Actual Space: When I First Knew I Was Black by Tyler Lewis
“what it would really be like to literally be the only Black person”
"Actual Space" is a monthly column for black voices. It is a forum to tell your story, and answer questions on a variety of topics concerning how one copes with being black, what concerns you about race, what you wished you learned, and what gives you hope for the future. Edited and curated by Robert Lashley, for NAILED Magazine. To obtain a prompt or question to write for "Actual Space," email Robert at robert@nailedmagazine.com.
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When I First Knew I Was Black, by Tyler Lewis
I spent the first 12 years of my life living in Black neighborhoods in the inner cities during the Crack Age of the 80s – Williamsport, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Southeast Washington D.C., and North Charleston, South Carolina.
During those years, my understanding of Blackness was primarily cultural and regional. We moved around a lot so I was always having to defend my old Blackness to my new Blackness. Why did I have that weird drawl? Is that how they sound in Williamsport and Harrisburg, the brothers in Philly would ask. And upon moving to Washington, D.C., I had to learn quickly that “I’ma steal you” meant “I’m gonna punch you.” And though Philly and D.C. were violent and drug-ridden, nothing quite prepared me for the unique mixture of violence and southern hospitality that marked my three years in South Carolina.
Each place was Black, but in ways that were so different that acclimating each time we moved was incredibly difficult. I’m both a creature of habit and in possession of a not-too-small amount of defiance by nature. So fitting in was never something that came naturally.
I did have some historical understanding of Blackness, mostly through my mother’s stories of what it was like to be the first Black family to integrate a small town in Central Pennsylvania and from her desire to raise my sister and me as pro-Black and self-determining as she could. Her stories were triumphant as I imagine stories of her generation – the first one post-civil rights – often are.
But I’ve come in my adulthood to remember more clearly the sadness that lay underneath. She once told me about a cross being burned in my grandparents’ yard soon after they bought the house and how she ran down to whip the ass of the culprit, a White boy neighbor. At the time, it was a superhero story. Now, it has come to mark a moment that is deeply isolating and has led to a deep sadness in my mother that I don’t think has ever left her.
But I myself didn’t know I was “Black” in the way we popularly talk about it until I was 13. That year, I moved to live with my grandmother and aunts in my mother’s hometown in Central, PA.
I’ll never forget that first day when my aunt brought me to school to sign me up for the first day. It was 7th grade. Middle school. Puberty. The most awkward and self-conscious time of your life.
And there I was unaware of what it would really be like to literally be the only Black person in the entire school. Culture shock feels too insufficient a word. It was worse than not knowing regional slang. It was to be dropped into a foreign land without any way out and without any supplies. I literally had to fend for myself and I was wholly unprepared, if mostly because I had no idea what was going to happen at any given moment, on any given day.
And yet, I was a somewhat known quality because my family had made this history in the town two decades earlier. These White kids knew my name and my family. And they thought they knew me, which just means there was a strong curiosity about how close I might be to what they’d seen of Black people on TV and in music videos. Showing up in baggy jeans and a backwards cap didn’t do me any favors in introducing me to these White kids as an individual.
There are often anecdotes that you hear about these experiences that shame White folks and end up in Buzzfeed articles, but what I remember most about this time is that as polite as people could be – and many of them were – the most resistance came when I wasn’t the kind of Black boy they expected and when I demanded a respect for Blackness in all its messy complexity. I was tall, but didn’t play basketball (I was a runner). I listened to a lot of West Coast hip-hop and Native Tongues, but I didn’t seem particularly scary or violent (to most, there were some who were threatened). And I was intelligent, which was the most controversial because it was the thing that created the most shame in everyone because they hadn’t realized they thought all Black people were dumb until confronted with someone who wasn’t.
I had a social studies teacher in 7th grade who would only address me as “boy” or by the name of my cousin, who was five years older than me and had this teacher when he was in 7th grade, because he resented that I was doing well in his class. I think what angered him is that I was quietly defiant about his treatment. I just didn’t respond when he called me by either of these names and told my aunt, who handled it with a quickness and a finality that astonishes me to this day. That year, a math teacher didn’t put me in pre-algebra because she just assumed I couldn’t hack it. My first encounter with the well-meaning White liberal helped me to see that such individuals are more dangerous precisely because they are blissfully unaware of their racism. It’s an invaluable lesson that I don’t know that Black people -- particularly generations that follow mine -- always learn.
But it’s an undeniably traumatic experience when you learn you are “Black” with all the weight of history and experience and violence that that word can convey. Typically, we think about integration as the solution to this trauma; as the way to help White folks understand Black people better. If we all live together then they will see who we are and change their perceptions. But it’s sadly true that those of us who live in integrated places typically end up being considered an exception because, as poet Claudine Rankine says, “Blackness in the White imagination has nothing to do with Black people.”
I think I carry that weight every day. For all the happiness I enjoy in my life, it is always there. My adolescence is the line of demarcation in my life. It’s the point where everything changed and it’s the experience that has most profoundly shaped who I am and how I see the world. It’s a sobering thought. But decolonization is a process and part of that process is knowing that you’ve been colonized in the first place.
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Header image courtesy of Brendan Clinch. To view more of his photography, go here.
Tyler Lewis is a writer and communications professional based in Washington, D.C. You can find him online: here.
