7 Days In Savannah: The Day I Discovered My Blackness

As a youth, I pretty much hung out with anyone: Black, white, Filipino, Jewish, Indian etc.. Race and/or religion didn't matter to me at all. My homies in New York were the personification of Martin Luther King's dream. Little black boys, little white girls. We were Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition... I think I have a picture to prove it... That's me in the burgundy Member's Only Jacket...




When I moved to Savannah, I pretty much did the same thing. I was in 6th grade and most of my friends were white. The same thing went for the first part of following year. Then something, or should I say, someone happened... we will call him P.

Me and P were really cool in 7th grade. We traded Garbage Pail Kids stickers together. We formed a pencil fighting league (I was the manager, he was the talent) and we talked about music all the time. I remember one day, I was listening to my Ready For The World tape, and he was listening to his Metallica tape. We compared music and both could get with Prince's "Sign o the Times" double album.


P was a pretty talented artist. Well, he wasn't Jackson Pollack or nothing, but what I mean is that he could draw. He was always doodling something or other. He would sketch cartoon characters or people and they always came out well. One day, we collaborated on a cartoon series. It was called the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The DRS was supposed to be a collection of comical criminals that got into misadventures. I know, it's corny, but I was a kid. We came up with the idea together, but when he showed me the first sketches, I knew something was amiss...

There was T-Bone, a black criminal that wore a thick gold chain, that he used as a weapon. Then there was June- Bug, a black criminal whose secret weapon was throwing roaches on people. Then there was Ice Pick, a black criminal who would pick his (buck) teeth with an ice pick and then stab people with it. Then there was... You get the point. As if it wasn't bad enough that all the criminals were black, they all had jive captions, like "yo, I be killin people" or "I be a murderer." I was like, hold up P, why all the criminals gotta be black?

P just didn't get what the big deal was. I was never the type to cry racism, but at that very moment, it hit me. Me and this white kid aren't the same. He views my people as only criminals, buffoon criminals at that that can't talk. Never mind that my grades were consistently higher than his, he still felt he was better than me. He was the worst kind of racist: the racist that didn't know he was racist. The kind that could point at me and say "some of my best friends are black."

From there, it all snowballed. I didn't mess with P no more. I couldn't in good conscience let that slide. I had discovered my blackness and there was no looking back. Add to that, watching "Eyes on the Prize" on PBS and reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and it was a wrap. I was black, and I knew and embraced it from that point on. It's funny how one day can change one's entire outlook on life. It was a relatively minor thing, but P's cartoon set me well on the way to be being the person I am today.