It's Possible to Forget

Sometimes I forget that I’m black. How? You may as well ask. I’m surrounded. I’m surrounded almost completely by people who don’t look like me – not just in my real, waking, breathing, touching other people life – but also in the popular culture I immerse myself in: the books, the plays, the music, the movies, the television shows. All I see is the same face, different features plastered upon it, a slight tint to the hue and a different shade of hair that flows perfectly, short or long, in a cascading wave of manageability. I confess I get confused. I get caught up sometimes and I forget, for short spans of time about my ethnicity or race or whatever the name, the silly spoon-like name, that defines me, describes me as different than those in my world. It’s not how eccentric I am. It’s not how my personality allows me to like and dislike people with great intensity depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the month, the year. It’s my skin, no matter how flawless, how devoid of imperfections, how smooth or how warm. It’s my hair, no matter how straight, how wet, how clean, how sweetly scented or how long. It’s my face, with my broad nose, my wide eyes, my larger than average, by which implies white-pink thin lips, my forehead. I am black. When I forget, for those short seconds, I always find my way back to the identity I was born into. When I glance in the mirror or catch a reflection from the dark computer screen that echoes back my image as I stare at face alone in the ether, which reminds me of me, of who I am. When I scratch my head and hit the kinky root, after the relaxer begins to fade and my hair becomes tough, resilient and unyielding once more, agitated by the pull of the comb, annoyed by the use of a brush, I feel that brittle but soft hair that comes from my ancestors that I of course have learned is coarse because of the harsh warm conditions where they lived as they evolved into a breed of humans not fit to be humans by those who remained fair and unchanged by their conditions in such an extremely different way than all those that surrounded them. When I look in someone’s eyes, the eyes of a friend, the eyes of a family member, the eyes of a stranger, which more often than not are not muddied with brown but springy and light with green or cool and wet with blue. I may forget from time to time but the sense of who I am, what I am,, comes rushing back every time, every second making up for the seconds when I lost the grasp of my eternal reality. We may be working towards not seeing ourselves as different from others because of our skin or because of our hair but how can we not when it’s innate? How can we not teach what we were taught? How can we teach something, we can’t believe no matter how hard we tried because our brains no longer accept change or alterations in our permanent perceptions?