{"id":54951,"date":"2017-09-08T19:13:57","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T19:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54951"},"modified":"2017-09-08T19:13:57","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T19:13:57","slug":"constantly-proving-my-blackness-is-exhausting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54951","title":{"rendered":"Constantly proving my blackness is exhausting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Constantly proving my blackness is exhausting<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Globe and Mail<\/a>
\n2017-09-05<\/p>\n

Chelene Knight<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nChelene Knight<\/small><\/a><\/p>\n

Chelene Knight<\/a> is working on her third book, a novel about a friendship between two black women who grew up in Vancouver<\/a> (Hogan’s Alley<\/a>) in the 1930s and ’40s.<\/em><\/p>\n

“But you don’t look that black.”<\/p>\n

I remember walking into an event where I was asked to be a guest reader by a woman who had “heard about my book.” We had never met, I was unfamiliar with the other readers, never heard of the venue, but was still interested in expanding my literary horizons.<\/p>\n

This is what emerging writers need to do, right? I introduced myself to her and she stared back at me for a good 15 seconds before furrowing her brow and saying “But you don’t look that black.”<\/p>\n

I was left feeling “less than” and not worthy of being part of the event because I didn’t fit the mould of what black should be. I didn’t meet the expectations of the diversity hashtag.<\/p>\n

My mother is an American-born black woman. My father is an East Indian-Ugandan who was kicked out of his country for not being black. Now, I am left to question my own blackness in a room full of white people with all eyes on me. I fumbled through my reading without ever looking up from my book…<\/p>\n

Read then entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a woman of colour, having to prove my “blackness” should never be something on my list of things to accomplish. Like other marginalized people, I work in a mostly white world, which for me happens to be the Canadian literary community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,19,8],"tags":[22979,20611,8908],"class_list":["post-54951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-canada","category-media-archive","tag-chelene-knight","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-the-globe-and-mail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54951","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=54951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54952,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54951\/revisions\/54952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}