I’m That Oreo Girl

No one wants to hear the opinion of an Oreo.

No, I’m not talking about those amazingly delicious Nabisco cookies. 

Chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside.

I’m talking about the very unlucky people like me who dubbed an Oreo.

It’s what they called me in middle school when I rose my hand in class, sat in the front of the bus, or used the word sugar instead of shit.

It’s the nickname no brown or black person wants.

Sure my skin is black….but I soon found out that didn’t mean I was black.  

It was a startling revelation in my search to define myself as a woman, as a first born, as an American….

In high school I learned there’s a whole box of things that qualify you as black, mostly stereotypical things like the music you listen to, your pattern of speech, how you dress

These things apparently defined your blackness amongst other black folks.

You had to have a hard knocks life story or atleast your kin folk did… 

You had to have a toughness to you… 

You had to be confident and take no shit

You had to listen to Biggie, Tupac, and Jay-z

To other blacks folks, black I was not.

With my platform shoes inspired by the Spice Girls

Or the way I rocked out to Coldplay and Norah Jones

I longed to recieve the invisible black card given to people of color, to be included, to feel accepted

So when I left my Filipino run high school in Virginia Beach I immediately applied to an all black college.

My parents were so proud.

I thought there I would find my blackness

It would be like the classic Spike Lee film School Daze

The film about a fictional historically black college that featured all black sororities, black activism, black music, and stepping in the quad.

But I guess I didn’t pay attention to the real messages that Spike Lee movie was preaching.

The messages colorism among black folks, and the struggle in having a voice in a world that judged you by the color of your skin.

Even at this all black college I was placed in the cookie category once again in college

They too called be an Oreo 

I was too white to be accepted by my black classmates… 

An Oreo who didn’t know how to play spade, or code switch …

I grew exhausted of trying to be something and someone I didn’t know how to be, so I left that all black school and went to a multicultural school… and I stopped trying to be black and started just trying to be me…