CHRISTINA GANDOLFO

I love being black; that's not a problem. The problem is that I don't want to always talk about it, because honestly, talking about being black is extremely tiring. I don't know how Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson do it. People who talk, think, and breathe race every single day — how? Aren't they exhausted?

The pressure to contribute to these conversations now that we have a black president is even more infuriating. "What do you think about what's going on in the world and how our black president is handling it?" asks a race baiter. "It's all good, I guess," I want to answer with a Kanye shrug. "I'm over it." But am I? Could I be, even if I wanted to?

Even now, I feel obligated to write about race. It's as though it's expected of me to acknowledge what we all already know. The truth is, I slip in and out of my black consciousness, as if I'm in a racial coma. Sometimes, I'm so deep in my anger, my need to stir change, that I can't see anything outside the lens of race.

At other times, I feel guilty about my apathy. But then, isn't this what those who came before me fought for? The right not to have to deal with race? If faced with a choice between fighting until death for freedom and civil rights, and living life without any acknowledgment of race, they'd choose the latter.

Growing up in Potomac, Maryland, was easy. I had a "rainbow coalition" of friends of all ethnicities. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

All that changed when my family moved to Los Angeles and placed me in a middle school where my blackness was constantly questioned — and not necessarily in the traditional sense, i.e., "You talk white, Oreo girl," or, "You can't dance, white girl." Those claims were arguable, for the most part. My biggest frustration in the challenge to prove my "blackness" usually stemmed from two very annoying, very repetitive situations.

Situation 1: "I'm not even black and I'm blacker than you." It's one thing when other African-Americans call me out on my race card, but when people outside my ethnicity have the audacity to question how "down" I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted of black women, it's a whole other thing. I recall a time when I was having a heated discussion with a white, male classmate. Our eighth grade class was on a field trip, and the bus driver blasted Puff Daddy.

"Puff Daddy is whack," my classmate said. "Puff Daddy is tight," I retorted. He rolled his eyes and said, "Have you heard of [insert underground rapper]? Now, he's dope." I hadn't, but I couldn't let this white boy defeat me in rap knowledge, especially as others started to listen. "Yeah, I know him. He's not dope," I lied to save face. He asked me to name which songs were "not dope." Panic set in. I was exposed.

As he rattled off names of MCs, he made me feel as though my credibility as a black person relied on my knowledge of hip-hop culture. My identity had been reduced to the Bad Boy label clique as this boy claimed my black card as his own. Of course, as I grew older, I realized that there was more to being black than a knowledge of rap music, and I didn't have to live up to this pop cultural archetype. I began to take pride in the fact that I couldn't be reduced to a stereotype and I didn't have to be. This leads me to my next situation.

Situation 2: "Black people don't do that." Or so I'm told by a black person. These, too, are derived from stereotypes shaped by pop culture. The difference is that in these situations, we black people are the ones buying into the stereotypes.

When I was a teenager, others questioned my blackness because some of my life choices weren't considered to be "black": joining the swim team when "black people don't swim" or choosing to be a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken. These choices, and the positive and negative responses to them, helped to broaden my own perspective and eventually spurn these self-imposed limitations. But not before embarrassing the hell out of myself in a poor attempt to prove I was "down." In seventh grade, I submitted an English project in Ebonics just to prove that I could talk and write "black." I was trying to prove it to myself as much as I was to everyone around me.

Even post-college, I'd overtip to demonstrate I was one of the good ones. Only recently have I come to ask, What am I trying to prove and to whom am I proving it? For the majority of my life, I cared too much about how my blackness was perceived, but now? I couldn't care less. Call it maturation or denial or self-hatred. I give no f%^&s. And it feels great. I've decided to focus only on the positivity of being black and especially of being a black woman. Am I supposed to feel oppressed? Because I don't. Should I feel marginalized? I prefer to think of myself as belonging to an exclusive club.

Being made to feel not black enough by "down" white people on one hand and not black enough by blacks on the other has shaped a more comfortably black me. Who is to say what we do and don't do? What we can and can't do? The very definition of blackness is as broad as that of whiteness. As CNN produces specials about us, and white and Latino rappers feel culturally dignified in using the N-word, our collective grasp on blackness is becoming more and more elusive. And that may not be a bad thing.

Adapted from The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, by Issa Rae, available February 2 wherever books are sold.

This article was originally published as "Can We Not Talk About My Race For a Minute?" in the February 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to get the issue in the iTunes store!

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