically straightened my hair, a process called relaxing. Again, I said all the right things: Variety is fun; I imagined a change; my hair is thick and hard to "manage". boxes and suitcases, determined, with this new beginning, to be a "sexy girl".
At the University of Warwick, then. To the sticky floors of the first week, to Jägers for £1, to meeting more people at once than I had ever had before. Searching, desperately, for proof that I was desirable in the glassy expressions of teenagers as they passed me off as blonder, whiter choices.
Don't you don't get me wrong - I've seen the beauty of all these young women too. But the repeated sting of rejection was heightened by mute confusion. I had straightened my hair, bought a new wardrobe; I didn't understand why things weren't different. When a male friend told me that the boy I was in love with "probably didn't like black girls," it didn't even occur to me to be offended. Although living as a black woman, we had all received the same message – beauty looked like Margot Robbie. Got it.
During my sophomore year, I took a class called Drama and Democracy, taught by the inimitable Carol Rutter. In this all-white classroom, I was handed a copy of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. The piece - whose title is taken from Langston Hughes' poem Harlem- is about black masculinity, class and, above all, dreams. But for me, 19, it was Beneatha Younger, an aspiring doctor, who searches for her identity as a young black woman through the eyes of the two men she dates - a pompous, assimilationist African American and her first generation Yoruba boyfriend, who accuses him, by straightening his hair, of "mutilating" it.
Black hair has always been politicized - and the history of this politicization is as rich and textured as our hair. He was shorn by the colonizers as Africans were forced into homogeneity aboard slave ships and since then he has been mocked, ridiculed and denigrated. Centuries behind...
I wasn't a particularly pretty or popular teenager. I wasn't a "sexy girl". Yes, I would occasionally go to a party and kiss the occasional boy, but mostly I stuck to my books and my self-righteousness. I laughed at being too busy with exams and lunches at the library. I didn't have time for boys or trivial, silly things. I was serious, an academic, a scholarship holder; I must not be distracted. But inside, I was filled with a kind of low self-esteem that erodes your identity like bile.
When I was 14, I chemically straightened my hair, a process called relaxing. Again, I said all the right things: Variety is fun; I imagined a change; my hair is thick and hard to "manage". boxes and suitcases, determined, with this new beginning, to be a "sexy girl".
At the University of Warwick, then. To the sticky floors of the first week, to Jägers for £1, to meeting more people at once than I had ever had before. Searching, desperately, for proof that I was desirable in the glassy expressions of teenagers as they passed me off as blonder, whiter choices.
Don't you don't get me wrong - I've seen the beauty of all these young women too. But the repeated sting of rejection was heightened by mute confusion. I had straightened my hair, bought a new wardrobe; I didn't understand why things weren't different. When a male friend told me that the boy I was in love with "probably didn't like black girls," it didn't even occur to me to be offended. Although living as a black woman, we had all received the same message – beauty looked like Margot Robbie. Got it.
During my sophomore year, I took a class called Drama and Democracy, taught by the inimitable Carol Rutter. In this all-white classroom, I was handed a copy of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. The piece - whose title is taken from Langston Hughes' poem Harlem- is about black masculinity, class and, above all, dreams. But for me, 19, it was Beneatha Younger, an aspiring doctor, who searches for her identity as a young black woman through the eyes of the two men she dates - a pompous, assimilationist African American and her first generation Yoruba boyfriend, who accuses him, by straightening his hair, of "mutilating" it.
Black hair has always been politicized - and the history of this politicization is as rich and textured as our hair. He was shorn by the colonizers as Africans were forced into homogeneity aboard slave ships and since then he has been mocked, ridiculed and denigrated. Centuries behind...
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