Someone I know described a rather distant love interest as "whitewashed".  She said that he went to a high school in Pasadena with mostly white kids, as if that explained everything.  She did not consider herself to be a person of color, but evidently had enough of what she described as a "love of black culture" to know that the brother in question was completely out of step.

     "How should he behave?" I asked.

     Silence fell onto our conversation like an ACME anvil.  My mind began to wander.

     Suddenly I was somewhere in the early 90's, eating Ben & Jerry's in my drawers and watching Arsenio Hall like everybody else.  Ice-T, lost in a rant, described Bryant Gumbel as "the whitest black man in America".  I remember how much it irked me when sections of the audience applauded in agreement.

     I don't care how any black person behaves, I wanted to say to this woman across from me, they're still black.  Racial profiling doesn't pass over any of them when they're driving down the Jersey Turnpike just because they're wearing a button down and some khakis.  They are just as likely to get pulled over and beat up beyond recognition for DWB as anybody else.   Come on, now.   If it were that easy to avoid harassment, we'd all shop at Laura Ashley.  I know I would.

     And of course, there's always passing.  But the black folks who pass always know who they really are and what they're doing, and live in constant fear of being found out.  Some white-looking black people, like Walter White, (who could easily have passed but never did) are our greatest heroes.  How white did he look?  Blonde and blue-eyed, he travelled to the South on a regular basis and sometimes showed up at Klan rallies to give accurate accounts of lynchings and murders for nationally syndicated newspapers and magazines.  What I wouldn't give to make an independent movie out of his life and times.  Anthony Hopkins could star in it.   But I digress.

     Of course, I couldn't say any of this to her.  It's impossible to talk to white people about your blackness when they think they know all about it.  She was striving to make herself into an arbiter of my blackness, to authenticate her black experience and feel validated.  I listen to her for a moment and I wonder if it's ever dawned on her that she will never truly be accepted as a black person.

     Sometimes, I think that allowing people like her to say things like that without challenging them is a simple way I've found to not extend my real self--because clearly my real self isn't anything that she's interested in. How many times have I let someone run in the wrong direction in a conversation because I could sense that they thought they'd figured me out.  Telling them otherwise is always such a disappointment for both of us.  Better off letting it ride.  So I did.

She wasn't listening anyway.  She was going on and on about her ex and how lost he was.