“My brownness isn’t something to be blind to or to love me in spite of. It is who I am,” writes activist Candice Russell.
It’s not that growing up I didn’t notice I was different. I saw it in the little things, like when we went to the lake and everyone else got slathered down with sunscreen from head to toe and I was only given a cursory swipe across my nose before being allowed to go swimming. Or after, when my sister’s skin would turn a blistery pink and start to peel and I would be a dark toasty caramel by day’s end. Or every year in December when my Grandma would send both of us our Holiday Barbie, the one we weren’t ever allowed to open because “some day it would be worth a lot of money, you know!” The one with a big poofy gown and blonde hair and light eyes that didn’t look a darn thing like me, just like every other doll in my ample collection. But none of these things were real things with a capital “T”. They were merely facts I knew to be true the way I knew that I wasn’t supposed to go past the lava rocks on Hemlock Drive on my bicycle and that Full House was on Friday nights at 8pm. The color of my skin was never made an issue by anyone in my family, save one time in an epic fight over remote-control power when my attempt to assert older sibling dominance was met with a tearful “You aren’t my sister. You’re…you’re…BROWN!”
Candice Russell at age four.
My mother had me when she was young, with a man I never got an opportunity to meet. When I was three she met and married someone who accepted me as his own and eventually they had two more children. Between my two families (and the joys of modern day romance) I have quite the abundance of Grannies/Papaws/Aunts/Step-Uncles/Second-Cousins-Twice-Removed and I grew up surrounded by people who loved me and never questioned that I was a part of them. Sure, as I got older and started to develop my own identity, I eventually figured out that there were things that we didn’t agree on. My parents loved talk radio, Rush Limbaugh in particular, a man who even at an early age got under my skin in ways I couldn’t really explain. At family get-togethers, when politics were discussed, the god-fearing Republican majority would quote McCain and talk about taxes while I had just spent an entire summer campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and volunteering at Planned Parenthood. These stories were typical of my other friends’ experiences, and for the most part we all tended to shrug it off the way you do in your early twenties, drowning our post holiday-dinner, eye-rolling annoyance in late night PBR-fueled bar crawls, smug in our political superiority. Families, amirite?
My white aunt doesn’t realize when she posts updates talking about “those people” in Ferguson, I identify far more with “those people” than I do with her.
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And then the Internet happened. Eventually even the most technologically challenged relations like my great aunt, who once asked me if she could have my email address to send me the purse she got me for my birthday, were sending me friend requests on Myspace. Like everyone else I knew, I held out as long as I could from letting them into my online world, eventually giving in when a job transfer moved my husband and me out of state and it became an easier form of communication than a phone call. For the most part this has proven to be a somewhat harmless concession. Yes, my uncle has a slight obsession with the Facebook “poke” feature, my cousin includes me in group message chain mail forwards that often include the ghost of dead children and ten years bad luck, and my grandma never turns off all-caps in chat and refuses to accept that I don’t play Family Pet Saga. But these things are easily overlooked, harmless annoyances hidden with the click of a mouse. Not really things with a capital “T”.
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It’s not until something newsworthy happens that those capital “T” things come out, and I am forced to look at the people that I love through a slightly different lens. Like when an election year happened and I read a bulletin talking about the “Muslim who is infiltrating the White House.” Or when a teenage boy was shot for wearing a hoodie in the wrong neighborhood and the acquittal of his shooter was celebrated as a victory over “thugs.” Or recently, when thousands of children crossed our border seeking refuge and my Facebook was filled with status updates denouncing our government for their inaction and demanding these “criminal illegals and future drug lords” be sent back. It wasn’t until the death of a black teenager in Missouri sparked a revolution and my news feed became a minefield of “Theys” and “Thems” and outcries of race-baiting that I had to struggle with the fact that the same members of my family who love me unconditionally, no matter what, wouldn’t love me under other circumstances. It wasn’t until our country was forced to look at the problem with racism that is still so prevalent in our society that I had to come to grips with the fact that I am related to racists.
My aunt doesn’t realize that my brownness is a part of my everyday life, that the color of my skin does in fact matter to most folks that think the same way she does, that it’s not my “naivety” that makes me so furious about the injustice happening over the death of Mike Brown, but my experiences as a person of color in this nation.
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“The color of your skin doesn’t matter!” my auntie once told me. “We don’t see you as a color. We don’t love you any different.” When I was younger this statement made me feel loved and accepted, made me stop thinking that I was different from the rest of them, the little brown girl in a sea of freckled faces in candid snapshots from countless birthday parties. But what my auntie doesn’t realize is just how much it does matter. She doesn’t realize when she posts updates talking about “those people” in Ferguson that even though I am not black, I identify far more with “those people” than I do with her. She doesn’t realize that even though I was raised by a white family in a white neighborhood, I still get followed in stores in West Texas or asked if I speak English on the regular. She doesn’t realize that my brownness is a part of my everyday life, that the color of my skin does in fact matter to most folks that think the same way she does, that it’s not my “naivety” that makes me so furious about the injustice happening over the death of Mike Brown, but my experiences as a person of color in this nation.
Candice Russell today.
“The color of your skin doesn’t matter!” they have all always said. “Love is colorblind.” Except for when it isn’t. Because the thing I have come to see over these past few weeks is that just loving me is not enough. That to love me, to really love me, you can’t remain complacent in the face of things like Ferguson. You can’t love me and summarily dismiss racism and invalidate the experience of people of color. My brownness isn’t something to be blind to or to love me in spite of. It is who I am. Loving me means fighting for the rights of “those people” because in doing so you are fighting for people not so different from me.
Photo credits–Raphael Estrada and Zac Davis Photography
Very well done, thanks for this article!
“I identify far more with “those people” than I do with her.”
The above statement reflects how I feel when I hear some of the whites in my family make statements about non-whites, of any description, that are in the news for one reason or another. Sometimes, the news story isn’t too negative, but the ignorance/prejudice is painfully evident. It can be a tough pill to swallow.
If you think blacks and other non-whites don’t think and say prejudicial things about whites and other non-whites, you painfully surprised they do. This is coming from a black American.
Thank you so very much for this article, Candice! As a multiracial woman of color, I relate to so much of it. My mom, brother and I were as black as the sheep got in my white dad’s side of the family. She has a different (and brown, specifically Puerto Rican) father from her siblings who all share a brown mother. So there occasionally were some issues along racial lines on that side of the family, as well. They are also largely based in TX and mostly VERY conservative. So what racially related stuff I’ve heard upset me that much… Read more »
Did you the closing of John Stewart last night about the way that his scruffy white producer and a well dressed black professional were treated in NYC?.
What happens when a well-dressed black professional (my adopted daughter) and a scruffy white Okie (me) walk into about ten schools in Brooklyn?
In every case, I was greeted first and with more respect. I’ve never seen anything that overt in Oklahoma.
Many people in this country hold different political beliefs and solutions to our problems; all because someone doesn’t agree with your political leftist ideas and issues, that doesn’t make them a racist. And as for these high profiles cases and political issues, I wish we all could wait for all of the facts to come out before making assumptions of guilt or innocence. Maybe the riots and looting in Florence wouldn’t have happened if people did that.
But when you say they n word or imply “them” or “they” it does I think that’s what this article is about mostly #tcot on twitter is a virtual kkk meeting
Well-written article*
This is a well-written! I believe my daughter (oldest and half-black and I have a younger white daughter as well) knows how you’ve felt and even though I believe skin color neither negates or determines how you treat someone I have tried to teach her that not everyone is like that. That racism exists. That stereotypes exist. And rather than shoo them under the rug, I allow her to talk about them and I let her know that although I can’t possibly understand everything she has gone through or will go through, that I will be there for her and… Read more »
Great article Candice! I really appreciate the courage it must have taken to write this article considering your family background. Your voice is the voice of many, so please keep up great work.