“There are people… who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie).

Dear Riley,

Before I begin, know that I don’t say anything in this letter to scare you, but maybe a scare wouldn’t be such a bad thing since nothing seems to keep your attention besides Minecraft these days. Now, being 7, there’s no way you could possibly understand what I’m saying, for if I received this letter at 7, I don’t think I would either, but either way, you’re still my favorite cousin, and if this helps you in even the most minuscule way, it has served its purpose.

In her newest article, “Why I stand up for Black Women,” Meg Thee Stallion says, “From the moment we begin to navigate the intricacies of adolescence, we feel … the weight of contradictory expectations and misguided preconceptions,” (Megan Thee Stallion). With this letter, Riley, I hope to take some of the weight from your shoulders and calm the “contradictory expectations and misguided preconceptions.” I hope that when you navigate through your own adolescence, that this remains here as a guide if you shall ever need it.

If not already, you’ll soon start to hear the word “exotic” everywhere you go. Soon they’ll ask you at the checkout kiosk at Macy’s, then at the hairdresser down the block, then in the seat at the orthodontist with the bib still clipped around your neck. It’s amazing, truly, that so many people take interest in where we are “from.” I guess we should take it as a compliment that we are so interesting, so sought after. We make people curious, right? They’ll ask you, “where are you from?” followed by, “No, you misunderstood me, where are you really from?” but as I’ve seen already, you know this already and always reply with a big, prideful grin and yell, “Jamaica!” That gives them some satisfaction, I’m sure, but they’ll also wonder more. Why our complexion looks the way it does, how our hair bounces the way it does, why our bodies are shaped the way they are, why our eyes are the colors they are, why we aren’t white and not Black, but a fetishized in-between. We’re “exotic,” they say; we are “unique,” they reassure us. One summer when looking at a biracial model on Instagram, my friend turned to me and said, “I wish I was mixed like you!” Maybe I should have said something; anything. Looking back, I wish I did. I smiled silently, my blue eyes looking back into her green ones on her white, sunburned face. I do too.

One hot summer day with grocery bags in our hands, Aunty Marlon, our tutor, Hannah, and I were walking to the car through the car park from Target; it was so hot. “Hannah needs to start wearing longer shorts,” our tutor said, turning to Aunty Marlon. “I know.” Hannah didn’t hear, but I heard the sigh. It was such a hot day.

For a long time, Barbie was my perfect. Taylor Swift was my perfect. Hannah Montana was my perfect. Whiteness, my perfect. Even now, as you watch me scroll through TikTok and Instagram, hovering over my phone with those starstruck brown eyes and a gawking mouth, my digital page is filled with these Barbies and Hannah Montana’s, and many times, I think back to the skinny blonde model I saw on my feed during lunch. If only I could look like her. Already, I have begun to hear this deathly phrase slip from your mouth, in quiet remarks or upon questioning. “Riley,” we tell you, “your hair looks so beautifully curly today!” You scowl. “I don’t like my hair.” We all worry, hopelessly trying to save you from following our footsteps and tripping down into the rabbit hole. “How do you wish it looked?” Blonder, straighter, longer; either in that order or a subtle variation, it’s always the same response. It saddens me that so many girls of color are pressured into these Eurocentric beauty standards; told that we are not beautiful if we do not have these small little hips and bouncing bobbling ponytails. They’re supposed to be mesmerizing by default. But what else are we supposed to believe when this country is constantly reminding us and putting us in our place?

But why do we let ourselves believe this? Why this strange complicity? Why do we succumb to this torture and pine over something we can never fully achieve? This whiteness? Ta-Nehisi Coates says in Between the World and Me that, “The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick.” Riley, we can never be white – we will never be white, not me, not you and not Hannah. So why should we compare ourselves and measure ourselves to them? It is hard, I promise, and I struggle every day, and most of the time I don’t feel like fighting. But I will fight for you, and re- mind you every time we visit you in Brooklyn, that your hair, your body, and your Blackness are equally beautiful. Remember this and never, ever forget it.

In middle school, I was constantly ridiculed for being biracial; for being what I am. It sounds absurd, but that’s plainly what the bullying was. You see, Riley, unlike you, Hannah and I do not share your brown eyes and brown skin; instead, we “need a tan” as Grandma always tells me. On my birthday, the first thing everyone came to notice when hovering over me swaddled in a blanket, was that I was well, white. Pale white; with two big blue eyes waiting to open and see the world. Because of this, it has always been a struggle coming to terms with what exactly I am. Yes, by blood I am just as Black as you are, or any other Black and white child, but on the outside, for years now, I have been told differently; middle school told me differently. Only now do I realize it wasn’t okay for my white classmates to draw caricatures of me and my hair on the white board and to “act like a Jamaican” to get me upset; whatever “acting like a Jamaican” even means. To put into perspective just how bad it got, I remember in eighth grade after spring break, my classmate came up to me and forcefully grabbed my arm and held his next to mine. He had just come back from vacation. “Look!” He said, cackling, “Now I’m Blacker than you!” The summer that same year, another boy thought it was funny to put our skin complexions into an online color detector. The results said that his tan was darker. Same thing.

Now, I definitely didn’t believe that I was Black; how could I be with blue eyes? Seemingly stripped of my black identity, I looked to the white community and to my white friends for acceptance. It seemed as if straightening the life out of my hair and shopping at Claire’s at the mall every weekend was a small price to pay. Acceptance never came there either.

Reflecting on this, I can’t help but wonder if I was, as Martin Luther King states in his “Letter to Birmingham Jail,” “The white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace”. I never fought for myself. I accepted the blatant racism from my classmates no matter how much it offended me. And I never fought for the other three Black kids in my grade either who also received similar abuse. Please do not do this at any cost. Please fight.

To do this, it’s essential to also recognize the privilege we hold in our identity. We both have white fathers; white blood. This gives us power. Whether we like it or not, we owe it to our Black family, friends and identity to use the privilege we have to stand up against racism and challenge the system. I couldn’t do this then. I was stuck in this horrible world of The Inbetween which I would rather disregard than face, and exist in without acknowledging. Living in this country, a country hellbent on categorization and labels, you too will feel this pressure of choice, just as we all do. I was stupid to think I could ignore it forever.

In mid February 2020, during my sophomore year, just after a sweet Valentine’s Day, I received this letter from a Kissogram event at my school, (Kissogram is a setup where you can send candy with an anonymous note to anyone you like. Definitely not a bad idea for high school students, right?). It’s funny how a slip of paper, just the light scratch of a pencil to a surface, is able to create masterpieces. Now, this letter was indeed a masterpiece, capable of blasting my windows and my walls apart, knocking me down like a building. Reading it was an in- describable experience. The sickly pink slip of paper. Gross. And the bubbly bubblegum handwriting. Grosser. Even now, I struggle to put into words what I felt in that moment. A punch in the stomach? A smack across the face? Drowning in a well? Suffocation? No, I’m really not that poetic – I simply thought I was going to throw up. I cried for weeks instead.

James Baldwin tells us to “… try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” Maybe this is an example of that. Maybe this person attacking my insecurities was really just exposing their own “inhumanity and fear.” I know that I have white skin. I know that I have blue eyes. But why did someone feel the need to use that as a weapon? To hurt me? To make me cry? I wish I could be strong for you and tell you that I didn’t let this get to me, but it was middle school all over again. The memories flooded my brain all at once; storm rains rushing from my eyes and down my pinkened cheeks. They never found out who sent it. They searched for five days. They dropped it after that. Did they even care? Do I care? I left my school’s affinity group.
I was embarrassed. I felt like a fake. I was pretending. I should leave. I still wonder about this time in my life and every action and step I’ve taken up to this day. But still I question, and I ask you reading, what would you have done if you were in my shoes? If the person who wrote that letter to me ever reads this, I have one question for you: Do you feel better now?

This note was enlightening for me, but still I wish it was only a bad dream; one I could wake up from and forget an hour later when trying to tell my friends. I wish I never saw its pink sickly paper or it’s gross bubblegum handwriting. But most of all, I wish I didn’t let it hurt me as much as it did. I’m stronger now. However, if it did teach me anything at all, I can almost confidently say this: Never change yourself to match someone else’s perception of you. Only you are yourself; only you are Riley. No one else can even begin to imagine what it is like to walk in your shoes for a day, just like no one knows what it is to walk in mine. So why listen to someone who hasn’t been you? People attack others based on their own insecurities – as if tearing someone else down would automatically bring them up.

So when I choose to include Baldwin’s words in this letter as advice for your future, know that I also do this to remind myself that these people who try to tear us down don’t “testify to [our] inferiority.”

Only we can do that.

Only we can choose justice rather than order. Only we can accept the in-between. Only we can determine our identities, and to love our bodies and ourselves. Every. Single. Part.

I wish I could give you a definitive answer on how to do this, but I am still learning and growing myself. But with everything I have gone through, from middle school until today, I know that I can definitely say this:

I love my blue eyes. I love myself, and no one, nothing, will ever change that.

I’m here if you ever need me, Riley.

With love,
Your cousin, Emma.