“No, it’s okay,” I said. I twisted my upper body towards him and said, “I call myself a black woman because that’s what I am. I can be both a black woman and a human. Those two identities aren’t separate from each other.”
“But why would you call yourself black?” he persisted. “To me, you are not black. You do not present yourself as a black woman, or at least the ones who I’ve heard about. You went to Princeton, you speak many foreign languages, you travel. If this were many decades ago, I might have married you.”
I refused to make eye contact with Augustyna’s aunt. Now the tension had escalated. Had his stare been underscored by his attraction to me, his inability to see me as both a black woman and a human, or both?
She chimed in, “She could’ve married our son! I mean, he’s married now and has a kid but before, you know.”
I suddenly lost my appetite. I continued to eat so that I would not be rude, but my embarrassment filled my stomach. I felt like chattel, as though I should have been flattered that I could have been acceptable as a wife for this man or his son. Marriage was something done to me, not a choice I made; a gift that a white man would deign to bestow because I met his standards. I wondered if he would have talked this way about me in front of his wife if I had been a white woman. I wondered if she didn’t take offense because she was extremely confident in both herself and her marriage, or because I was black and black women could be shuffled like playing cards in the hands of white men.
At the same time, I wanted to be in his presence in order to expose him to someone different and force him to confront his own prejudices. It was unfathomable to me that he could have lived for four or five decades in America and never interacted with a black woman. If I had to be the first, so be it. But that was not what I’d signed up for when I agreed to come to Augustyna’s home for lunch.
Augustyna’s husband, in his jovial, unassuming, and indubitably British voice, added, “I don’t understand why they are labels to begin with. We are all human. When I look at you, I see a human.”
I thought that I might be interrogated about my arguments surrounding police brutality. I didn’t think my hosts would suggest that black womanhood is diametrically opposed to humanity.
I thought about Chris from OkCupid who said when he saw my profile, he didn’t see a “black woman,” only a “woman.” Between that experience and the one at Augustyna’s home, I had been trapped in a paradox. These white men acted as if there was no difference between me and them, but in doing so they made it clear that I had to shed my identity as a black woman. I cannot be both perceived as a human and a black woman in their eyes because those two identities are incompatible with each other. My black womanhood cancels out my humanity because black womanhood is inhuman.
White people think it is a compliment when they do not “see” you as a black person. In their minds, black people embody the biggest clusterfuck of societal ills: out-of-wedlock pregnancies, single mothers, drug addicts, high school dropouts. They are robbers, killers, rapists, convicts, degenerates, vagabonds, couch potatoes. Their pants are always sagging, they talk too loudly, they can barely speak English correctly, they dance too sexually. They cannot assimilate to white society, and if they seem perfectly okay with eschewing it, then they are condemned to being black because in a white society, blackness only exists as a punishment. They do not understand that blackness doesn’t undermine but rather vivifies our humanity.
In my experience, white people are the only ones who purport to advance equality through the erasure or rejection of marginalized people’s identities, which signals to me that they have fooled themselves into believing that they are “unraced.” This belief is false, because it is based on the idea that whiteness is the human standard and that furthermore, by virtue of them being white, they are the arbiters of humanity. The Three-Fifths Compromise, a clause in the US Constitution that allowed for a state to count three-fifths of each black person when determining population for legislative representation in the House of Representatives, is a prime example of racism at its crudest level. People can only access their humanity by casting away all identities that exclude them from this white standard.
I did not respond to Augustyna’s husband’s comment, instead stuffing more arugula in my mouth like a rabbit meddling in someone’s garden patch.
The last question her uncle asked me was this: “Why do you only write about black people? Aren’t you afraid of cutting yourself short? You’re a smart girl. You can write about anything.”
I quietly laid my fork down on my plate. “I love writing about black people, and no, I don’t think I’m cutting myself short, especially when our narratives are often neglected or dismissed altogether.”
Augustyna nodded, and we proceeded into another room for Polish tea and pastries.
On the ride back to the train station, Augustyna profusely apologized for her uncle’s behavior. She explained that because of his bluntness, he is rarely invited to social events, and whenever she invites people over to her home they can become uncomfortable. I was partly relieved that Augustyna was not defending her uncle, but I was also somewhat disappointed that she did not defend me more during that conversation. Then again, what could she have done? She was learning, too, intently watching me when I spoke. Would I have liked it if she had tried to interject and given her thoughts on an experience that was not hers? And we all have (often older) family members who are “too far gone” on certain issues, who have not been swayed by any kind of new argument since the Kennedy administration. Accepting this is a resignation and an act of self-preservation in order to retain our peace and sanity by not expending intellectual and emotional labor on those who haven’t asked for it.