In my early teens, I used to lie in bed with the desk lamp on during the darkest hours of the night and stare at my hands. I would inspect them and cry over them and wish for them to be different. Physically, my hands were fine. They had all 10 fingers, they could hold both hot and cold items, and they could even make a basket through a hoop if they tried real hard. But my hands were cursed with a light brown tone. A color that signaled to the world that I was not white, but kind of white, and I hated my hands for that fact.
At times, I tried to wash my hands, hoping to scrub off all the color from my skin. Kids at school would joke that I was the same shade as the poop their dogs produced in their grass, and my mother always told me you must wash your hands when they’re dirty, so I scrubbed and scrubbed, but the dirt never came off. And I would go back to bed, depressed, and continue to stare.
Middle school brought such unoriginal nicknames. Oreo, because my mom was white and father black. Poodle, because my hair had those “good” curls, as my grandmother would say. Halfie was one I heard in elementary school — along with Poop — but both died once the kids learned words like “nigger,” which they felt comfortable saying to me because I was only half black, so I couldn’t be fully offended. (Actually, I was always fully offended.)
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Biracial, gay and bullied
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