Historically Hindered Hue...

“What is shameful about being black—so shameful that we should pretend that we don’t notice?” This was the rhetorical question that hit me in my emotional center because it made me realize further that the color of my skin mattered to others lacking its melanin in a negative way. Should I feel this ashamed that through no decision of my own, I was born of darker skin coloring? I do not intentionally go about my life feeling ashamed of my skin, but throughout my educational journey it has definitely hindered my academic success. The color of my skin was the reason that I was not published in a medical journal at the age of 15 during my summer studies at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia under the tutelage of one University of Pennsylvania professor and neurology researcher. He was unfortunately, second in command of the Neurology research department of CHOP during the summer of 1994 and I was a part of summer science program that paired students from West Philadelphia High School and me, a lone student from Overbrook High School and he was instructed to remove my name from final submission copy as a lowly contributing lab technician because he would not ever be named in the company of insert whatever term you think he really called a young Black girl of the nineties. This was the same man who would not utter a “good morning” back to me for the majority of the eight weeks I worked there. I can remember that the doctor I worked under was from England and he explained to me early on that the head doctor was not a fan of allowing the likes of me in and around his laboratory. But, being from England, he explained that racism was a factor of life, just not in the especially cruel way that it manifested itself here in the United States. The goodwill program was designed to encourage more students of color to enter STEM fields and I readily accepted the challenge. My fellow program attendees, not so much, and they helped to perpetuate the negative stereotype that this type of scientific endeavor was both beyond the range of capabilities and uninteresting to them. I, on the otherhand, actually learned and dutifully performed research enough to where I should have been allowed the credit. That summer those doctors were searching for the presence of specific antibodies located in spinal and nerve tissue of rats. I performed daily dissections for the sciatic nerves liver, and the DRGs from the spinal cords of rats, embedded the tissue in the liver and mounted it on cork, froze the tissue using liquid nitrogen, cut microscopic tissue sections using a cyrostat machine, mounted the microscopic sections on slides, stained the slides with fluorescent staining solutions, and then when dried looked under the microscope for the various colorings that would indicate the presence of certain antibodies. I can remember my doctor was looking for the presence of specific antibodies know as GD3 and LB1 and he already had found the presence of one and was over the moon the day I came and showed him what I had thought to be the presence of the elusive one. I felt honored to be apart of this process and had no idea that he would even consider adding my name to his work some kind of way until he showed me on his computer the finished draft of the article and in small tiny print at the top was my name. However, when the article was published and they entire lab was celebrating it was clear that my name had been removed and the joy and accomplishment I felt was crushed out of me. He took me aside and blamed the other doctor and then as if I did not possess a single feeling; he raised he returned to the festivities and left me in the office. It was the end of the summer and the program and their summer sessions so I was told that I did a great job and dismissed unceremoniously. To this day, I wonder what was the purpose of treating me the way that I was treated by the white people that I met here in this summer experience and other scholarly places as well. I was always made to feel like an anomaly, like I should not ever think that I belong. I am only allowed to feel tolerated never fully included. Circling back to the rhetorical question, why should I feel ashamed? I have never been enslaved. It is like telling a rape victim to feel the shame placed upon you by your rapist and going out of your way to remind them of that rape and the shame they should own from it while simultaneously protecting and uplifting the rapist. What bothers me most about this idea of race is that within my race I feel that the women are even dredged lower than the men and no one sees it. The podcast, “Made in America,” noted the White man “simultaneously passed laws stating that white women could not have biracial relations with enslaved or even Native Americans.” It went on to further note that white men could have intercouse with everyone but white women and non-white ‘men’ could not. Who did that leave out but the women that comprise my genealogy, women of African and Native American descent? Oh, so what this spoke to me was if the White man could have sex with everybody and he was the only one who could then who was the everybody? This was really a bit disturbing for me to think about because it conjured up feelings of violations by the very women who had to survive so I can live this life. A life that I feel with the plethora of opportunities that came my way and I worked hard to achieve that if I had been born White would have at least afforded me a far more equitable niche in life than the one I possess. But, I digress, this is a long and a bit therapeutic post. I just want to make a final note that my toddler, all of did this exact scenario to me in a Target years ago. I felt the same embarrassment and anxiety that was described of the White mother in the scenario, even though she was calling out the man for being too White (pale) in his coloring. I can remember shushing her and basically starting a lifelong conversation about the do’s and don’ts of speaking on race in public. To see and not see color is a delicate skillset to teach to a child while simultaneously teaching her that color does not matter and she can be, do, or achieve whatever in this life she so chooses.