Oluo speaks

Speaks to me:

When people met my mother, they would look at her with pity, imagining the story of a white woman lost—lured and abandoned by Blackness and left with two Black children to forever remind her of her fall.

Ijeoma Oluo, page 12, “Whipped for Lying with a Black Woman”, 400 Souls.

Speaks to me:

“There was no record of the Black woman in question being punished for polluting herself with whiteness. [Hugh] Davis was whipped for polluting whiteness—his own and that of his community. This was the first recorded case … and that “pure” whiteness must be protected through law.” (12).

But I am not white—I’m not even half-white. My mother is white. I am Black.

I explained to her: “You cannot become part white.” // Whiteness sis a ledge you can only fall from. // The fact that whiteness was something that could exist only in purity, not in percentages, was something reinforced throughout my entire life.