What Are You?

As previously seen on Black Coffee Creative, now with a prose intro and audio!(CW: Racism, Swearing, Violence)

Hello, readers and/or listeners! As some of y’all may have picked up from when this piece first appeared in Black Coffee Creative’s publication, as well as from some other pieces of mine, I’m what people in the United States would call “mixed” or “bi/multiracial.” To read the original piece, as well as some awesome work from other writers, click on the post below:

The Face of Race

My Mother’s side of the family mostly consists of western European settlers who colonized what is now rural Texas. The casual cruelty stemming from that colonization and the rhetoric necessary to justify taking someone else’s land is rather evident in a lot of their views and behavior.¹ Needless to say, neither my Mom nor I talk to them much.

My Father’s side of the family is a whole international tale unto itself. Half of his family’s from the Bahamas. The other half is from all over little pockets of what used to be pieces of Great Britain’s empire. There are not-so-distant relatives throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, parts of the Caribbean, and Egypt that I’ll likely never meet.

So, with that in mind, a question that I would get frequently as a child and even as a young adult was, “What are you?” I used to agonize over that question. Sometimes I ruminate about it to myself now.

What I do know is that as someone who’s navigated somewhat unpredictable shifts in treatment based on others’ perception of my race, race has always felt more of a social thing to me, based more in people’s perceptions than the account of my relatives I just relayed to y’all. For a more thorough explanation of such ideas in the context of the terms “white-passing” and “white-presenting,” I’d recommend you check out Marcelius Braxton’s post below:

"White-Passing", "White-Presenting", or Neither?

For a rather comical example, one time I was in my freshman dorm lounge talking to some friends. I’d put on one of my silly voices (think a sophomoric impersonation of Count von Count, [v]one bat, two bats, etc.), and some passerby I’d just met asked if I was an exchange student from Eastern Europe. On the graver end of things, summer’s gotten weird as an adult. I like being in the sun (with sunscreen, thank you!), but I don’t like when store clerks start shadowing me, interrupt my stroll to monitor me in the guise of, “Are you looking for something?” It’s darkly humorous to me that in some grocery clerk’s eyes I’ve gone from “generic” shopper #542 in January to potential shoplifter #IDK in July.

Messed-up and navel-gazey thoughts aside, I came to this piece with all that baggage in mind. I don’t want to preach to you or over-explicate further. So, without further ado, here is, “What Are You?”

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What Are You?

"What are you? Roots?"
Let me spin you
The histories
That predate me:


Many years before
My parents' time,
Ancestors stepped
On stolen sands:


Lukku-Cairi
Now just traces
In names like 'Key'
From Taino.


Caddo Táy:sha'
Pushed from their home,
Changed to Texas
By Moms' forebears.


Soon colonial tongues bore names
Bent in bloody hypo-descent
For people born to my station
I was fortunate to not hear:
Spanish would call me 'cuarterón,'
Which the English soon after stole,
Pirated with shifted vowels
To the caste epithet 'quadroon.'


One day faces kind of like mine
Would meet Harper's Weekly readers:
Chiaroscuro propaganda
Woodcut from 1864,
Detailed emancipated slaves
Both paler and darker than me,
Imploring a war-torn public's
Similarity sympathy.


But really I'm realization
Incarnate of the Supreme Court
Case Loving versus Virginia:
A unanimous decision
Allowed a Bahamian man
To marry a Texan woman
And raise—then tear—a family
In this decaying colony.


"What are you, thing?"
Let me show you
With the objects
That cling to me:


The tangerines
Near Nanna's pool
In her backyard
Outside Nassau,


The pecan pies
Mom taught herself,
Since my Granny
Burnt everything,


The airplane flights
That came and went
To tie both trees
And cut them free,


The dialects and creoles shown
Only in phone conversations,
Glitchy Skype communications,
Snippets of holiday visits
With relatives who exiled us
For Mom's cardinal sin: voting
To not stomp on people like her
"Off-white" children: my sis and me.


"What are you, boy?"
Some burnt stranger
Asked me from his
Rusty red truck.


A collection
Of body parts
That confound him
And shift in time:


The baby blues
That age has changed
To something not
Quite like Mom's green,


But certainly 
Not the deep brown
Of my father
Or my sister,


Ambiguous,
Blending in light
Of whatever
Terms you affix.


The inevitable sunburn
Blushing Mom's freckles on Dad's nose
As the waxing of each summer
Charts the wane of my mousy waves
And golden curls to solid brown,
Which, like my parents shaped their tongues
To dress what came out of my mouth,
I tried many techniques to "tame."


"What are you, man?"
They jump to this
Before they ask
"Who are you?" Huh.


There's quite a bit
I've had to hide
When the answer
Means "peace" or strife,


When honesty
Many have met
With disbelief
Or suspicion,


Labels become
Entrance exams
To see if I
Pass in/Fail out.


Maybe I'm the college baby
Gay who ran an experiment
To see what kind of men invite
Themselves to ask me such questions
When I edited my profile
Between white and more than one race,
How often cloudy eyes earned praise
Over other parts I'd market.


"What are you, huh?"
Well, who are you
And why should I
Reify that?


Are you the news
Who interviewed
My friend and I
As if our light


Complexions gave
A guiding light
For "folks at home"
To comprehend


That maybe they
Should give a fuck
About humans
Different from us?


You shouldn't need Harper's Weekly,
National Geographic eyes
to realize how such a question
Carries the dreadful spell to change
Someone, once complex, to something,
Into tourist commodities,
Make simple tales of history
To buy over other voices.

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P.S. Apologies for any butchering of other people’s languages. In my perfect little fantasy, my linguistics degree would’ve helped a lot more.

P.P.S If y’all interested some further information/context, y’all can take a look at the sources in the second footnote!²

1. I mean, when her hometown’s Wikipedia article literally has a whole sub-section on race relations, shit’s cooked.

2. For information about the Caddo people and their history, you could start here. For more information about the Harper’s Weekly illustration I referred to, as well as other propaganda in that similar vein, consider braving this admittedly ad-infested article.