What are your intersections?
I am a black cis female, I’ve often felt like race has been a deciding factor in my socioeconomic status; I view the world through these lenses. Growing up on the southside of St. Louis City, I was surrounded by the happiest black and brown people this world possesses. Our community is predominately black and low-income which allows us to spend hours outside goofing around with neighbors, playing everything from kickball to figuring out who runs the fastest. I grew up happy so depending on how you look at it, we either had everything or nothing at all.
What is your background?
Surprisingly enough, I have 17 siblings and a mother with a “turn nothing into something” mentality, ensuring there’s enough to go around. As the rapper J.Cole once wrote, “I grew up in the city and though sometimes we had less, compared to some of my niggas down the block, man we were blessed.” My mother’s been living by this my entire life. So when our food stamps check comes in each month, we get all this food but with so many kids and children we share with in the community, it’s gone not even three weeks later.
Through persistence, my mother found a way to put all 14 of her kids through the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation (VICC). VICC is a desegregation program responsible for transferring city students to suburban school districts. So while I lived in the city of Saint Louis, I took a bus for 2-3 hours a day to Kirkwood, MO where I received my K-12 education. The people in the Kirkwood School District (KSD) are predominantly upper-middle class white folks. It was through this change of culture that I struggled with parts of my identity.
How do your intersections affect you?
Learning in a predominately white suburb of St.Louis, I found myself trying to reshape my personhood, only to fit the standards of my white counterparts. It started in second grade, my first year in the district. I stood in line waiting for lunch and a classmate looked at me and said, “Khalea, [my friend] doesn’t like your skin color.” At just 7 years old, I was confused, this was the first time I felt explicitly discriminated against and otherized.
After this encounter I tried to embed myself into white culture. As one of the the only black people in my second grade class, I wanted to fit in and not stand out. So when I’d hear my white counterparts use words like “awesome” and “totally” I tossed them into my vocabulary. The first time I used those two words, I felt completely humiliated and not myself. Still, I continued.
Word choice wasn’t the only aspect of myself I altered. I changed my wardrobe, hairstyles and unconsciously began code switching. I yearned for things my family simply couldn’t afford and I struggled with finding comfort with it. “You’re always acting white,” said my sister. Hearing those words for the first time was challenging. To them I was becoming someone they didn’t know. Someone even I didn’t know.
As I look back on these defining moments, I’m reminded of the people in this world who are victims of injustice while others know exactly what unearned privilege tastes like. I saw this first hand during my time in the Kirkwood School District and even more during Ferguson unrest. We had teachers who told students, “You can’t talk about this in my classroom,” but when it's happening right outside their doorstep how could they not? Thus, my social justice work began.
If by leading conversations on race with students and/or staff of the entire district (that's one high school, two middle schools and five elementary schools) increased people's understanding of the role race, equity, and privilege played in our community, then so be it. If writing about white privilege and gun violence in my schools newspaper enhanced the voices of black people, then so be it. If it took re-establishing my schools Social Justice club for students to have a safe space to discuss white supremacy, the criminal justice system, black liberation, the Muslim Ban and more, then so be it. I was going to ensure that marginalized voices in my community felt and were heard. When Trump was elected and a 14-year-old cis male called her a nigger, I wanted her to feel heard. He was held accountable.
My devotion to social and racial justice work has existed for the benefit of others. I do this work not necessarily so that I can reap the benefits, but so someday someone else will. This commitment was recognized in April of 2017 by an Ivy League institution: Princeton University. I was awarded the Princeton Prize in Relations at a school assembly. As a part of winning, I received $1,000 and an all expenses paid trip to Princeton University to participate in a race symposium alongside winners from across the country. Caroline Benec taught me that “freedom at the expense of others is not freedom,” that “If I believed racism wouldn’t end, I’d be believing in racism” from Isaiah Blake and that “it’s not a person of colors responsibility to educate the oppressor,” from Eva Lewis.
Since winning the award, I’ve become a committee member for the Princeton Prize in Race Relations Greater St.Louis region. I’m now in my second semester of college and will be attending the University of Missouri-Columbia in the fall, majoring in Political Science and minoring in English. It’s to none of friends surprise that I plan on becoming a lawyer, creating change through the legal system. My mission is for little brown second graders to look at their skin and see their uniqueness. So if someone tells them they don’t like their skin color they can say, “Well I do.”
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#TWintersectionalfridays: Space to explore intersections of identity and systems of oppression. Space to tell your story. Space to listen. Every Friday of 2019. // Week 11/52. 'Khalea' / 8x8 in. / mixed media on paper