Thinking About The Color of My Skin

Coming from the East of Africa, I grew up without a perception that my skin came with a certain sense of existence different from others. Rather than my existence being centered around the color of my skin, the question I often asked was some flavor of “how do I tell stories that portray the diversity and complexity of our people?” To answer this question, I needed to look back in order to look ahead. Although colonization was motivated by the idea of one group of people being of lesser value viewed as lower than another, this concept of caste is not only remnant but has morphed into bitter and negative ethnicity among Kenyan tribes. The color of my skin, then, was just a happenstance even as it took much more meaning in college.

In general, English places adjectives before the subject unlike Swahili or French (the later that I spoke since 14), . So, what ends up happening is that in describing a person, their skin color is pointed out before we know that subject is first and foremost a person. With an attempt then, to place the person before the color of their skin (a person who is black as opposed to a black person), I witnessed the slight dissociation of skin color from becoming the defining characteristic of a person. I can therefore be a human being before I am black, I can be a man before I am black, I can be a Kenyan before I am black. Since in Kenya there was no concept of being black, I began to try to understand Black America, through conversation, the media, and readings. Back home, there is a loose concept of blackness and so, as I asked myself the question of “how do I move through this space as a black person,” I found myself having to stop and think in a state of mind that did not occur naturally to me. To have to think about the tone of my voice, the cadence of my speech, how my feet bounced off the ground, how my hands and neck revealed my body language, whether, if in fact, I was a danger to anyone was exhausting. I think of how my female friends talked about how they work against the grain of a misogynist culture, how they have to be aware of their senses because you can never be too careful. How then could I weave my identity as a person of color while sustaining my Kenyan heritage, and could the two exist in concert?

It was in the fall of 2016 that I became awakened to the color my skin having implications on how I moved through spaces. More and more, I began to see how the color of one's skin can be a reference point to the kinds of lives that could be extrapolated solely from what color that is. How black America was presented was very much a culture as well as the stories that are attached to its invention. To be black was also taking up and actualizing an identity from the color of my skin. Superficial blackness is for instance, cool, slick, having that delicate bounce and smooth swagger. The deeper work was internal – from understanding my relationship with my skin – learning how to take care of it in the cold and dry winters and reaffirming its affinity to the warm tropical weather. I was growing out my hair since the end of high school and taking delight in how it looked up with its coarse texture. And this process intrigued me, along with the idea of becoming black. An African such as I could empathize with the African American history of being enslaved and discriminated against, judged, lynched because of the color of one's skin. But in as much as this dark history seemed to take center stage in discussions and conversations about racism against African Americans, there were stories of tremendous triumph, stories of black enterprise and far-reaching cultural movements in music, art and literature among others. Whether I could juggle these two aspects as well as discover other manifestations of the black experience remains an unresolved journey. Three realities emerged. There were environments where I became fully conscious of the color of my skin, there were also spaces where I could forget the color of my skin mattered and there were situations where the consciousness and lack thereof existed in a kind of tug of war.

There is a kind of inward gaze about black America to which I observed: that the story of the black America is often centered on his experience and how that experience shapes his worldview. For me, a Kenyan who looked outward into the world, and from the outward gaze into America, the process of looking inside led me, first, to take a closer look at how I was raised and how that upbringing did, if in any way, shape my black experience; and secondly, to begin to pay attention to how I navigate different spaces and social situations and how this navigation is informed by (a) my being a man and (b) having black skin. Very quickly after I arrived in New York that Fall of 2016, I became more aware of how, as a black man, could walk the streets of New York at odd hours of the night and carry little fear – unlike some of my fellow female friends who kept mentioning the amount of caution that they exercised in the city at night. With the #MeToo movement, various celebrities, and public figures, primarily men, began facing the consequences of taking advantage of their power and influence to assault and/or take advantage of women. This calling out of men couple with conversations with others, as well as reading, began to open my eyes to the power dynamics that exist when I interact with women and how much work there still remains to be done, especially back home, for men to understand how it is also up to them, not only women, to examine the ways they are brought up to view women. While growing up there was a lack of direct conversation surrounding what it means to be a man, I took mental notes from my father who was a preacher/minister and an academic, in that order. Looking then, into my blackness, I defaulted towards my faith and my upbringing – neither of which seemed to provide adequate fodder for my nascent conceptualizations of Black America. Black America needed me, a man with black skin, to keep engaging with its gripping past to bring myself to an understanding of its present form in daily life.

Toni Morrison, in her book, The Origin of Others talks about how easy it is to estrange others. I think about this idea of Othering, how many times I have made it possible for someone to feel different, how deliberate as well as easy this act can be – to not listen deeply, to make lazy assumptions, to not want to know someone's experience, to put value to one person over another. I think again of how simple the process of seeing the world with my eyes alone. “Why should we want to close the distance when we can close the gate?” – Morrison asks. Yet, to the many who have stretched themselves to me, it has been a selfless gift as well as a humanizing and healing process. How much more, then, am I to give an ear, to take a pause, be open to another point of view, step into the discomfort and know another?

Credit to one dear friend who helped me edit this piece.