WHO AM I?
Ana Sofia De Brito Good Hair
The issue of race has always been a problem in my Cape Verdean family—and in my life. We constantly argue whether we’re white or black. My dad says he stayed with my mom to melhorar a raça, or better his race, by lightening the color of his children, and I’d better not mess up his plan by bringing a black boy home. In my home country, being lighter is equated with having money, which is a process called branqueamento, where money makes you whiter and marrying lighter helps your race. Needless to say, he is proud of his light skin.
I had always wondered what my dad had against broad noses. As he realized in my late teenage years that my taste leaned toward black men, most of whom had the type of nose he despised, my dad would always advise me to think twice.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said one night when we went out to dinner together. “What do you mean?” I had no clue what I was doing wrong. “You’re destroying the race I helped create by marrying your mom. All my hard work will go to waste after you have a child with someone with a flat nose and nappy hair. You better start learning to do black people’s hair!” he replied, laughing.
Destroying his race? I was not aware that I was the product of his “hard work” to make the Cape Verdean race lighter, with finer hair and a straighter nose. For years I had heard him say he “bettered his race,” but I never truly believed he was serious. He would joke about my hypothetical future husband by saying he didn’t want to hurt his hand when he patted the Brillo-pad hair of his grandchildren.
It wasn’t until I heard his life story that I understood my dad’s sensibilities. When I was a child, my father was very evasive about his own childhood. It wasn’t until I was eighteen years old and away at college that I started to question him seriously about his past.
In 1965, at age three, my father left the Cape Verde Islands with his mother, father, and two youngest brothers and moved to the African country of Mozambique, another former Portuguese colony. My grandfather had been sent by the Portuguese government to serve as mayor of a village in the interior of the country that was quickly growing into a city. It was in Mozambique that my father’s views about race were formed. As the Cape Verdean son of an official in the administration of a Portuguese colony, my father led a privileged life, living in a big house with great food and many servants.
All this changed, however, when he went away to a boarding school attended almost entirely by the children of white Portuguese settlers. My dad was neither Portuguese nor white, so he was constantly bullied, beaten up, made fun of, and humiliated. He never talks about this part of his life in Mozambique, but the bullying he suffered has had an irreversible effect on him. The fact that his skin was the color of tan sand made him stand out in a sea of white, and his broad nose did not help matters. At his boarding school in Mozambique, the whiter students called him “nigger” and other epithets, the very names he now calls people who are darker than him. The white children in Mozambique equated him with the darker-skinned natives, whom their parents had taught them to look down on as inferior. Although my dad returned to Cape Verde at age thirteen, his notion of blackness and whiteness had been radically changed, and he still carries the mindset of the bullied child. Had my dad’s family stayed in Cape Verde, where color lines are blurred and there is no outright racism, I believe my dad would not be the way he is.
My mother was born and raised in the Cape Verde Islands, including Praia, a city where slaves were sent to be sold in the time of the slave trade. On the island of Santiago, where Praia is located, there are more Africans and Afro-descended Cape Verdeans than on any other island. At age ten, my mom moved from Fogo, a volcanic island with a bigger population of whiter Cape Verdeans, to Praia for schooling. My mother is the lightest in our family, and her thin, fine hair goes with the rest of her features. She has round dark eyes and a straight European-looking nose, the thin lips associated with being white, and a pale complexion that turns tan only in the summer months. My brother and I both inherited many of her features, but our noses differ. Mine is broader and his is straighter, on account of our having different dads. And even though we have similar features and complexions, we have different mindsets. We both identify strongly as Cape Verdean; he, however, identifies with being white, whereas I identify with being black.
It gets complicated when my family talk about skin color. They believe that black is ugly, but so is being “too white”; our Cape Verdean color is just right. My father seems to place Cape Verdean people in the category of an entirely different race. The reality is that Cape Verdeans are mixed both culturally and racially and are many different shades.
Cape Verde is made up of ten islands off the west coast of Africa. The Portuguese colonized the uninhabited islands in the fifteenth century. Like other colonies, Cape Verde prospered from the transatlantic slave trade. Cape Verdean people were literally born out of the interactions between the Portuguese, Italians, Asian Indians, British, French, and African slaves. Among those who call themselves Cape Verdean are blonds with green eyes and those who are dark as ebony. In between you can find any shade and combination of features. Even within my own family, our skin hue, the texture of our hair, and our eye color vary from person to person.
Our Cape Verdean-ness became even more complicated when we tried to integrate ourselves into America. In 1996 my mom decided to move to the United States and bring my brother and me along. I was five and my brother was fifteen. My father had gone ahead a year earlier. My mom stayed behind for a year because of her career as the manager of a well-respected hotel and restaurant in the capital of Cape Verde. We led a very comfortable life before moving to America. My parents were well-off, we lived in a spacious house, and my brother and I went to private schools. Nonetheless, the educational opportunities that were offered in Cape Verde could never compare with those offered in the United States. That summer we packed our belongings, got on a spacious South African plane, and came to the United States.
Our immigrant story was not that of the “huddled masses” often perpetuated by the media. We had no reason to leave Cape Verde. Our extended family is well respected there, particularly my maternal grandparents, because my grandfather saved many lives during his medical career, and my grandmother helped thousands of women give birth. To this day, people ask me to thank my grandparents for their benevolence. My grandfather had worked himself up from nothing after his father died when he was fourteen, leaving his mother with thirteen young children. He became a nurse and later pursued a career in politics, in addition to his medical career. My paternal grandfather did the same. His mother was a black Cape Verdean prostitute, who was impregnated by a white Portuguese judge and bore my illegitimate grandfather. He was sent away to be taken care of by his godmother during the hard times of World War II, when there was famine in Cape Verde. He excelled at school, became a pharmacist technician, and later also pursued a political career in Mozambique, becoming a mayor. My grandparents instilled in their children a love and admiration for education, which was passed on to their grandchildren. When my father left for the United States and sent back news that he had found work, my mother decided to move to the States as well to keep our family intact, and for the sake of her children’s education.
When we arrived at the airport in Boston, my mom shouted, “There he is!” I turned my head and spotted my dad. It had been a whole year since I’d last seen him, so I immediately began to run as fast as my little skinny legs could take me to his outstretched arms. “Cuquinha,” he whispered as he gave me a hug. That was my nickname—and it had been a whole year since I’d heard the word from his lips.
When we pulled up to our new home, I was very excited. I ran up the stairs, but as my dad opened the door, a wave of disappointment hit me. For some reason I was expecting something other than what I found. Our new home was a bachelor’s apartment. My father lived there with a roommate; it was gray and cold and smelled like cigarettes. I hoped with all my heart that this wasn’t our home; it was so much smaller than our old house. Unfortunately, this small duplex apartment has been our home for the past fifteen years. For the first three years there, I slept on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ bedroom while we waited for Nelson, my dad’s roommate, to leave. We watched the years go by, and the street began to change from white to black. As more Cape Verdean and Latino families moved to our street, more white people began to move out. The streets in our neighborhood also became less cared for, and violence increased. I watched all this through my window and from my balcony, since I’ve always felt uncomfortable being outside in my neighborhood.
Our first summer in the United States was a period of acclimation. Everything was still new and exciting, but limited. After six months of living here, we became undocumented after overstaying our tourist visas. Our family went from being relatively well-off to living on a tight budget. Cape Verdean currency did not translate well to American dollars. My father worked cleaning offices for a business in Providence, and my mother was unemployed. She spent her time helping me learn English so I could be enrolled in school in the upcoming fall. We spent hours every night practicing with flashcards. Because my mother was the only one in the family with any knowledge of English, she was the one who helped me learn my first words in this new language.
My elementary school was attended mostly by Cape Verdean children of all colors, who either had immigrated to the United States or were born here, some Latinos, African Americans, and a few whites. When I looked around, I saw familiar faces and heard a familiar language. I never had to answer the question “What are you?” In fact, until tenth grade I never thought of myself as a “minority.” This changed, however, when I transferred from a violence-ridden, under-resourced public school to a private all-girls Quaker school attended primarily by white Jewish girls. Overnight I became not only a minority but, because of my mixed racial background, also “exotic” and very much the “other.”
It was in this school that I first became aware of race relations and socioeconomic classes, and how the two are inexplicably intertwined. Until then I had never given much thought to my economic situation or race. I knew I wasn’t rich, but even though my mom was a domestic servant and my dad worked in a factory during this time, we were able to go on vacations to Hawaii and Florida, so I deduced that we weren’t poor either. I wasn’t very conscious of the various racial heritages that made up my Cape Verdean self, nor did I care. But then, suddenly, my school peer group consisted of seemingly rich white kids almost completely ignorant of people unlike themselves. I recall my mom’s advice to me on the first day at my new school: “Remember where you came from and don’t let these rich kids make you think they’re better than you. And also remember, you’re not rich.”
I definitely knew I was not rich. As an undocumented-immigrant transfer student into the tenth grade, I was offered a discounted tuition of only $5,000, though tuition was normally $19,000. My parents, however, could not afford to pay even $5,000 a year, as we lived from paycheck to paycheck and continually struggled to keep up with the bills they already had. I cried every day for three weeks after being notified that I had been accepted at the school, knowing I would never get to leave my public high school with its gang fights, rapes, and restrictive atmosphere. My salvation came from a Jewish family my mom worked for as a nanny and maid. They offered to pay my tuition for three years because they believed that any intelligent child deserved the same educational opportunities their son would have. For this I will be indebted to them for the rest of my life. They allowed me to become part of their family and made sure I took advantage of every educational opportunity presented to me.
My private high school solidified my identification with being black. I came to see that in this society I wasn’t just Cape Verdean—I was black. My parents had told me I was a white Cape Verdean, but being in a majority-white school made me think maybe I wasn’t white enough. I soon began to analyze my life in the United States through the same lens as most Americans, who saw my family and me as black. Ever since we moved to the States, my father had been complaining that he didn’t receive any respect here. He used to complain often about how disrespectfully he was treated by white people. This was especially confusing for him, because he thought of himself as white too, and therefore one of them. So he chose to assume that his poor treatment was because of his immigrant status or his limited English and thick accent, which forced him to work in low-paying factory jobs. He was never willing to consider that as far as white people in this country were concerned, his tan skin meant that he was black.
My family has long been in denial that in America we are simply seen as black. It wasn’t until I participated in a majority-white world every day at high school that I realized we were highly mistaken. I was not a white American and never would be. To people who didn’t know what Cape Verdeans were, we were just another group of colored people.
The rest of the world aside, within my family I am considered white. From an early age, I saw the struggle of racial identification becoming a problem even within my U.S.-based Cape Verdean family. I remember the first time I felt I was better than my cousins because I was lighter. I was seven years old and my hair was down to my waist. I was standing in front of the mirror having my cousins detangle my hair when the “hair problem” reared its ugly head. My cousins always fought with each other over who would comb my hair, which was soft and curly and long—not “black” hair. My cousins and I had just come back from the beach, and all of us had washed and combed our hair. Mine was air-drying; theirs was being flat-ironed and pulled in every direction by their mother in order to make it straight. My young cousin asked her mother why my hair didn’t need to be straightened like hers. “Because her hair is nice and is not kinky like yours,” her mother replied with a sigh. I beamed. To me at age seven, those words meant I had won, that despite my African features I had one thing they didn’t have—cabelo bom, or nicer hair—and therefore I was whiter. I was too young to understand fully how prized straight hair is within the Cape Verdean community, or that my hair being “whiter” made me less black.
Today I find myself wishing my hair were kinkier in order to qualify truly as “black.”
My hair is curly and fine. I do not use chemicals to make it straight; all it needs is one good pass of the flat iron—just like a white girl’s hair. Being able to walk out of the shower and let my hair air-dry into my hairstyle is a freedom that my black friends do not have. Because of my hair, the black community has identified me as not being truly black. Thus I have to prove to them that I am African, that I watch black movies and know what relaxing and perming are—that I, too, have experienced racism. It’s a constant struggle for me to identify as black, and I wonder how many more years I will have to fight to amass sufficient cultural capital to be considered black by other blacks.
The privileges I supposedly receive in America because of my light skin have been detailed to me by my friends at college who are considerably darker than I. They say that white people will treat me with more respect because I am light-skinned; that if I straightened my hair more often, I could easily be taken for a “maybe” white girl; and that I will be able to get jobs a darker-skinned person will not. With each such “privilege,” my separation from black people becomes increasingly clear.
When I have challenged the idea that my hair can determine the course of my life, my black college friends say, “Of course your hair matters! It’s been proven by scientific research that when a black girl wears her hair straight to a job interview, then she is more likely to get hired than if she wears her hair natural.” A dark-skinned Dominican friend said, “When I have my hair curly, I always get curious looks, but when I have my hair straight, I don’t. Watch. Straighten your hair for one day and see the difference in the comments you get.” So I decided to straighten my hair for one day and walk around campus to see what would happen. Sure enough, people came up to me asking to touch my hair, and I got lots of positive comments: “Oh my god! Your hair looks so pretty.” “Your hair is so long!” “Can I touch it? Wow, it’s so silky!” “I wish I had hair like yours.” “You’re even more exotic now. You should model!” All I could think was, “Damn, my friends were right.” White standards of beauty had won; my straight hair got me more attention than my curly hair. The most dramatic difference I noticed was that white boys who had never paid attention to me gave me flirty smiles and talked to me. Not once while I was wearing my hair curly had white boys struck up a conversation with me on a nonacademic topic. Despite all of the attention I get with straight hair, I still prefer my natural hairstyle, which I believe makes me appear more ethnic, more black.
I often ask myself, “If I’m not considered black, what does it mean to be black?” In my Rhode Island hometown, my ethnic and racial identities have never been questioned. I’m Cape Verdean, and so are my next-door neighbors. We consider Cape Verdean a separate race. But since I came to college, my racial identity has been ripped apart, and I have not yet been able to reassemble the pieces. The look of recognition in people’s eyes at home when I tell them that I am Cape Verdean has been replaced with a look of confusion among people on campus. Few people at my college know what Cape Verdean people are or even where the small island nation is located. People often assume I’m Latina or “that mixed-race girl.” Never black. Never African. And with my fine curly hair, light skin, and mixed European and African features, I can see how hard it must be for others to understand me in this polarized racial world. To them I am exotic.
I desperately cling to my Cape Verdean identity, which is like a piece of string slowly unraveling and threatening to snap. If it snaps, I fear my sense of self will be in complete disarray. I identify as black, but in the eyes of the world I am neither black nor white. When I try to affiliate with black student organizations at college, black students often don’t know what to make of me. They say, “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” implying that as a light-skinned girl, I don’t know what it is to be truly black. They seem to consider themselves the arbiters of who is truly black, and I somehow get lost in the shuffle.
After three years at college, I still feel there is a divide between dark-skinned and light-skinned blacks, and between African Americans and Africans. Interestingly, I am African and I identify mostly with African American culture, yet I feel as if I’m not being taken seriously at black group events because of my light skin. This has pushed me to associate more on campus with Dominicans, who understand my racial mixture and suffer the same type of discrimination.
My conundrum often arises on the dating scene as well. When I told one black freshman boy I was from Cape Verde, he said to me, “I like light-skinned girls with curly hair. And you’re different from black people. You’re exotic.” It’s hard to figure out if a boy likes me for my light features, because I’m exotic, or because of who I am.
Although I have never had a strong preference for any particular type and have dated boys from various backgrounds and races, at college my preference has focused on men with darker skin. Someone once asked me, “Why do you only like black men?” This question irritates me; why aren’t white people asked why they are attracted to other white people? Is there a law that says I must be attracted to others who look just like me?
It’s so much easier for me to date men from Rhode Island than from my college, as the locals tend to be familiar with Cape Verdean people, culture, and food. They know what Cape Verde is and can locate it on a map, so I don’t have to explain my heritage and can enter the relationship knowing they will understand where I am coming from. My former boyfriend was African American with Cape Verdean ancestry. He has what would be considered black features and was completely immersed in the black community.
When my parents heard I had a black boyfriend, they had different reactions. My mom was genuinely happy I had found someone I seemed to like. Her motto has always been “It’s you that has to like him, not us, and it doesn’t matter what his color is.” My father, however, responded, “Another black person? I can see you’re stuck with that category.” But when he met my boyfriend, his reaction surprised me: “Oh, I thought he’d be darker. He’s just like us. I like him.” It seemed my new boyfriend passed the test because his skin was lighter than my previous boyfriend’s. Surprisingly, my father actually acknowledged him and spoke English with him. My previous boyfriend had hardly received a hello or a handshake.
Black men at my college are interesting. They seem to consider the dark-skinned girls more authentically black, and my light skin becomes a negative in their eyes. I remember having a conversation with a dark-skinned black student one winter night about the use of the word “nigga” and whether I was “allowed” to use it. “You’re too light-skinned and you can’t use the word. You’re almost too white. If you were to use it, it’d be as if a white person were to call me a nigger.”
I tried to explain. “No it’s not. That’s crazy. I’m not white—I’m black! If I want to call you a ‘nigga’ like you do with your friends and how you sometimes address me, I can.” He replied, “It’s not the same. You don’t understand how hurtful it seems coming out of your mouth.” I pressed on, with tears streaming down my face. “Because I’m light-skinned? Because I’m a few shades lighter than you, it removes the fact that my family was also part of slavery, that my family was also discriminated against because of their skin color, that my family also has had racial problems with the world? When IN ALL THAT did we lose being black and become white instead?” He chuckled. “Aww, I made you cry. You don’t get it. You’re still light-skinned. And you just can’t use the word ‘nigga.’ That’s it.” He ended the conversation and left, as he saw that I was getting increasingly upset.
I was angry. This conversation, in the end, was not about whether the word “nigga” should be used or not. I don’t condone use of the word and I don’t want to use it. But the fact that he was denying my right to use it because of my lighter skin made me feel like I was being discriminated against by my own people. How could he not see that my family and I also experience discrimination? It seems that because of my light skin, I am blamed for the world’s discrimination against other blacks’ darker skin. It almost makes me want to heed my parents’ advice and date a nice Cape Verdean boy who understands the struggle of finding an identity in America, instead of having to explain myself to every new boy I date. The “Who’s blacker?” argument gets old quickly.
In America, I often feel I’m forced to choose whether I’m black or white or “other.” I prefer to choose “other” because I’m neither black nor white, but being in between creates problems for others trying to classify me. So here in the United States I identify as black, which is the most comfortable category to fit myself into, but I constantly feel like the immigrant stepchild to black American culture.
To make up for the lack of recognition by my fellow black people, I tend to adopt my friends’ accents and mannerisms and try to appear “more black.” I’ve become a great actress in the role of black American. My accent changes from southern to midwestern to New Yorker, depending on where the person I’m talking to is from. I’ve learned to talk about black hair and leave my hair curly to keep from looking “too white.” I stay out in the summer sun as much as possible in order to get a tan and appear “more black.” I take classes in African American studies, where I often feel that comments from lighter-skinned and African students are delegitimized because we have not gone through the same experiences as the African American students. Once again, there is the divide between Us and Them.
By the end of college I’ll be able to write a book called “How to Be Black in America,” based on my experiences of learning how to fit in. Fortunately, I think I’ve won over most of the student body at college. I’m now seen as black, though some people are still surprised when I announce I’m in the NAACP or part of the Afro-American Association. I wish I didn’t have to mount a campaign to win people over to the identity I have chosen, that I could just be Cape Verdean and be seen as what I am instead of trying to fit into the single category of being black.
Regrettably, my family’s ideas about racial identity are less evolved than mine. I don’t think they are racist in terms of color, but they are against what they see as the black mentality, based on stereotypes perpetuated by the media and the poverty-stricken environment we live in. My father doesn’t want me to associate with black Americans, whom he views as lazy, stupid welfare users. He’s always surprised when I bring home black boyfriends who are educated, but they are never good enough for him: “He’s pretty educated . . . for a black boy.” My family and I constantly fight over the way they address black Americans, but it’s hard to change their way of thinking when they continue to see the effects of poverty on the black population. This makes it hard for me to explain to them how their words affect me and make me feel like the black sheep in our family.
It’s hard to live in a world where fighting for what you want to be seen as is not supported by your family members, which is summed up in what my immediate family marked down for the census—brother: white; father: white/other; mother: other; me: black/other. It seems as if America has thoroughly confused us.
I will continue to state that I am black, despite being labeled a “nigger lover” by my family, being made fun of as the whitest person in a group of “truly black” people, and always having to fight to be accepted as black. Maybe someday these racial categories can be dissolved and I’ll no longer have to choose.
After graduating from Dartmouth with a major in Latin America, Latino, and Caribbean studies and a minor in Lusophone studies, Ana Sofia spent two wonderful months in Brazil and now works in a clinical research setting. She looks forward to becoming a health care professional and serving low-income women and being a part of the women’s health care field.