The issue of race has always been a problem in my Cape Verdean family—and in my life. We constantly argue about whether we’re white or black. My dad says he stayed with my mom to better his race, by lightening the color of his children, and I’d better not mess up his plan by bringing a black boy home.
It wasn’t until I was away at college that I started to question him seriously about his past. It was in Mozambique that my father’s views about race were formed. As the Cape Verdean son of an official in the administration of a Portuguese colony, my father led a privileged life, living in a big house with many servants.
All of that changed when he went away to a boarding school attended almost entirely by the children of white Portuguese settlers. My dad was neither Portuguese nor white, so he was constantly bullied, beaten up, made fun of, and humiliated. The whiter students called him “nigger” and other epithets, the very names he now calls people who are darker than he is. Had my dad’s family stayed in Cape Verde, where color lines are blurred and there is no outright racism, I believe my dad would not be the way he is.
My mother is the lightest in our family, and her thin, fine hair goes with the rest of her features. She has round dark eyes and a straight, European-looking nose, the thin lips associated with being white, and a pale complexion. My brother and I both inherited many of her features, but our noses differ. Mine is broader and his is straighter, on account of our having different dads. And even though we have similar features and complexions, we have different mind-sets. We both identify strongly as Cape Verdean; he, however, identifies with being white, whereas I identify with being black.
It gets complicated when my family talks about skin color. They believe that black is ugly, but so is being “too white”; our Cape Verdean color is just right. The reality is that Cape Verdeans are mixed both culturally and racially, and are many different shades.
My elementary school, after we moved to the United States, was attended mostly by Cape Verdean children of all colors, some Latinos, African-Americans, and a few whites. I never thought of myself as a “minority.”
That changed when I transferred to a private all-girls Quaker high school attended primarily by white Jewish girls. Overnight I became not only a minority but, because of my mixed racial background, also “exotic” and very much the “other.” In this society, I wasn’t just Cape Verdean—I was black. My parents had told me I was a white Cape Verdean, but being in a majority-white school made me think maybe I wasn’t white enough.
I remember the first time I felt that I was better than my cousins because I was lighter. I was 7, and my hair was down to my waist. I was standing in front of the mirror having my cousins detangle my hair when the “hair problem” reared its ugly head. My cousins always fought with each other over who would comb my hair, which was soft and curly and long—not “black” hair.
My cousins and I had just come back from the beach, and all of us had washed and combed our hair. Mine was air-drying; theirs was being flat-ironed and pulled in every direction by their mother to make it straight. My young cousin asked her mother why my hair didn’t need to be straightened like hers. “Because her hair is nice and is not kinky like yours,” her mother replied with a sigh. I beamed. To me at age 7, those words meant that I had won, that, despite my African features, I had one thing they didn’t have—nicer hair—and therefore I was whiter. I was too young to understand that my hair’s being “whiter” made me less black.
Today I find myself wishing my hair were kinkier in order to qualify truly as “black.” I do not use chemicals to make it straight; all it needs is one good pass of the flat iron—just like a white girl’s hair. Being able to walk out of the shower and let my hair air-dry into my hairstyle is a freedom that my black friends do not have. Because of my hair, the black community has identified me as not being truly black. Thus I have to prove to them that I am African and that I, too, have experienced racism. It’s a constant struggle for me to identify as black, and I wonder how many more years I will have to fight to amass sufficient cultural capital to be considered black by other blacks.
The privileges I supposedly receive in America because of my light skin have been detailed to me by my friends at college who are considerably darker than I am. They say that white people will treat me with more respect because I am light-skinned; that if I straightened my hair more often, I could easily be taken for a “maybe” white girl; and that I will be able to get jobs a darker-skinned person will not. With each such “privilege,” my separation from black people becomes increasingly clear.
When I have challenged the idea that my hair can determine the course of my life, my black college friends say, “Of course your hair matters! It’s been proven by scientific research that when a black girl wears her hair straight to a job interview, then she is more likely to get hired than if she wears her hair natural.”
A dark-skinned Dominican friend said, “When I have my hair curly, I always get curious looks, but when I have my hair straight, I don’t. Watch. Straighten your hair for one day and see the difference in the comments you get.”
So I decided to straighten my hair for one day and walk around the campus to see what would happen. Sure enough, people came up to me asking to touch my hair, and I got lots of positive comments: “Your hair looks so pretty.” “Your hair is so long!” “Can I touch it? Wow, it’s so silky!”
White standards of beauty had won; my straight hair got me more attention than my curly hair. The most dramatic difference I noticed was that white boys who had never paid attention to me gave me flirty smiles and talked to me. Not once while I was wearing my hair curly had white boys struck up a conversation with me on a nonacademic topic.
Despite all of the attention I get with straight hair, I still prefer my natural hairstyle, which I believe makes me appear more ethnic, more black.
I identify as black, but in the eyes of the world I am neither black nor white. When I try to affiliate with black student organizations, black students often don’t know what to make of me. They say, “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” implying that, as a light-skinned girl, I don’t know what it is to be truly black. They seem to consider themselves the arbiters of who is truly black, and I get lost in the shuffle.
Although I am African and I identify mostly with African-American culture, I feel as if I’m not being taken seriously at black group events because of my light skin. To make up for the lack of recognition by fellow black people, I tend to adopt my friends’ accents and mannerisms to appear “more black.” I leave my hair curly to keep from looking “too white.” I stay out in the summer sun as much as possible to get a tan and appear “more black.” I take classes in African-American studies, where I often feel that comments from lighter-skinned and African students are delegitimized because we have not gone through the same experiences as the African-American students.
I will continue to state that I am black, despite being labeled a “nigger lover” by my family, being made fun of as the whitest person in a group of “truly black” people, and always having to fight to be accepted as black. Maybe someday those racial categories can be dissolved and I’ll no longer have to choose.