Brown Skin – My Identity

I keep saying, “What are we teaching our young black males? What are we saying to them about the value of black lives, when we tell them it’s okay to scuffle with a policeman after committing a crime and still expect to go on living? What are we telling them when we don’t raise an eyebrow when they senselessly kill one another? Why is it okay to kill your brother? Why are we okay with remaining silent when we kill one another but want to raise hell when someone other than a black person kills one of us?” I admit, I’m sometimes confused. I sometimes find myself trying to determine who I am in the midst of everything that is unfolding in front of my eyes.

My Identity

Who am I?

Am I me or have I been forced

to be we, a generic identity

that labels all brown-skinned beings

the same. We’re allways under suspicion.

Labels were embedded beneath our skin

as we lay in our mother’s arms that first time,

a solemn beginning to the inevitable end:

Will act suspiciously even when standing still.

Will walk the mall under suspicion.

Driving a car will cause them to raise a

suspicious eye

‘cause I have two perfectly fine feet

to carry me where I need to be

at any given time.

But even when I’m walking

you raise an eyebrow at me.

There’s just no rhyme or reason to explain

how my brown skin causes me to allways be

suspect, criminal, thug, thief, dead.

All my shuffling & scraping to get by

will never be enough to free me.

I’ll always be held hostage to an identity,

one you use to label me:

suspect, criminal, thug, thief, dead.

I keep thinking about the day I took my son, Cameron, to football practice for the first time. He attends a private religious school and he’s part of the minority in the school. So it was no surprise to discover he’d be the only brown-skinned boy on the football team, out of nine boys. That didn’t deter us. We went happily. Because part of his imaginative play every day involves him playing football. He said he lives for the game. We’d never met any of the families before the day of the first practice. We arrived about eight minutes late, so practice had already begun. We rushed from the car to get him onto the field and we passed an SUV with a white woman inside. She reached over and locked her door when she looked and saw us approaching. No one saw it but me. My kids, all of them, were with me, but none of them saw that reflex reaction displayed: reaching over and locking the car door. That action instantly made me feel like an outsider, like I didn’t belong there. But I didn’t want to deny my son this opportunity. And eventually the mother exited the SUV and came over and introduced herself. No problem here, right? Wrong. I still feel like we don’t belong. I’ve never felt that way before. I always felt like I was one of the good ones, so no one would judge me like the people breaking laws. That is until they did. And that’s where this poem came from. Just another experience in the day of a brown-skinned woman.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind