by C.A. Davis / August 14th, 2017
I remember, vividly, on a certain Martin Luther King Jr Day during my childhood—back before schools regularly observed the federal holiday—when my kindergarten teacher passed out coloring pages of Dr. King’s portrait which the class was to fill in. Not a minute after I began coloring brother Martin’s face the same color as my Afro-Filipino father—brown—I noticed all but two or three of my white classmates were coloring the page with black crayons.
When I asked my friend why he was using that particular shade of crayola, he replied with an undisturbed confidence in what he felt was obvious.
“Because: he’s black.”
BLACK—the same color as galvanized steel—was and still is perceived by many people in America as one end of the spectrum of human diversity.
My world shifted at that very moment. I was just a child; I wasn’t old enough to understand the vexed, traumatizing complexities of the American Identity and had yet to live through anger and frustration while developing “Racial Impostor Syndrome.” And yet, I remember feeling a very distinct tug behind my sternum. A line was drawn that day between me and the rest of world with a black crayon.
Identity is a heavy word. Not because of the weight of information it presents about any given individual, but because of the magnitude of the exformation shed via the process of understanding oneself. As a child, the lines of separation between you and all the bits of…