![\"what-are-you\"](\"http:\/\/theangryblackwoman.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/icons\/nisishawl.jpg\")
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Been looking all over for\u00a0the Natasha Raymond\u00a0poem by that title. Natasha and I performed it with my friend Elise (menshed in “My Favorite Beatle” below) in venues around Ann Arbor, Michigan.<\/p>\n
Natasha, like\u00a0most mixed race people, got that question a lot, and as a light-skinned black woman I could and can\u00a0relate.\u00a0 “What are you?” these inquiring minds always asked her.\u00a0 The poem runs through her various possible responses: human; a woman; various fractions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Kim Jong-il.\u00a0 It ends with her fantasy of turning the tables, questioning her questioner, then deciding there’s no need for that, “because I already know what<\/em> you are.”<\/p>\n I get that question from white people and from blacks.\u00a0 Bus riders, online daters, anybody and everybody sees me as fair game for it.\u00a0 Whites are a little more circumspect in recent years about voicing the question, but it still hangs on the hedges of their teeth, behind the roses of their mouths, wishing it could utter itself.<\/p>\n What am I?\u00a0 I identify as African American, black for short.\u00a0 That’s one answer.\u00a0 If you look at me you can see some European heritage, pretty obviously, but no whites in my families’ woodpiles for five generations back.\u00a0 Unless you count the ones that passed, like my paternal grandfather Vandeleur Rickman.<\/p>\n But that’s another story.<\/p>\n What am I?\u00a0 If I want to get technical with my answer, I\u00a0use the term\u00a0”high yella.”\u00a0 Then I’ll talk a bit about the history of color consciousness.\u00a0 My father’s family and most of my mother’s belonged to the “paper bag club.”\u00a0 That is, their skins were no darker than your typical grocery bag.\u00a0\u00a0 How relieved June’s and Denny’s folks must have been when they found each other, two properly pale people.\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, they loved one another, but the main thing\u00a0was that\u00a0they’d have\u00a0paper bag babies.\u00a0 But my middle sister, Julie, was born darker than either of them, darker than me; she\u00a0was saved from ostracism only by her “good” hair.\u00a0 Then, when I was six years old and she was four, I cut it all off her head.<\/p>\n That’s also\u00a0another story.\u00a0 I’ve already written and sold it.\u00a0 It’s called “Cruel Sistah,” and they reprinted it in the Year’s Best Fantasy #19.<\/p>\n What am I.\u00a0 When the dreadlocky man on the sidewalk outside Ross Dress for Less<\/em> asked me that I igged him.\u00a0 He didn’t want an answer anyways, I could tell that from how he kept on saying the same thing over and over again without waiting for me to reply.<\/p>\n To\u00a0riff off\u00a0what I wrote in my first post here, maybe you’ve never wanted to\u00a0ask that question, because you\u00a0thought you\u00a0already knew\u00a0me?\u00a0 Or maybe not.\u00a0 Could be you’re unsure now and\u00a0always have been.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Could be that unsureness is quite all right with you.<\/p>\n What am I?\u00a0 I am beyond what, and way, way into who.<\/p>\n And this is my last post.\u00a0 If you don’t know me by now, you will never, never, never know me.\u00a0 Woo-oo-oo.<\/p>\n Thank you, Tempest, and thank you everyone who has commented me.<\/p>\nAnd now a word from our sponsor…<\/h4>\n
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