“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a white sharp background.” – Zora Neale Hurston
I didn’t realize I was black until I was eight years old. I knew I was brown though. My mom and dad are brown, my sister is brown and they’re all varying shades of the natural, earthy color. My mother loves to garden and her grandfather owned a farm so when I asked her where we came from and she said, “from beautiful brown Sun people who worked the land and loved the earth,” I believed her.
Then I moved from Roselle, NJ to Fanwood, just 20 minutes east, and in that short distance my world was whitewashed pretty quickly. But growing up black in a predominately white suburb taught me a few things. One, my white friends were just like me. Two, they weren’t ignorant from lack of curiosity, just silenced by the thought of unintentionally offending. Three, I was up for explaining and teaching so we could understand each other better.
The first time someone told me I “sounded white” was in middle school. A classmate and one of the few other black kids in my grade brought it up.
“Why do you talk like that?” she asked me during free time one day.
“Talk like what?” I questioned back.
“Like a white person.”
Courtesy: Afropunk‘s Facebook Page
I just looked at her, confused more than anything. I talked the way I was taught to talk, the way my parents talked. But the implication was massive: enunciating was for white people and I, as a black girl, was not supposed to do it.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was part of a growing demographic. African-American kids growing up in the suburbs and not identifying with urban culture were becoming more and more common – so much a slang term was coined. According to Urban Dictionary, an “Oreo” is “a term for African-Americans, that the black community is generally offended with for betraying their roots… the term is branded OREO since they are “Black on the outside, white on the inside.” 13-year-old me didn’t like the label, 21-year-old me still doesn’t. Just because I listened to The Backstreet Boys more often than B2K didn’t make me a traitor and I didn’t appreciate the accusation.
Courtesy: Afropunk
For all of high school I walked the line of two demographics. I was the black girl who understood Ebonix and loved Nicki Minaj, but was also hyped for the new One Direction single and wrote fantasy flash fiction between marching band and women’s choir practices. A Hodgepodge of interests came to the surface in cycles, but if anyone asked me how or why I was the way I was, I told them I’d always been this way and there wasn’t a name for it.
But there is. Afropunk prides itself on ‘the other black experience.’ Originally focusing on the urban alternative culture, the term now encompasses any and all other black experiences. The movement has been gaining significant media attention recently though since 2005, there has been an annual Afropunk Fest in New York City which is an outdoor festival celebrating music, art, fashion and self-expression. Unfortunately, the first Afropunk Atlanta was cancelled this past weekend due to weather, but the first international festival was held in Paris earlier this year.
Courtesy: Afropunk‘s Facebook Page
I only found about Afropunk about a year ago, but I don’t feel so guilty about wanting to dye my hair purple anymore. I wasn’t the only kid going through an identity crisis, and I won’t be the last. Being myself for all these years has paid off, and I now know there are people out there with similar interests and ideals who look like me. But above all, I’m glad I found an alternative slang word to label myself: goodbye Oreo, hello Afropunk!