Living in this skin is the best study in human behaviour

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Being black is exhausting. This is something few of us want to admit because of the labels that may come with that admission, but I’m here to free us all by telling the truth nobody wants to own up to. Being black is exhausting. So exhausting.

The constant gaslighting and prejudice makes the experience of being in this skin a heavy burden. You add being a woman and African into this mix and suddenly you’re dealing with a quagmire of issues. But I really need you to read the words as they are and not hear what I’m not saying. What I’m not saying is that I don’t love being black, female and African. I absolutely love it and wouldn’t change a thing about but this doesn’t mean I don’t recognise the challenge of being crucified for something I didn’t chose. 

Last month I spent a couple of days in Cape Town after judging and attending the Loeries. There I spent time with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while and we immediately started having a ‘spirited’ discussion about race. He told me that black people focus too much on race and that we shouldn’t make our race the focus of our experience. We argued, sorry, I mean we had a spirited discussion because while I agree, the world never stops reminding me, us, that we’re black. Would I love to have my humanity be the first thing that people see? For sure. In fact, that’s how it should be, but our unconscious biases are incredibly ingrained in us. 

The truth is, my friend himself, no matter how open minded he feels he may be, cannot deny the fact that he himself is aware of my race, as much as he is aware of my gender. I remember having an illuminating discussion with a television producer whose of Italian descent married to a black South African woman, and he mentioned how they’d both be at a restaurant – ironically, he was referencing their experiences of Cape Town’s partially dormant racial discrimination – and she would feel the hostility from the staff while he was totally oblivious to it and was in fact, having a lovely experience. He mentioned how he had to eventually stop questioning his wife’s feelings and actually believe that while they were sitting at the same table, at the same restaurant, they were having two completely different experiences because she was dining while black, while he was just at a patron. You may love me in spite of my skin colour but people around you, around us, will definitely be aware that we’re a couple/friends/family that don’t look the same. 

How I see myself and how the world sees me are two different things. Whether I’m shopping at Small Street or in Sandton City, I will always have a security guard dedicated to following me throughout my shopping experience. If I’m wearing designer gear from head to toe then I’m nouveau riche; if I know all the lyrics to Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles, then I’m a coconut. And there are many more examples I could make of living, travelling, writing, loving, laughing while black. Toni Morrison once said that labels belong to the labeller, not the labelled. And Ms Morrison was totally right. But how do we define ourselves beyond labels such as “the angry black woman”? 

The answer perhaps is in how we see ourselves because so much of our lived experience has been from the vantage point of other people’s projections on who we are and should be.  “Blackness is a condition imposed on me, rather than being an experienced identity,” says acclaimed author, Tsitsi Dangarembga in her new book, Black and Female. While basking in the glory of being nominated for a Booker Prize in 2020 (for her book, This Mournable Body), the Zimbabwean government decided to make an example of her by prosecuting her for protesting. I experienced the silencing and denigrating of black women when I released my book, The Way I See It, and discovered that many people wanted to silence me because I wasn’t saying what they wanted me to say, the way they wanted me to say it. But it’s not only these micro-aggressions that make being black exhausting, it’s also the very real threat of police brutality that follows us no matter whether we’re George Floyd or Khuli Chana being shot by cops for driving while black. 

When Ava Duvernay released the Netflix series, When They See Us, she forced us to sit and watch the discomfort of what it is like to be falsely accused of a crime you didn’t commit. Required, but difficult watching. This is why I wasn’t surprised that the Zeitz Mocaa’s latest exhibit (which opens November 30 in Cape Town), When We See Us, was inspired by this true-life story of these young African American men forced into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. When We See Us features artists of black and African descent, exploring the various ways we view ourselves. 

For black people – no matter where we come from – to fully see ourselves will require us to lead with our humanity, no matter how the world tries to dehumanize and gaslight us. None of us are imagining racism, no matter how casual, it is real. But make no mistake, no matter how exhausted I may be, I’ll never stop reminding you what a privilege it is to be born black. Living in this skin is the best study in human behaviour. There is no greater education. And I wouldn’t change being black for all the privilege in the world.