Origins of Blackness

My paternal grandmother has 7 children, including my late father. They are affectionately known as the “Stevens Clan,” characteristically known for large foreheads, seductive wit, and enthusiastic intelligence. In the summers, the clan would draw together at my grandmother’s home in Roanoke on Staunton Avenue, along with their children and other family friends. I am the youngest of my father’s children by 20 years and only got to experience the tail end of the summers at Grandma Daisy’s house. After the first few summers of tears, I came to anticipate the meaning of the 3-hour drive from Richmond to Roanoke as the start of 10 weeks spent at Grandma’s house amongst family and friends that would eventually come to develop my understanding of self. It is during these summers that I can recall developing the foundations of my identity as a black person.

My summers between 1995 to 2002 were as much about lessons as those days in preschool and kindergarten classrooms. Both my paternal grandparents had been teachers. This was evident from the behaviors of their 7 children. Circled around the large kitchen table like a campfire, my aunts and uncles would engage in extemporaneous speech, feeding off one another and playfully sharing stories about their upbringing. In the years after, I came to learn that many of the stories were interwoven with the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Never explicitly stated, a question to my aunt Lynn about her first day of school would excite the response, “Whut you say, dah? Huh, uh! chil’, You’s enough to dribe me wile. Want a sto’y; jes’ hyeah dat!” From across the room, my uncle John would retort, “Whah’ ‘ll git a sto’y at? Di’n I tell you th’ee las’ night?”4 My dad would swipe at my nose with his thumb, chiming in, “Go ‘way, honey, you ain’t right.”5 The evening would continue this way through the end of Dunbar’s A Cabin Tale. A question of “what’s for dinner?” would turn into a rendition of When Da Co’n Pone’s Hot. Once those summers ended, I would come to appreciate Dunbar’s poetry as a formative experience, presenting a specific definition of blackness. The performance of Dunbar’s poetry, as well as the works of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and many more, continued the cultural system of communication marked by call-and-response, group creation, rhythmic improvisation, and “signifyin’” practices; all of which are practices encompassed by the Black Vernacular Tradition. These external messages “play a critical role in how we come to view ourselves and our place in the world.”

During those summers on Staunton Avenue, I came to equate these authors and styles of communication with my identity as a black person. Socialized notions, such as race, are influenced in early childhood development.8 My summers with my family and Dunbar socialized attitudes about blackness continues to be a source of pride. The performance of blackness was inextricably linked with intellect, beauty, humor, and (historic and immediate) community. These would be the initial influences of not only the way I viewed myself as black but also how I viewed other black people. Eventually, this notion of self would be challenged by encounters with the outside, non-black world.

Throughout primary and secondary school, my understanding of blackness was never formally challenged. Being raised in an urban center in the south meant that most of my peers were like me. Any peers who were not like me did not present a conflict with my identity until I reached college. Up to this point, my classmates share the same socio-economic and cultural dynamics as myself: majority black, southern, middle-class metropolitan kids. Though I never left my city, my undergraduate institution was a predominantly white university, with a majority of affluent, upper-class students, faculty, and administrators. As a result, I was brought into sharp conflict with the community of which I now found myself a part. The concept of social perception as “the two-way bridge between identities and interactions,” means that our understanding of self is a convergence of the reality of a thing as well as informed perception. When we encounter a person, like us or unlike us, we use whatever socialized information we have to make sense of them. Where this leads us astray is when the qualities we affix to a particular race or gender become “fixed qualities” and inform systems and ways of dealing with people solely on the basis of that fixed judgment or bias. Typically, our initial judgments are just that, and eventually come to be appraised through interactions with others.

In college, I found the interaction with stereotypes to be extremely difficult, not only because I’d not been directly confronted with stereotypes about blackness but because they were so harshly and forcefully opposed to the notions of self I had inherited as a child on Staunton Avenue. A dialogue had appeared between and my previous evolitions to try to reconcile the gulf between my very Black nascent self and this new code switching, shrinking version of myself. Where I saw intellect and pride, many of my peers expected ignorance and fear. I found myself sometimes questioning whether I should be feared or whether I lacked some essential knowledge. Was I ignorant because of the way I spoke? Was my black skin truly dangerous and fear-evoking? I questioned the very methods of signifyin’ communication that thrilled me during the summers at grandma’s house. In these interactions with my peers, I became deeply defensive and entrenched. I did not want to place my identity into conflict. I began to act in a way that I felt protected me against conflicting information that called into question the “stability and significance” of my experience. My responses to the conflict echoed Barnlund’s observations as well. As much as I could, I sought to avoid communication as a way to protect my ideals through isolation; my communication also became selective, where I only sought to interact with those who felt and understood blackness in the same ways that I’d been taught.  

This defensiveness corrupted any opportunity I would have had to evolve my experience as a black person. Fortunately, I would fall into an area of scholarship that would open my eyes to the value of dialectical communication. After reading Plato’s Phaedrus in an introductory rhetoric course, I came to understand that I would need to place this part of my identity, my blackness, into a productive space with differing opinions, if not for my sake but for the sake of others. Plato places great value in this space, where similarities and dissimilarities can be evaluated, and perspectives can be refined.18 Similarly, I would come to a feeling of peace, accepting that I could exist in the world with my understanding of self as black even whilst other, competing notions of blackness exist, and only by placing those two into productive spaces would there ever be a full understanding of what it means to be black.

“Each of us has a sense of self that is integral to the ways in which we move through the world. When this sense of self comes into conflict, we must remember that not only do we develop as individuals through interpersonal interactions, but we also encourage the pursuit of new meanings for others.”

Dean Barnlund (2008).