First, you must find someone from that culture who doesn’t seem to fit in. Someone who is isolated from her own culture and surrounded by yours. Welcome her with open arms into your life: Invite her into your home, feed her, buy her gifts—spoil her in ways you imagine she’s only dreamed about.
Begin with compliments — make sure you exoticize her to the fullest. Tell her you love her skin tone. Make sure to touch her dark skin as much as possible without ever acknowledging the contrast between your fingers and her body. Point out its flawlessness by complimenting her clear skin and asking for her skin regimen. Always bring up how jealous you are that she can sit in the sun without burning. In the summer, be sure to put your arm next to hers and complain about your tan not being close to her complexion. Two weeks later, put your arm next to hers again and nudge her about how soon you’ll be darker than her. Don’t forget to wink. When she goes inside to nap after lying in the sun for fifteen minutes, hide your envy in jest. Say something like, “We are unworthy, sun goddess” or “Just trying to be like you” as she walks away.
Always make sure to remind her of her body. Chances are, you’re smaller than her in the hips or breasts, so offering to share clothes can be both a compliment and an insult — a way to spin your superiority as inferiority. At pre-games and sleepovers, stand in the mirror and critique your body, point out your imperfections and bring up both your bodies as if you could modern-day Frankenstein the two of you together. Something like, “If I had your eyes, boobs, and hips, with my nose and ass …” Pause for effect, clarify: “Not that your ass isn’t great, it’s just so much.” And then continue explaining how much of a bad bitch you’d be with her ancestry implanted under your skin.
Once she is your friend, help her assimilate into your culture by explaining that it’s correct. Your culture is the one she should admire and want to be a part of. Clarify that it’s not white culture, but American culture. Introduce her to a new version of her country. Make her want the things you have. Take her shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch, Aéropostale, American Eagle, Banana Republic, J. Crew, and Victoria’s Secret. Places where her body won’t fit into the clothes without drastic changes. Where petite women in all black, tape measures hanging around their necks, ask if she’d like to be measured. Where employees don’t look in her direction. Where noses are up in the air as if something smells bad.
Smother her independence with courteousness. Always take the check at dinner. Pay for the movies. Buy breakfast. Never ask for gas money. Always extend an invitation. Never take no for an answer. Even when she can’t afford it, scoff and buy the ticket without her permission. Let her taste the flavors of privilege; mask the sour with parfum blanc. And when she leans in close, remind her how sweet it tastes.
In return, ask her about her culture. Where are you from? Ohio. No, really, where are you from? Ohio. What does your name mean? Queen. That’s beautiful, where’s it from? It’s Ethiopian. So, you’re Ethiopian. No. Then, where — and as she explains her background and her family, nod your head as if you’re listening. And then go home and google Ethiopia, find it on a map, and see images of dark women with gouges, scars, and babies clinging to their backs. Tell yourself this is her culture, even though it’s not.
Gentrify her name. Make it foreign to her tongue. NUH- GUESS-STAY. NUH-GUESS-STEE. NI-JEST-TEE. NUH-JEST-AY NEE-GEE-STEE. NUH-GEE-STEE. Don’t stop until she pronounces it wrong. And then give her a nickname. GUEST. GIST. GUEST-ER. GUESS-TEE. NEHJ-EE. GIGI. Ignore her when she corrects you.
Don’t go to her house. Don’t visit her neighborhood. You can’t be around too many black people at once — you should hit just the right note of not racist, slightly ignorant. Plus, your parents said it’s unsafe. Always ask why she’s not allowed to have friends over, as if you want to go, but then never ask to visit. Muffle your surprise when she displays any sign of wealth. Struggle to comprehend how regardless of location andclass, she has something that you don’t. Devalue her property by deeming it as uncool. She bought her phone six months after it was released, itis no longer the one to have. Get everyone on your side. Tell her it’s okay. Make sure to have a slight tone of pity offset with a smile. Give her your hand-me-downs without asking if she wants them. Even if she’s not, act as if she’s poor.
But nothing is free. Culture is not free. White privilege isn’t free.
Hide your guilt in public. Always hide the fact that you have nothing to claim besides a history of colonization and conquering. Ignore that you have no culture. Ignore the fact that everything you have is stolen. Turn that guilt and shame into rage. Mold that rage into ignorance. Use it to fuel your racism.
Cut off her dreadlocks in class. Add it to your trophy collection. Pull on her hair when you sit behind her and ask if she can feel it. Ask her how she washes her hair. Tell her that she’s dirty. Slide your dirty hands into her hair to feel her scalp without permission. Cover her with insults like sweat: tentacles, spiders, Predator. Years later, try to dread your own hair: throw away your combs. Have a fit when your mother freaks out.
When you are older, you’ll realize there are ways to become black while remaining white. Fillers and injections all over your body to sculpt and fill out the areas of your choice. For a price. Turn your body into a hot bag of plastic. Liposuct your insecurities. Learn to twerk because the black girls do it and Miley Cyrus does it. Twerking is the way in, you’re sure of it. Kiss a black man and suck his bottom lip. Tell him you love the thickness. Pay someone to use a bee to sting your bottom lip. They sell lip gloss with trace amounts of venom now — use that, too.
Listen to the radio religiously. Adopt a language that isn’t yours. Affect an accent. Insist that imitation is a form of flattery and that this is imitation, not mockery. Download her culture onto your phone and music player. Sing in your bedroom about drugs, trap houses, hair, poverty, hope, relationships, blackness, blackness, blackness. Listen to those songs over and over, searching for meaning in the lyrics, in the beat, until you know all the words and loudly proclaim: “Thank you, Beyoncé, for gifting this to me.” It is the “me” that ricochets off her culture into yours as you have made oppression relatable, oppression fashionable, oppression profitable. Stop censoring yourself at home. Say it: nigga. Sing along to “F. U. B. U.” by Solange: All my niggas in the whole wide world / made this song to make it all y’all’s turn / for us, this shit is for us.
Pin your hair back like Solange. Let a bandanna hang from your back pocket. Pay a dentist to install a single diamond in your canine. Flash it in your pictures. Inflate your ass with fat or silicone and then do a handstand with your feet on the wall. Twerk your heart out. See a black man and think, “He’s cute for a black guy.” Seduce him and place his hand on your ass, hold him by the wrist, and say, “Now, I’m just like a blackgirl,” or “Don’t you like that, King?” Or “I’ve got everything you need.” Buy him a pair of shoes. Get on your knees and let him use you. Colonize him while you’re on top. When he becomes too much, when he stops obeying, when he no longer works to please you: assert your birthright. And when he doesn’t care, say it: nigger. Tell him that you’ll make him pay. Scream it: rape. Move on to another black man. And another. Another. Proclaim yourself Snow Bunny. Salivate at the thought of mixed babies.
Have the audacity to tell your friend that you are blacker than her. Look her in the eyes as you do it. Tell her that you have the best of all worlds: money, power, privilege.
At the end, when you have completed your theft and manipulated her culture into something you can exploit and profit from; when you have built up your privilege using her — when you have lost her, you will chalk it up as a phase. You will revert to white men and claim you’ve never known love before. Say, “I’m done with black guys, they’re too cocky.” Make excuses. Let your ass shots wear off. Stop plumping your lips. Return to country music. Wear more white clothing. Trade in your Jordans or Louboutins for a pair of riding boots. Never speak to her again. Everything will become black and white. And you’ll be so busy trying to distance yourself, you’ll ignore your own shadow.
/ / / / /
This excerpt from Negesti Kaudo’s Ripe: Essays is used by permission of Mad Creek Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press. You may acquire a copy directly from the press by clicking here.
“Emotional range without consequence,” Negesti Kaudo writes in her debut collection, Ripe, is a privilege of whiteness. In these essays, she fights back, exhorting readers to follow her through fury, grief, love, and hope as she confronts what it means to own her Blackness and her body in contemporary America. A scathing and nuanced cultural critic, she disentangles intersections of race, class, pop culture, size, sexuality, and more in spaces where she always seems to be either too Black or not Black enough. From attending private school as a poor Black student to the evolution of her hair routine to being fat and sexual when society says she should be neither, Kaudo overlooks nothing as she names the ways that white America simultaneously denigrates and steals Black culture. Most of all, she writes against the idea that a Black woman’s anger makes her an “angry Black woman,” claiming full emotional range as her birthright and as a tool against injustice on her quest to find herself no matter how uncomfortable the journey.