Taking off the Mask

By Olivia Harris

“Don’t imagine that you are safer than any other Jew just because you are in the royal palace. If you keep quiet at a time like this, help will come from heaven to the Jews, and they will be saved, but you will die and your father’s family will come to an end. Yet who knows—maybe it was for a time like this that you were made queen!” Mordecai, Esther 4:13-14

My favorite Biblical character growing up was Queen Esther. She was young, beautiful, a good girl who was able to save an entire nation, and a real-life female superhero. And she didn’t appear to do much more than have good fashion sense and have dinner with the well-to-do. We both come from humble backgrounds, she an orphaned child of Jewish exiles raised by her older cousin in Persia, and I the child of a Guyanese mother, raised in East New York, Brooklyn.  I grew up in what one might call “the ghetto,” with Dominican and Puerto Rican neighbors whose lives were regularly disrupted by their citizenship status. No one in our neighborhood had more than a few dollars to spare.  Since many adults did not complete school or speak great English, most parents worked jobs with very little pay, security, or mobility. Women were usually off the books healthcare workers and babysitters, while the men worked construction. Those who were educated, like my mother, often worked dependable but low paying city jobs. Many of us lived with extended family members who stayed a few years to get on their feet before attempting to achieve the American Dream of financial stability.

Despite how it might sound, my childhood felt idyllic, because while we didn’t have a ton, we had enough to satisfy me. I never wanted for anything, and could always be myself. I was both an avowed bookworm who loved reading any kind of mythology book I could get my hands on, and a tomboy who liked to ride my scooter for hours up and down the same block because I wasn’t allowed to cross the street. Although my community was racially and ethnically mixed, every child was expected to behave themselves in a way that reflected well on our families, most especially to distinguish ourselves academically, as we had opportunities in America that our parents did not. I was keenly aware growing up that despite our working- class finances, my family had solidly middle-class values.

While Esther became known for her comeliness, I exemplified myself through my education. In both my public school and the Prep for Prep academic program, I excelled, not just because I worked hard, but because I genuinely delighted in academic pursuits: learning Latin etymologies and history was my idea of fun (although algebra was not). I was also distinguishing myself as more than a bookworm: I had a penchant for the dramatic.

That was Olivia in her home environment, shining her brightest and exceeding expectations. But as I began applying to independent schools, I found myself thrown into a world of completely different anxieties and expectations. When I visited one school, the interviewer puzzled aloud if I would be able to survive being a year younger than my classmates, when I had always been a year younger than my peers. Ivy League legacies and country homes, bat mitzvahs and the New York Times were all suddenly extremely important to me, most of which I had barely interacted with, if at all. I felt my difference at every level, most of which could not be helped. Later on in college, when we read W.E.B. Dubois’ Souls of Black Folk, I found this quote exactly described my jarring introduction to life on the Upper East Side, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” I no longer felt that I was just Olivia, a know-it-all who liked to make up songs, there was external pressure to be Olivia Harris, one of two African-American students in the class of 2010, who was, dare I say it, a threat.

It sounds preposterous to me to even say that a skinny glasses-wearing, goofy thirteen-year-old with a poetry book could be a threat. How do you know that you are a threat? Is it possible to quantify the shifting eyes when you walk into a room? Can you really describe the impossible expectation that your fellow students, teachers and administrators have for you to adjust to them but never for them to adjust to you? How many times did I have to learn to bite my tongue and not raise my hand after my parents and I were informed in a sit-down meeting that students in a 12-person classroom felt intimidated because I was raising my hand too often in class? Can I really explain the rage and humiliation I felt at being outright disrespected by male teachers with witnesses who didn’t come to my aid? How I had to respond to being yelled at in a room of at least twenty people with grace and a “thank you” because I knew that if I responded in any other way, I would be a ghetto black girl who didn’t know how to behave rather than an innocent child with a legitimate concern? How should I explain the crushing anxiety and fear I had whenever I mentioned my faith in God because I had heard students and teachers openly deride anyone who was Christian as being a backwards, gun-toting Southern Baptist?

Everywhere I turned I found myself helpless and friendless, and fearful of doing or saying the wrong thing because, as I had already been warned by a well-meaning teacher, I had to choose between having friends and being a good student. My parents were sympathetic but they could not really understand my frustrations. So I stuffed down my anger and resentment and learned the world around me as quickly as I could. The prevailing opinion of my peers and professors mirrored the disdainful distaste of Bill Maher’s documentary on the Abrahamic religions. I could not help but feel that if only I were more exotic, I would be deemed acceptable. Students and teachers alike were fascinated with Asian religions and cultures, but were at best entertained (Olivia, do that thing where you catch the spirit again!), or at worst openly scornful of religions closer to home.

Perhaps one of the most difficult pieces for me to understand was a world in which one could profess atheism or agnosticism and still observe religion culturally.  In my Black Baptist world, if you went to church, you believed in God, and if you didn’t, you just hadn’t seen enough trials to see what the Lord was doing for you. Many students in this new place seemed to practice a form of Judaism that revolved around attending Seders with famous people and joking about building sukkots in Upper East Side backyards. When I brought up the Bible in my tenth grade American literature class, I watched my classmates roll their eyes and giggle, until finally one day, when a girl had the audacity to interrupt me as I was connecting a Thoreau quote to a Bible verse, I snapped. “What do you even know about the Bible?” I asked her, with three years of frustration growling through my voice. “We studied parts of the Old Testament in sixth grade,” she replied, as if that were enough to qualify her as an expert in a religion she didn’t practice over someone whose daily life was suffused with Baptist doctrine. From then on, I realized that these girls, despite their grades and insider status, didn’t know anything more than I did. From that point on I refused to let them parrot popular anti-religious opinions unchallenged, and also refused to let them disrespect me or any other student.

Breaking out of the “nice respectable black girl” mask in order to speak my mind took a lot of courage for me. I had no idea if anyone else cared about fairness, as often the faculty was present when other students were rude or derogatory towards others. The students with the most clout always got away with their bad behavior. While I don’t blame anyone personally for making their choices, their silence and refusal to engage urged me to act, even when standing up for myself could be construed as combative. No one fought for me because I was on the bottom of the social rung, but I could make sure that no one else I knew would have to go through what I did. When my friend with a stutter stumbled over her words and my classmates laughed as she tried to get her point across, I point-blank responded “that’s rude,” even though my teacher never addressed what happened.

I could go on for a long time detailing the difficulties of my adjustment to that world so unlike the one I went home to every night, but I will conclude this chapter by saying that after almost four years of sleeping in class out of sheer exhaustion from my lonely two hour commute and writing suicidal Sylvia Plathesque poetry in any notebook I could find, I figured out, like Queen Esther, how to make myself acceptable for court. Even as I stood up for others, I still had to hide parts of myself. I didn’t want to remind my peers that I didn’t have tutors, time or money to do extracurricular activities like they did. And with that hard-earned knowledge, I became one of the most popular and celebrated students in the school. I hosted dance parties, read poems at school assemblies, and played the out-of-tune still-life guitar in the art classroom.  I arranged Beyonce for my a cappella group, wrote an epic poem for the 51 people in my class, and edited the literary magazine and yearbook. At the end of my senior year, I was presented with the Head’s Award, which recognizes the senior who has contributed the most to the school community. By all accounts I had overcome my obstacles. Getting into Columbia also seemed to say to me that whatever suffering I did was worth it.

 You might be thinking, “What a beautiful story about a girl who overcame the odds and learned how to beat the system.” And in many ways, my story is a triumph. But, as I have already told you, Queen Esther is my hero. She, like me, successfully assimilated and well-loved, could have decided that becoming queen was the end of her story. It would still be a riveting tale of individual success. But she didn’t. During a time of duress for her people, Esther had the option to keep silent and not make herself the victim of possible retaliation. But, at the urging of her wise cousin Mordecai, she considered her position to be not just a point of individual achievement but an opportunity to bring the plight of her people to the most important men in the land. And that is powerful.  When you have succeeded at assimilating it is dangerously easy to forget who you really are and replicate the same prejudices you endured. As the biracial writer Danzy Senna wrote, if “whiteness were contagious...then surely I had caught it. It affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.”

And how easy it would be for me to say that race in America isn’t so bad. For one thing, I look trustworthy, by which I mean, not too black. As the old segregationist saying goes “if you’re white you’re alright, if you’re brown, stick around, if you’re black, get back.” My parents and I are all around the same shade of tawny brown that doesn’t frighten too many old ladies when we walk down the street. Not only that, my family already knew how to get ahead in America by taking advantage of educational opportunities. My mother’s parents, while poor when they came to America, were from well-to-do families in Guyana full of teachers and doctors. My father, who graduated from Columbia University, had aunts and uncles who attended graduate school at Teachers’ College and Business School on scholarship.  I had been taught an image of Blackness as powerful, capable, and ultimately, limitless. And why not? I had seen it with my own eyes that Black people could run their own world.

But as we have seen in the past couple of years, it still really doesn’t matter my exact skin color or education, as long as I am not white. It doesn’t just affect my relationship with police, it also affects my relationship with myself. There are many things that your family can’t shield you from, not just bullets. Even though I was well-equipped educationally and emotionally with so many confidence-building positive experiences, I still found myself doubting if I was worthy enough to sit amongst my white peers. And when the issue comes to race and womanhood, for many of us, the prejudices affect our self-image, and completely dictate how we attempt to present ourselves to the world. My cousins who were raised in Georgia damaged their hair with artificial weaves because they wanted to have flowing locks like the white and mixed-race girls who were considered to be pretty. In fact, until college, I too used to perm my hair and always wear it in a ponytail to look more like other girls.

What is so important about how girls comb their hair? Why do we fight so hard to be seen like the other girls? This is not about the inanities of vanity or “fitting in.” It is about the power of perception, because if you look unassuming and have the right credentials, you can slide by, date the same boys, apply for the same internships, join the same sororities and live in the same neighborhoods without too much trouble. More insidiously, if you do not seem like you fit into the dominant culture, you deserve to be disrespected. As the Washington Post recently noted, black girls in school are suspended at rates that far outstrip their white female counterparts and even outpace the rates of most groups of boys, excepting black males. And sometimes they are suspended for things like wearing an Afro.

And there are girls who go unmentioned that I would like to remind you about, because their race is one of the big reasons that they are so ignored. There are girls whose stories are even more arresting than my own, filled with the unfairness of the justice system, who cannot speak to you today because they are in and out of group homes where they face domestic and sexual abuse. Black girls are not considered innocent, they are portrayed as Jezebels, sexually aware before their time. There are girls who are forced into prostitution who go missing and have none of the publicity of Elizabeth Smart because not only do their families not have the funds, it seems their stories are not nearly as tragic to the rest of America.  A black woman in Florida with children who fires warning shots during a domestic dispute has spent more time in jail than George Zimmerman.

I have been blessed with the platform to speak with you all today. I have been educated in such a way that unlike Rachel Jeantel, I will not be ridiculed for how I speak. My final message, similarly to Queen Esther, is that at every level of society, black people are suffering. But especially for black women, I need to draw attention to our unique struggles because people may not see us as worthy of protecting. We too are under attack, both physically and psychologically. And without us there will be no more black families.