As my pseudonym suggests, I have a complicated background. Growing up in Montgomery, AL, presented several challenges for a girl from the West side raised by blue collar parents. I remember my childhood in long bus rides across town to the more affluent neighborhood schools (read: white). My friends had straight blond hair, nicer houses, and it never seemed that their parents had to worry about where the next meal was coming from or how the power bill would be paid any particular month. At age 8, friends from school invited me to church and pretty soon I was living a life in two different worlds and I was learning the value of camouflage. I learned to fit in to a world where it became a joke to suggest that I was actually a black American. And I eventually learned to turn the proper down a notch when answering my phone at home, so as not to confuse family friends into thinking they had called a house that belonged to “somebody white” and hanging up. I taught myself to take it as a compliment when older white ladies in my church described me as “articulate” (Reid: speaking without a Negro dialect). I did notice that they never described my white friends that way—it was assumed that they would speak standard written American English. But I am neither mad at them nor Senator Reid.
I capitalized on the opportunities that being the polite, articulate little black girl brought me.
I capitalized on the opportunities that being the polite, articulate little black girl brought me.
