I don’t remember a time when people didn’t attempt to strip my ethnicity from who I was. I heard it from friends, classmates, and even their parents. In their minds, it isn’t possible to be so intellectual, so “articulate,” so aspirational, while also being Black. As though the only way to accept me was to carefully measure me by how much I complied with a stereotype. In retrospect, I’ve noticed that as I grew older, the type of racism I experienced became more and more implicit, occurring on a micro level.* In middle school, I remember telling my mother about how my classmates called me an “Oreo” during recess. They told me that I was “white” on the inside because I didn’t talk like a “regular” Black person. My mother turned to me and told me not to accept the pseudo-complement. She said that being African American and speaking “proper” English were not mutually exclusive, and that the way I spoke was not a result of me being internally “White”- it was a result of my first-rate education and intellectual capability.
As I grew older, the way people enacted racism was more complex than comparing my personality to a popular snack. The message, however, was always the same: “You’re so white.”  Why anyone, with positive or negative intentions, would say that to a person of color is something I never really understood the root of until attending a predominantly white University. In conversations about racism with other Black woman undergraduates about their experiences with racism, the phrase “you’re so white,” and how much we’ve heard it throughout our lives, always comes up. The women I spoke to all had something distinct in common: they were high achieving, intellectual individuals. To me, this isn’t unusual, so I was perplexed by all these people who found it to be so.
I have been surrounded by a support system of high achieving Black men and women all my life. However, given that many of my peers and their parents were only exposed to stereotype, they saw me as an anomaly, but I never saw the contradiction. I still don’t see a contradiction. It took me a long time to understand that people saw a discrepancy between how I spoke and how I looked. Strangely, they felt a need to tell me so. My embodied Blackness didn’t fit their perceptions of what Blackness should be.  When confronted by the existence of someone who does not fit into that understanding, instead of expanding their conception and understanding of Blackness, they labeled me as “white.” Â
I grew up believing in myself and my abilities, not because I wanted to be the exception to the stereotype, but because I never registered one in the first place. My peers called me an Oreo because the person they saw in front of them clashed with their preconceived ideas of who they should have been seeing at their magnet schools, their NHS meetings or their research labs. But what they didn’t realize is that those things were never “theirs” in the first place. No one group can claim ownership of intellect, achievements, taste in music, or personality type. There is not one “type” of Black person, and there is no one “type” of any person of any ethnicity. We are all individuals with diverse backgrounds, interests and aspirations- not cookies to be boxed into a misrepresentation of our respective cultures.
*What are Microaggressions?
Microaggression theory was originally developed by a psychiatrist named Chester M. Pierce in 1970, and has been elaborated on by several psychologists and psychiatrists since then. Derald Wing Sue of Columbia University has categorized different types of “microaggressions” into 3 groups: Microassaults, Microinsults and Microinvalidations. According to Sue, microaggressions are “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent to them.”
DeAngelis, Tori DeAngelis. “Unmasking ‘racial Micro Aggressions'” American Psychological Association. 2009. Web. 10 Oct. 2016. <http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/02/microaggression.aspx>.