How Hearing an AC/DC song in Africa Ended My Tokenism
Don’t Tell Me I’m Acting White
Like many, I resonated with Ramesh Nagarajah’s recent article “Reflections From a Token Black Friend.” I also grew up being one of the only Black students at every school I went to. So I know that when someone says, “I have a Black friend,” it says a lot more about the Black friend’s tolerance than it does the white persons. I also understand that merely existing in that kind of environment can lead to tolerating more than you should simply to avoid being labeled “the angry Black guy” or having to deal with being called “white” simply for fitting in in ways they didn’t expect.
I stopped catering to those concerns when I turned 18 and went from being one of the only Black students at a rural Virginia high school to volunteering in Southern Africa during the height of the AIDS pandemic. During my time there many experiences challenged my notions of culture, privilege and happiness, but one particular bus ride and my reaction to an AC/DC song redefined my notion of Blackness. Looking back on it now, more than twenty years later, I can now appreciate that this bus ride changed how I navigate being Black in white spaces, which continued on for me in law school. This bus ride is why I can today still say I have many white friends and have not had to compromise anything about myself to have them.
It all started for me while returning from teaching a class out in a village in Botswana. In this village, the bus stop was a tree with a hand-painted sign that simply read, “Bus.” I walked up and joined a few other people who were sitting on a log huddled in the shade of the tree trying to keep cool. Early November meant the southern hemisphere was creeping closer to summer; the already ridiculously hot weather was finding a way to get hotter still. It also meant occasional small amounts of rain, which was already greening up the desert.
After a couple of hours, the twice a day fifteen-seater bus finally pulled up in a cloud of dust blaring music. The driver turned the radio down and his assistant quickly hopped out to help people load their things. I got on and took one of the last remaining seats next to a colorfully dressed, elderly woman who greeted me with a toothless smile. Everyone on the bus was laughing and chatting, and all the new arrivals joined right in. I was thoroughly convinced everyone in Botswana knew each other since this always seemed to happen. My Setswana, however, wasn’t good enough to ever understand what they were talking about, though cows did seem to be a reoccurring topic of conversation if I heard them correctly. The instant joyous camaraderie felt familiar. I’d seen the same thing many times in the States when large groups of blacks got together, with barbershops and backyard barbeques being perfect examples.
“Growing up in America, my racial identity — my Blackness — was something I consciously thought about all the time because it was regularly challenged by both blacks and whites.”
Once the other new passengers and I were settled in and started paying the assistant, the bus slowly took off down the untarred, bumpy road. As it bounced along kicking up a trail of dust in its wake, the driver turned the music back up. It had an infectious beat provided by African drums and a melody that allowed everyone on the bus, except me, to effortlessly harmonize with a timber to their voice that reverberated throughout my entire body when they drew out and held a note. If I were to ever sit next to a person who didn’t at least tap their foot to this kind of music, I’d scoot away for fear their soulless condition might be contagious. With everyone on the bus either clapping or singing along, a festive, heart-enlarging atmosphere was created, and I couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear as I moved along to the music and the swaying of the bouncing bus. It was one of those simple, yet euphoric moments of life you could live in forever.
After about thirty minutes of this perfection, the tape ended. The driver popped it out and quickly found a replacement. On came AC/DC’s She Shook Me All Night Long, a rock classic and arguably the polar opposite of what had just been playing with its focus on guitars and high pitched scratchy voiced singing. I immediately stopped dancing. The smile on my face ran away, and my body stiffened. The contrasting musical style, however, wasn’t at the heart of my new-found rigidness. It was that I didn’t deem the music to be black enough, and I forced all the good vibes out of my body to show everyone how committed I was to my Blackness. But I appeared to be the only one suffering from that belief. Everyone else went right back to enjoying themselves and bobbing their heads to the music, including the elderly woman next to me. These people, whose Black credentials were beyond reproach — not only were they Black, they were African Black — were enjoying the music because they found it enjoyable.
“Racial stereotypes have been so deeply embedded in some Black folk that it causes them to feel they can take on the role of policing other’s Blackness.”
Growing up in America, my racial identity — my Blackness — was something I consciously thought about all the time because it was regularly challenged by both Blacks and whites. The result, I realized all at once on that bus, was that I had internalized other people’s ideas of what it meant and what I must do to be “Black.” I had imposed limits on myself about what I could and couldn’t like or do, and classic rock was high up on the list of things that weren’t “black enough” for me to appreciate. This would be no different than if a boy liked a pink shirt but wouldn’t allow himself to buy it out of fear of how other people would react to him liking a “girl” color.
My entire educational career had been in overwhelming white schools; however, I did a good job of fitting in. Maybe too good of a job since I would frequently be told while in high school that I was “the whitest Black guy” many of my classmates had ever met. They would say this in flagrant disregard for the sample bias our 97% white, one-thousand person high school represented. The comment, which was sometimes said as though I should take it as a compliment, always stung, even before I had the words to articulate why.
“I’m intelligent, well-spoken, and generally haven’t modeled anything about myself from hip-hop videos. I have a good work ethic and can be impressively well-mannered if I feel a situation warrants my best behavior. “
These have been the underlying reasons some have felt they could question my racial identity. The idea that any of that should cause me to not be viewed as black, however, is out-and-out racist; it’s saying these relatively common characteristics are out of reach of the typical Black American. When black Americans would make similar comments or call me a “Milk Dud,” a candy that’s Black on the outside and light on the inside, it was because they had similarly taken issue with the way I speak, the way I carry myself and that I had adapted to a larger swath of American culture than just Black culture. And I believe it was often said in an attempt to shame me into some type of conformity.
Unlike when these remarks come from whites, when coming from a black person, I don’t consider them to be the result of racist thinking. I consider them to be, instead, an effect of racism and the way it continues to be imposed on black people to such an extent that it causes some of us to put severe limitations on who we can be. Racial stereotypes have been so deeply embedded in some Black folk that it causes them to feel they can take on the role of policing other’s Blackness. Some of these same Black Americans taking issue with those of us who dare to assimilate to any degree into mainstream America believe that taking school seriously, speaking English formally, eating healthy or being able to maneuver in environments that aren’t Black-dominated is a betrayal to Blackness. But why the hell would they have us give up such valuable ground, and how on earth does that do anything but play into the hands of racists?
“Why am I holding myself to some restrictive idea of Blackness that these Africans on this bus most certainly aren’t,” I thought to myself as everyone continued rocking out to the music. The realization that, in trying to live up to other people’s notions of Blackness, I was denying myself untold opportunities, experiences and pleasures made me think of an African proverb I’d heard earlier in the trip about a man looking to buy crabs: As the story goes, a man went out to a dock where a crabber had three barrels of crabs. Two of the barrels had lids on them and on top of the lids were large rocks holding them in place. Still, the lids on these two barrels were clearly being pushed up on from beneath and it looked like the crabs might make their way out at any moment. The third barrel, however, was completely uncovered even though it also had crabs in it.
Curious about this, the man asked the crabber, “Why do those two barrels have lids while the other does not?”
The crabber replied, “That barrel, unlike the others, is full of African crabs. You don’t have to put a lid on them.”
“Why is that?” the man asked.
“Well, with African crabs, anytime one of them tries to climb out, the others will pull it back down.”
I had, with a lot of help, been living in a barrel of my own making and all I had to do to get out was stop caring what other people thought about me. From that moment, I would fight against allowing any decision in my life to be dictated by other people’s definitions of Blackness or manliness, or any other social construct meant to inhibit me. My only standard for deciding what I liked would be if I liked it, and I could rest assured that I’d still be Black, just like the people on that bus. They didn’t let being Black restrict who they could be, they let who they were expand what it meant to be Black.
Obviously, this epiphany did nothing to reduce the frequency of people challenging my race. Quite the opposite. In the years following my emergence from the cocoon of racial limitations, my colorful wings attracted more attention and more negative comments, but that was okay because my connection to my Blackness had also grown. Learning that being Black wasn’t about a checklist of things I must like and interests I must avoid helped me hone in on the underpinning of the connection I feel with Black Americans and Black Africans.
On the one hand, I came to view being Black as being nothing more than an adjective to describe the color of my skin. On the other, however, it is the bond forged by the shared experiences, mistreatment, and oppression that has resulted from how people who look like me have been and continue to be treated. More importantly, it comes from how we’ve never let it dampen the joy, the music, the laughter that is so deep within us that it was able to travel across the ocean in the most unspeakable of conditions and sustain us through hundreds of years of slavery, colonization, apartheid, segregation, and discrimination.
This bus ride and the remainder of my time in southern Africa allowed me to see there were no restrictions on who I could be as a Black person. It would still be a couple more years, frustratingly, before I was able to come up with a retort that properly shut down people who dared tried to pigeonhole me over race and properly frame the thinking behind such comments: “Oh, I’m sorry. Exactly which one of your racial stereotypes am I not living up to?” is now my locked and loaded reply to comments so steeped in narrow, repressive racial thinking — regardless of who says it.
This was as excerpt from my forthcoming book “When a Stolen Child Returns: A Black American Teen Volunteers in Southern Africa During the AIDS Pandemic” For an article with another excerpt click here.