My Brief Flirtation with Coonship
I was thirteen years old the first time another person of color called me a coon. Tazz was my favorite cousin and the closest thing I’d ever had to an older brother. Tall and athletic, Tazz had full eyelashes and well-kept dreadlocks that reached his shoulders. He was sixteen and the girls on the block tripped over themselves trying to get close to him, a fact he took full advantage of. That night, Tazz was hiding from a couple of girls he’d two timed— locked away in his basement bedroom, he played Madden while I watched apathetically, my phone vibrating every few seconds. “Who's blowing your shit up, cuz?” He asked without looking away from the screen. “You got a lil boyfriend?” I could see the corner of his mouth turned up in a smirk. I steeled myself, raising my chin and squaring my shoulders as best I could in the gigantic bean bag I was sitting in. “So what if it is? I’m allowed to have one.” I snapped. Tazz paused the game and looked over at me, his chocolate-brown eyes brimming with mischief. I knew that look and frantically tried to extricate myself from the bean bag before he pounced — too late.
Easily twice my size, Tazz effortlessly scooped me up and slammed my back down on his king sized bed WWE style. I laughed heartily, my phone held as far away from Tazz as I could manage as I bounced atop the comforter. “You’re really going to keep secrets from your favorite cousin?” He said, his voice cracking with amusement. He tickled the armpit of my outstretched arm and I instinctively brought my hand, and the coveted cell phone, to my chest in order to protect my underarm. He snatched the phone and started pretending to type. “Dear boyfriend,” he said in a high-pitched imitation of my voice, “You should know that I like the smell of my own farts.” I knew he wasn’t really typing and (probably) wouldn’t send a message like that, but my 13-year-old brain panicked anyway. “Tazz, come on!” I whined, “I don’t embarrass you in front of all them girls you bring around! Be fair!” I crossed my arms and sat up on the bed sulkily, glaring at him. He could tell I was not playin’ and slid closer to me, wrapping one massive arm around my shoulder. “Alright, alright. Tell me about this new mans then.” I felt my face light up thinking about my new beau, Ryan, a nineteen-year-old who’d recently moved into my apartment complex. The inappropriate nature of that relationship is another story entirely; even then, I knew something was off about our age difference because I lied to Tazz about it.
“He’s a new neighbor,” I told Tazz, “he’s in eighth grade. He hasn’t asked me to be his official girlfriend yet but I think he will this week.” Tazz nodded his head knowingly, saying “Okay, cuz. What does he look like? You got a pic?” I didn’t want him to see Ryan’s beard, so I lied again, saying, “I don’t have a picture... but he kind of looks like a skinny Channing Tatum.” That last bit was true and I dreamily looked off into space, imagining Ryan with his shirt off. When I looked over at Tazz a few moments later, I was surprised to see his face screwed up in anger. “So he’s white?” He said, his jaw so tight I could see the muscles clenching in his cheek. I shrank into the bed a bit; Tazz rarely directed anger at me. “Uh.. Yeah.” I said. Tazz’s eyes bore into mine— they radiated anger and disappointment. He closed his eyes and took a breath. I continued to stare at him, utterly baffled. When he opened his eyes, they were no longer hostile. They were sad. “What are you doing running around with white boys?” He asked, elbowing me playfully, his casual tone juxtaposed against the obvious distaste in his face.
I did not have an answer for Tazz’s question. I thought black men were just as fine, if not finer, than white ones but I liked Ryan, and Ryan was white. It had never occurred to me to acknowledge our racial differences. “I just like him.” I said, “He makes me feel special.” Tazz sneered, a cruel laugh escaping his lips. “I bet he does. White boys love high yellow bunnies like you almost as much as niggas do.” I was taken aback by this. Few boys took notice of me at my predominately white school and I was often made to feel ugly for being black; my hair too frizzy, my complexion too muddy, my nose too wide and so on. Ryan was the first boy (well, man) to make me feel desirable. I didn’t know how to respond and settled for, “Fuck off, Tazz. He likes me for me. My daddy’s white and he’s the best.” Tazz nodded slowly again, “That’s true, your daddy’s a good man. You better be careful about coonin’ like that though. No cousin of mine gon’ be a coon.” I had no idea what a “coon” was and didn’t want to sound stupid, so I just nodded for a moment. After a few awkward seconds, I stood up. Wanting to have the last word, I said, “I hope you think about that when you’re out with all them white girls.” Tazz laughed airily and picked up his video game controller. Deflated and ashamed for reasons I did not understand, I went upstairs to watch TV until my dad came to pick me up.
***
Almost ten years later, I understand exactly what Tazz meant. He saw my relationship with a white man as a betrayal to the black community, calling me a ”coon” to imply that I was becoming, in effect, an Uncle Tom who degrades black folk in order to earn approval from white people; another “high-yellow” female abandoning her community to further ensconce herself in white privilege. As a biracial black woman, Tazz’s sentiment became familiar to me as I aged and navigated the dating scene. The few white men interested in dating me fetishized me; they described me as “exotic” and eagerly admitted how much they’d “always wanted to date a black woman.” The white guys that I dated usually made my blackness a focal point of the relationship, as if being in an interracial relationship was a new and groundbreaking concept that they’d invented. Black men coveted my light skin, often putting dark skinned women down in a twisted attempt to flatter me. “I need a caramel girl like you, I can’t stand a burnt-coffee-lookin’ ass bitch.” Is a memorable quote from a black fellow I hooked up with one summer in high school.
These comments deeply confused me, and they were not unique to men. I’d spent my life wishing my skin was darker, believing that if I looked more like my gorgeous, ebony mother that I’d finally be beautiful, too. If I was darker, I’d know that I truly belonged in the black community at long last. The fetishization of my skin color did not stop at the handful of white guys who were into me. More than anyone, it was white girls who told me I was “pretty for a black girl.” The girls I was friends with and the boys I dated as an adolescent joked about me being the token black friend, and I found myself making self-deprecating black jokes in order to be accepted. I became a “coon”, just like Tazz had said.
I felt close to no one and stewed in my own self-loathing. As I did the work to unravel my internalized racism, I often felt like men and women of all colors were more interested in the idea of me than in who I actually was. As my sexuality began to bloom and my attraction to both men and women became apparent, I began reaching out to women in online chatrooms to explore my queerness. Racism and colorism were prevalent in these chats; fetishization was common from white women, and dark-skinned black women often told me that they wanted to look like me. Other mixed women seemed to wear their complexion like a badge of honor with usernames like “Mixed_Bitch” and “light skin-princess.” I vividly remember reaching out to one such girl, asking why she chose that username. Her response was, “Mixed bitches are just better.” With a winking emoji. I asked her why she thought that. “We got the best of everything,” she said, “I’m glad I came out off-white.”
That always stuck with me. Not black, not even brown or light-skinned, but “off-white.”
I still felt close to no one.
All of my relationships, romantic and otherwise, lacked a crucial aspect of intimacy: understanding. How could a friend or partner understand me, when even I did not understand my place in the world? I didn’t understand the insidiousness of racism, nor did I have a name for the colorism I experienced. Models of who I should be as a mixed woman and how I should act in a relationship were few, and some of the few that existed made me uneasy. I watched Tyra Banks force women of color to comply with eurocentric beauty standards on America’s Next Top Model. I watched the feeble mixed women in Tyler Perry movies play out the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, which involves someone of mixed race unknowingly suffering in a world divided by race because she fits in with neither the white or black communities. I related to the tragic mulatto in some ways, but I was aware of my outsider status. I never saw any resolution to the problem: tragic mulattos were either suicidal over their exclusion or they chose a single “world” to exist in.
Still, Tyra Banks celebrated and uplifted women of color in other ways, as did Tyler Perry. Even now, representations of mixed race women paint us as privileged, vain, and “other” as they attempt to represent our worldview. Watching Netflix’s “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker,” I was shocked and disgusted at Madame Walker’s fictionalized rival, Addie, a light-skin businesswoman who did everything in her power to keep Madame Walker from succeeding. Addie often made racist comments to Madame Walker and her beauty is often weaponized as her success is attributed to how she looks. She is a prime example of how I saw myself represented in media growing up; despite being a business powerhouse, Addie was in an abusive marriage and a phone call to her mother shows the disgust she feels with herself for being the product of rape. Her mother says she never worried about her because of her coloring and Addie says, “That doesn’t make it easier, mama.” Classic tragic mulatto. It baffled me that the writers, all of color, chose to focus the conflict of the story as being between two women of color – specifically a dark-skinned and light-skinned woman – instead of continually highlighting Madame C.J. Walker’s real enemies in life: white supremacy and sexism. The creators of the show pitted black women against each other, modelling a prevalent bitterness and jealousy among women of color that persists contemporarily. Walker’s real business rival, Annie, was a dark skinned woman who mentored her. I think it is important to draw attention to colorism. I think it’s even more important to face colorism with solidarity, as colorism is perpetuated by the internalization of racism by the black community.
Now a grown woman engaged to a white man, I still hear Tazz’s words, “You better be careful about coonin’ like that..” When I’m the only person of color at the family barbeque, when I’m surrounded by the white people in my friend group, when I hear rappers sing about not wanting to be with dark skin women, I feel the same deflation and shame that I felt that day. However, I understand that feeling now. I talk about that feeling of otherness. I refuse to degrade myself and others for white approval and I refuse to be elevated for my light skin among the black community. I know that loving a white man doesn’t make me any less black or any less queer. I know that the color of my skin doesn’t make me any more or less valuable than anyone else. Anti-racism is a lifelong learning experience that I embrace fully. I feel close, not just to others, but to all aspects of myself. You won’t ever catch me coonin’ again.