Anthropology

One morning I stood with a mirror and saw the color squeezed from my skin. I am an olive without my oil, bitter and hard. You picked me too soon because you never knew a damn thing about olives. We grow in soil and open air, not cans. We do not only come in Black. We taste of earth and herbs and bright sun skies, not salt. I am more than a body with a hole and a pop top container. You want to tell me--You want to say you see who I am and lean your chair back and voice consolingly, "This is how it is, sweetheart!" I am sad that this is true. You never meant to whitewash me. I bet your parents ignored race, never addressed that it was more than color, but also cultural experience. You never meant to black out the thoughts you did not understand as mine. You never meant to muddy the waters. You have never seen me in red Mississippi clay collecting arrowheads or mourning felled trees on mountaintops. You have never seen me with the leaves in my hair after I tumbled down a hillside shrieking in joy. You have never seen me stand up to an overbearing ass of a man and shout, "How dare you?" followed by a string of colorful curses that would make the hardest blush. You have never seen me shrieking in joy-true joy. You dull my edges. You dilute my experience with laughing denials and eye rolls and intellectual conversations on shared anthropological roots overshadowing life experience: We all came from Africa. I have words to share with you: You are not my place. You want to tell me otherwise. You are not my people. You want to tell me otherwise. You are wrong. You want to tell me otherwise. I am more than the check boxes and ethnic classifications assigned to me. Your reflection of my ingredients is correct, but your assumption of the product is wrong. I am not hollow, to be stuffed with the flavor of your choosing. I will not sit in tins with groups of other stoneless bodies. I will not hold still under narrowed assumptions that I have not lived what I have lived because I do not look Black or White or Brown enough to you. I am not what you think I am. There is no shame in sniffing out the blood trail on your knees if you are able. There is no shame in hunting yourself if all your life you were only told what you should be and never allowed to decide what you are. And there is no shame when you do not look the role assigned to you in a narrow mind because you may have lived it anyway. You would like me to put those thoughts aside. Certainly, life would be simpler if I identified with the majority and looked at Hatred as righteousness and Intolerance as necessity. I have been plucked by those cruel misters and chewed over those days when the mirror showed me the color still in my skin and my heart still inside me.