{"id":45548,"date":"2016-02-06T20:36:33","date_gmt":"2016-02-06T20:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45548"},"modified":"2016-02-06T20:36:33","modified_gmt":"2016-02-06T20:36:33","slug":"im-protective-of-my-blackness-because-i-had-to-find-it-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45548","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m protective of my blackness because I had to find it myself"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2015\/nov\/12\/im-defensive-of-my-blackness-because-i-had-to-find-it-myself\" target=\"_blank\">I&#8217;m protective of my blackness because I had to find it myself<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\" target=\"_blank\">The Guardian<\/a><br \/>\n2015-11-12<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/rebel19\" target=\"_blank\">Rebecca Carroll<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>I was dogged in my determination to evolve outside the narrow margins of the small white world of my beginning and into another more racially familiar one<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I spent the first 20 years of my life internalizing white beauty standards, intellectual values and cultural sensibilities. By the time I was a freshman in high school I had, like many of my white female peers, embarked upon an ongoing war with my body. I was never diagnosed as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anorexia_nervosa\" target=\"_blank\">anorexic<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bulimia_nervosa\" target=\"_blank\">bulimic<\/a>, but I intermittently starved myself and took laxatives in an effort to be skinny and hipless without any sense whatsoever that my curves might be considered a thing of beauty in black culture.<\/p>\n<p>I abandoned my 11-year-old crush on <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Michael_Jackson\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Jackson<\/a> (with whom I became almost preternaturally smitten after seeing him in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Wiz_(film)\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Wiz<\/em><\/a>) in favor of the young white male stars that adorned the covers of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tiger_Beat\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Tiger Beat<\/em><\/a> \u2013 <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rick_Springfield\" target=\"_blank\">Rick Springfield<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Leif_Garrett\" target=\"_blank\">Lief Garrett<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rob_Lowe\" target=\"_blank\">Rob Lowe<\/a>. I was guided by college counselors to consider <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/New_England\" target=\"_blank\">New England<\/a> state schools and maybe long-shot universities \u2013 historically black colleges and universities were not on anyone\u2019s radar&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;It took a long time to find my blackness, find my people and my relationship to black culture, despite my own (albeit limited) self-awareness regarding race at a very young age. \u201cI am a black child\u201d reads the first sentence of a short personal essay I wrote when I was eight or nine years old&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2015\/nov\/12\/im-defensive-of-my-blackness-because-i-had-to-find-it-myself\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m protective of my blackness because I had to find it myself The Guardian 2015-11-12 Rebecca Carroll I was dogged in my determination to evolve outside the narrow margins of the small white world of my beginning and into another more racially familiar one I spent the first 20 years of my life internalizing white [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,8,20],"tags":[22899,2103],"class_list":["post-45548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-rebecca-carroll","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45549,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45548\/revisions\/45549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}