I Hate Being Black.

Impartiality isn't enough when it comes to the unrealistic standards of tribal politics

The Wrong Side of History

I don’t love myself. The idea of “loving yourself” has very little sway over the ego when you’re sitting on the toilet with a stomach-ache! Yet, on the other hand, I’ve never really hated being me. I was a bit of an existentialist before I ever read Sartre because, for me, my existence just was and is. I’d stumbled into this world, and it was all very bizarre but all very much a part of being thrust into this state of mortality whether I liked it or not. Growing up impartial to myself and my circumstances was a double-edged sword because it quickly became apparent that other people were not at all impartial to it.

If you don’t know, I’m a YouTuber and I sometimes make videos where I say something nonchalantly or, from my vantage point, impartially that gets taken into a whole new dimension by a handful of viewers. One such time was when I said something along the lines of: “Sometimes when I look into a mirror I’m taken aback because I realise that I’m black”. Now, for me, this fact has proved relatively insignificant in my everyday life: I don’t spend most of my time in front of or walking past mirrors! I was also transracially fostered, then adopted, and then fostered again in South Africa and England, so having grown up surrounded by white South Africans has inevitably influenced how I perceive myself.

But this became a problem. I was accused of self-hatred, setting back fellow black people, and had the very personal video I’d made about not relating to my skin colour demonetised for being “hateful”. Fair enough, but this is also something that I’ve regrettably been taking to heart since a very young age. You see, in my imagination and in isolation, I’m disinterested in my skin colour: I can’t change this fact about me and therefore accept it, but I also can’t comprehend attaching some kind of spiritual or deterministic significance to it. To be proud of my skin colour just doesn’t make sense to me. But it’s when I’m obliged to leave my mind and to emerge into the real world that I increasingly find myself hating my skin colour because of how sadly mismatched my impartiality and reality are.

Suddenly, my skin colour is everything. It’s the first thing people see and that is perfectly understandable. We are visual creatures after all! The dread sets in as soon as it becomes the only thing people see once I open my mouth, express an opinion that is deemed contrary to assumption, or talk with a so-called “posh English accent”. It’s when I’m told that I’m on “the wrong side of history”, that I’m “not black” or that I’m a “traitor” that I start to hate being black. I suspect this is something very particular to our era of progressive ideals and identity politics that has somehow lost itself in the very comforting appeal of tribal allegiance.

The Tribe Lives Within You

The newly crowned king of the Zulu people Misuzulu kaZwelithini at his coronation in November 2022.

I grew up surrounded by tribal culture in South Africa. I stuck out like a sore thumb from a very young age because although I looked like any other Zulu¹ girl, I crucially could not speak a word of our language. I would also go around hand-in-hand with a morbidly obese white South African woman who confidently explained away the perplexed stares of strangers with a flattering rationale: “Look at how beautiful the Africans think you are!” I was satisfied with that explanation for a blissful few years until I had no morbidly obese white South African woman to shield me from my situation. What made it so frighteningly real was that it was adults and not fellow children who teased, mocked, and labelled me as a “bastard” and “traitor” to the tribe and the vision of a post-Apartheid South Africa. I was very popular in high school and my classmates tended to love how I didn’t sound or act as stereotypically as I looked. As soon as school ended or adults came into the picture, I was either a curiosity (to white adults) or a disgrace and disappointment (to black adults).

If faced with being a curiosity or a disgrace, I can pretty confidently hazard that anybody would choose being the former over the latter. Curiosity often fades from the minds of the curious and life goes on; but disgrace and disappointment linger like a foul smell. I would always dread having to engage with a black South African because 50% of the time it would end offensively and disparagingly. It was a gamble that riddled my social interactions with anxiety and paranoia. Such public interactions were inescapable however, and as I got older and “womanlier” they became sexually aggressive. A group of men plotted how to “fuck the black back into me” while I was standing in a queue next to my white friend’s father. I was now an embarrassment because I could reproduce. And just imagine if she pops out even more traitors, the little “slave wh*re”! Long story short, I have come to firmly believe that tribalism is a chronic disease. Oddly enough, this disease affects not just those who are in but also those who the tribe deems to be out, particularly the outsiders who look just like them.   

This revelation has recently made me rather low and despondent. For many years, I’ve fallen for progressive, Enlightenment thinking and am only now beginning to appreciate that my love is unrequited. I believed that if we read enough books, understood enough science, and engaged with enough people, surely tribalism and emotional frenzies could be overcome?! I left South Africa unexpectedly in 2016 just before my 16^th birthday. I made no friends at my new school and found great solace in the books I was all of a sudden allowed to read at will. I learnt about politics, sociology, philosophy, and current affairs, and this made me believe that I’d left behind a tribe – my tribe, the Zulu tribe – that had never accepted me. I was reading about worlds which believed wholeheartedly against the tribe. Maybe this reasoning was just a way of coping with being in a new environment with no friends, family, or any inkling of where I could possibly go beyond my sense of aimlessness.

Being a YouTuber has felt like a déjà vu effect when it comes to being black and feeling somewhat aimless. It feels like being in a virtual South Africa: I am obliged to choose between being a curiosity or a disappointment. If I express views that go against what is assumed someone of my skin tone should hold, my job and income suffer. I have a choice that I never signed up to make by mere fact of being black. Although I find great pleasure and intrigue in my job, it has shattered what was perhaps my naïve faith in the power of progressive, Enlightenment thinking to get us beyond the tribe. The tribal nature of internet culture lives on and, like a parasitic host, the tribe lives within me too. What many (including myself) find difficult to understand or make sense of is that it’s my own people – my own theoretical tribe of lookalikes – who make my blackness something I hate as opposed to something I’m impartial to. It is the tribe itself as opposed to those beyond the boundaries of the tribe who make things worse in a peculiar attempt to supposedly make things better for everybody.

To be “black” in our internet age has a long way to go, especially as more black people beyond the American experience make their way onto virtual platforms. Contrary to my encounters with blackness, there appear to be far more varieties of being, say, “white” in our internet age. There are, no doubt, tribes; but these allegiances tend to be based on things beyond mere skin colour and assumed behaviours or shared history stemming from that fact. Right now, the stereotypical African American experience is unquestionably the blueprint of what it means to be black. If you don’t fit into that framework – which only 42 million people can even put a finger on – that’s “a you problem” as I have been told many a time. I have found this unfortunate fact reduced to name-calling and the kinds of disappointment and disparagement of my childhood.

If we’re comfortable calling fellow black people “-coons”, “Uncle Toms” and racial slurs that we otherwise deem derogatory coming from outside the designated tribe, blackness truly does have a long way to go. Until then, it would be dishonest for me to proclaim any kind of love for my skin colour that my very unusual situation makes near impossible. Apparently, impartiality and nuance aren’t enough. And if that’s the case, well, I hate being black.

1. The Zulu people are the largest ethnic group and nation in Southern Africa.