“See, it's not about races,
Just places, faces.
Where your blood comes from
Is where your space is.
I've seen the bright
Get duller;
I'm not going to spend
My life being a color”
~ “Black or White” by Michael Jackson
I grew up in a colorless world. When I became aware that there was a world of colors, the powers that be presented me with a choice. I could decide to live within this new world, where so many other people lived their days out in day after day of color-filled existence. On the other hand, I could choose to stay on the path that fate had originally placed my now well-traveled feet.
My first crush was Kim, a boy that my mom babysat on occasion. He had a penchant for getting into trouble and I would often come home from my kindergarten class to find that we had to get in the car, drive back up to school and pick him up from detention. I’m not sure what it was about him - if it was his glasses, straight black hair or slanted eyes that almost looked like mine. Whatever it was I found so darling about him soon disappeared. He was fooled by another girl in the neighborhood who pretended she knew karate. I remember hanging out in our backyard, behind a fenced-in area where the trashcans were kept. She threw some kicks and bragged about how she took karate classes. I lost whatever little interest he may have had in me. That was fine by me. There were plenty of other guys to fawn over, even at that young age.
My first best friend was Jason Muck. He was a year older than me, and most of his friends were older still. None of this mattered to any of us, and after telling my parents every detail about my day at school I would tie on my shoes, grab my bike and run outside to join whoever was already waiting. My earliest memories include so many images of running around outside with Jason, picking up snails and ladybugs, imprisoning poor butterflies and climbing as high as we could into the branches of one well-loved tree. Jason, Justin and I would so often wear ourselves out, running, playing, laughing, ending our time outside sitting on the playground swings, swapping stories about so-and-so who lived in that apartment or discussing aliens. Just before my family and I made my first remembered move, he tried to kiss me. We sat outside, in the warm California weather, playing in the cloth Fisher-Price house I usually kept in my playroom. He told me to close my eyes and I did…for a moment. My curiosity was the only thing that kept my first kiss for a much later time. Things between us got weird for a while. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was White, but that he’d crossed that line between friends and whatever came after that stage. I got jealous when I heard he had a girlfriend, but that storm soon blew away and he was my best friend again before we were separated, as is the fate of so many navy brat friendships.
I always knew I was Black, but I never noticed it until about the second grade. Even then, it was something I noticed, frowned over in confusion, and brushed aside like a dust bunny. In the second grade, a blond haired, blue eyed boy by the name of Colin slipped me a note during quiet time. “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” One box for yes and one box for no. I scribbled in my sloppy handwriting that I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend, otherwise I’d say yes. My small fingers folded it back up and slipped the note to a friend, who passed it to another friend, who passed it to Colin. It was something about those blue eyes that got me to at least admit that I liked him.
I want to think that we at least walked together to art class. That’s probably just my wishful thinking though. In all reality, he probably walked with his friends, and I with mine and sat down at opposite ends of the long tables with paper and paint. Eventually I was passed a second note saying that it probably wouldn’t work out because I was Black and he was White. Confusion filled me for a moment, and only a moment, then came the conclusion that he was a little silly. At any rate, the event neither traumatized me nor stuck with me for very long. A year later I had a crush on this hazel-eyed boy with sandy brown hair by the name of Samuel Bendilillo.
Sometime after we moved to Michigan during the summer of my fourth grade year, I looked over the pictures from my two years in TAG (talented and gifted program). Third grade, Mrs. Winter’s class. There was me and Ivory Harris. The only two Black students in our whole class. Fourth grade, Mrs. Blum. Ivory Harris, Daniel Tanner, Jessica and myself. That made four. I found it odd, and asked myself why as an initial reaction, but that’s as far as that thought got in my mind.
As I became older, the question that arose in third grade started to repeat itself. Every time I participated in a gifted program, it would fleetingly come to my attention the overwhelming ratio between White and minority students. Still, like that first encounter years ago, it brushed my consciousness to tell me of its presence before filing itself away in some deep cabinet in my mind. It wasn’t until high school that these buried seeds started to germinate.
From tenth grade until I graduated, I participated in the International Baccalaureate program at Princess Anne. I had been really excited about moving to Virginia Beach, hoping for real snow, new friends and exciting adventures. The neighbor hood we moved to, Green Run, was full of minorities. My sisters would play outside in the street as kids are supposed to do. Homework, literature and anime kept me inside most of the time, although the summer heat and winter snow could usually succeed in pulling me back to nature. I’d adjusted pretty well to the rigorous course work we were doing at school, and my introspective nature started to flourish more and more. Sometime late sophomore year, probably just around the summer, the last Black guy in the IB class of ’03 dropped the program. With him gone, there were only six Black students left, all of them female: Chanelle, Leah, Demetria, Nicole, Rachel and me.
I will never forget the words that came one day while I was chatting away to my mom. My younger sister by four years laughed and told me that I “talked so white.” With very little hesitation, I quickly told her that “it isn’t white, it’s educated.” As the moment passed, the impression stayed at the forefront of my consciousness. When on earth did whiteness become a synonym for educated? Better yet, how many people believed that way still? I’ve never been big on speaking ebonics; that wasn’t the way me or my sisters were raised. Je’leen picked it up from the friends she keeps. However, even at twelve, thirteen, she “knew” there was a certain way that each race is supposed to behave and speak.
As I started to search for colleges, my mother and godmother both asked me at some point if I was looking at any HBCUs. “Not really” was my reply. When they asked the ever predictable “why?” my answer was simple: “They aren’t looking for me. If I got some mail from an HBCU, I might look at it, but they haven’t sent me so much as a letter. I’ll have an IB Diploma when I graduate. I’m not gonna beg a school to accept me; it’s the school who should be begging me.” By this point, I understood how valuable a student I was. I knew all about supply-and-demand. I would be one of only six other Black females graduating from PAHS in the internationally recognized IB program. I was planning to use my minority and academic status to my advantage.
I saw it now. This other world that so many people inhabit. This world of color, a world where minority students could not afford to be average if they wanted to make it in the world of “the man.”
During the summer of 2000, I started to date a college student who was a Black man attending the predominantly White WCU. At the time we met, he was in the process of working on a book about his experiences in a racially different environment. He’d told me, in one of many conversations, that a Black had to work twice as hard as a White man in the same position. It was probably not the first time I heard such a remark, and I know it wasn’t the last. I’d go on to hear the same thing from mom, dad and plenty of other minorities in chat rooms and in person.
It seems like the older I get, the more I hear about how “we” have to stick together, how “they” are always against us. Call me an optimist…maybe even naïve, but I’d like to think that the system isn’t as against minorities as it used to be. I know racism still exists. I know that discrimination runs rampant yet, even if it is on the subconscious level. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that the oppressed can carry some of the blame as well. So many Blacks raise their children by teaching them from their first breath that the world is against them. They grow up expecting the worst, and finding it because they are searching so ardently for it. Thus, a vicious cycle is born, even if the child has never been exposed to any blatant racism or discrimination.
I can do anything I want if I put my mind to it. The world is mine for the taking. These thoughts were the ones that filled my world from as long as I can remember. If I wanted to sing, my parents let me sing. If I wanted to write, the teacher let me write. Can I put on a play instead of writing a report? Sure, Jannae’, that’s a wonderful idea. What do you want to do Jannae’? Do you want to participate in these programs? If there was any negativity fed to me in my childhood, it came from outside sources for which I did not care or pay any attention. My parents, my friends, my teachers believed in me, so I believed in myself. By the time I tripped upon the threshold to the world of color, I was already equipped with another set of glasses. Life was not about what other people expected from someone my color, but of what I could do, what I wanted to do and my own personal ability to do so.
Life presented me with a choice. I could enter this world of color, or stay where I was. I decided some time ago that I liked being Jannae’ Amyne Ellis a lot more than I liked the thought of being an African-American woman. I decided I wanted to be known for who I was, not what I was. But Jannae’, that’s not how the world works. Since when have I ever functioned the way the world expects me to function? I never have, never intend to, and pray that I never will.
I choose to be uncolored, and I’ll wait at the threshold to see who else I can take away from this suffocating world of Black, White, Red, Yellow and Brown.
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Subject: Art of Inactive Members! 
Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:11 pm
