Illustration by Rachel Maves
I have never linked my identity to ethnicity. I have a white father and a brown-skinned mother, but I do not identify as strictly black or white, and I am proud of my roots on both sides. I have simply never felt particularly connected to a racial title. This is not to say I have grown up sheltered. Although, perhaps in a sense I have. I have never experienced what it feels like to be afraid of police officers, and I was sometimes unconscious of how I could be treated differently for being brown, let alone brown and female. I identify as Florence Odessa Hott from Richmond, Virginia. I identify as human. Yet some seem interested in making me choose a “side.”
Sometimes, as with an incident several years ago, that choice is forced upon me. I was leaving the public library in downtown Richmond with my father when I noticed a homeless woman camped out on the front steps. I offered her a smile, but as we passed, she rose to her feet, pointing her finger at me and spitting, “N--ger!” followed by, “Tell all your n--ger friends we don’t want you here!” She kept shouting it over and over, even after we got in our car. I hid my tears until the doors were closed, then I let them flow freely and told my father exactly what she had said. Her words carried in them a history of learned hatred that, as a 9-year-old child, I had no reason to fully comprehend.
Later that night at the dinner table, when I told my mother what I had experienced, my father said he had not heard the racist epithet, despite the fact that this woman conjured everything in her to scream it at me. He said he had “blocked it out.” I love my father more than anything, but this hurt and baffled me. My father and I came out of the same library doors and got into the same car, having two entirely different experiences. One of us heard shouting and felt protective. The other heard a word she knew was meant specifically for her. It’s possible that my father never heard it because he does not have to hear it. And even if he had heard it that day, he could not have felt it the way I did.
I find myself stuck on a middle ground in which my intersectionality can create both conflict and, I suppose, in its own right, a kind of privilege.
To a lesser degree, I have also found difficulty concerning my ethnicity with my self-identifying black-girl peers. More recently, I have become acquainted with various comments such as: “So, what are you?” “You’re black?” “Ugh, light-skinned girls.” “You talk ‘proper.’ ” Some might say that genetically, I am only one-quarter black. My skin is light. I do not have “black girl” hair. My mother is biracial. I am home-schooled. I live in a semi-rural community. While that alone does not mean I am not experiencing black culture, in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, the majority of black teens are not “someone like me.” When I am with my brown-skinned peers, we talk a lot about the “American black girl experience,” something I honestly have a hard time relating to. The gradients of skin tone also seem to require some kind of explanation. I am confronted with my own privilege for being light-skinned in a “black girl” community, something referred to as “colorism.” In these moments, I can relate to my father’s being unable to know what he cannot fully experience, and yet, we are still held accountable to understand.
I always feel as though my experiences are less valid than those of people who deal with more overt racism as part of their daily lives. There is a sense that I am just complaining about a small inconvenience that hurts my fragile self-esteem, that I cannot understand the “true” black experience. My skin tone protects me from the most horrific effects of systemic racism, though it simultaneously ensures that as a person of color, I must remain mindful of more covert racist ideas and barriers. I find myself stuck on a middle ground in which my intersectionality can create both conflict and, I suppose, in its own right, a kind of privilege that I am still very much learning how to navigate.
I seek a world in which skin tone does not require an explanation or a conversation about white ancestry or the amount of melanin deemed acceptable. For this to become a reality, however, systemic racism must be eradicated. Without racism, colorism would have little power. It requires that one both quantify and qualify blackness in a way that divides the black community and allows the white community to “embrace diversity” by including more light-skinned African Americans in ads, work environments or social spaces. I seek what seems impossible, but nonetheless I seek to understand and to be understood.
Odessa Hott, 17, graduated from home schooling in June, and this fall, she will begin her third semester at Reynolds Community College, where she is studying to receive a Career Studies Certificate in American Sign Language. She was one of two youths nominated by Richmond Young Writers to attend the 2019 International Congress of Youth Voices conference, which took place in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in August (Hott's recap of that experience). This essay, adapted for publication in Richmond magazine, was part of her application.
