I Can't Believe They Said That

When I was in high school, I attended a summer theater program at Northwestern University called Cherubs. it was specifically for high school students with an interest in theater. And since it was in Evanston, Illinois, students came from all across the U.S. I loved it.

I don’t know how I got onto the subject, but I remember telling a boy that I was black.

He said, “How can you be black? You’re white.”

To which I replied, “Both of my parents are black.“

“But you’re white… Are you an albino?”

At this point in my life, I was not ready for difficult conversations. I was dumbfounded. Did he ask me if I was albino? Obviously, he was not exposed to many blacks and didn’t know we came in all shades.

Everyone was so carefree and innocent in the program.

He may have been innocent and was sincerely asking, but I saw it as ignorance. He had heard about albino rats, so was it possible that I could be albino? That he was meeting his first albino?

True, rats can be albino, but they also have red eyes. And did he notice I had dark hair?

It’s funny, you think you know someone based on their personality and your friendly exchange, and then they say something like that that shocks you and you don’t know how to respond. You understand what their life is really like. You can’t imagine living without any diversity and not growing up without having these conversations about race.

But it wasn’t just high school students who made these shocking statements to me or about me.

In middle school in Connecticut, I wore my hair down one day to a Halloween dance. I was a mermaid. Normally, I wore my hair in tight neat braids every day, but as the mermaid I decided to wear my hair down and wild. One boy walked up to me and said I looked like I put my hair in the washing machine. He chuckled.

When I lived in New York City, a stranger said I looked like a clown in my Afro and another stranger, a man, said I looked like I put my finger in an electric socket. They thought they were funny. At a Broadway show, an older woman whispered loudly behind me to her husband, “What is she protesting?”

As if wearing your hair natural or in an Afro meant that you had to be protesting something.

Yes, it can be surprisingly what people say. Some people, of course, say things to make you feel bad and others are simply ignorant.

The good news was that I loved my Afro and my hair, so these statements were just sudden jolts in my day.

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