Colored Girl: How Music, Racism, and a Small Town Shaped Me as a Writer

Circa 2003

The year was 2003. We had just moved to a new town, again. I struggled to make friends in New places, but I did have Ebony. She was the only other black child in my neighborhood. Our parents were friends, which meant we were too.

In the early 2000s, MTV still ruled living rooms, and while Ebony and I played dolls on the floor, music played in the background. Outkast was popular at the time and there was something about Andre 3000 in particular that made my heart beat extra fast. All I knew was that this man dressed in bright green was singing songs that made us want to dance.

So we did.

When OutKast was on, we always danced. Hey Ya, Roses, pretty much anything that played, we’d find a way to move with it. It was the one thing Ebony’s stepsister would do with us. She was older and white, and didn’t usually play with us. But when OutKast came on, we all danced.

One day, after a loud girl group rendition of Roses, which we had learned by heart at that point, we were cast off into the wilderness that is a tiny suburban front yard.

I pulled on the grass, feet firmly planted on concrete and butt on the curb, while Ebony’s stepsister, who for all intents and purposes we’ll call Fran, stood over us. The street sign we sat under looked extra shiny in the late summer sun. I never liked confrontation, so I traced refraction around the edges while Ebony and Fran argued about which game we would play.

“I’m in charge,” Fran said. “You have to do what I say.”

Ebony, ever the fighter, scoffed. “No, we don’t.”

“I’m the oldest, which means I’m in charge. Besides, you all are colored.”

Staring at a bright green street sign that reminded me of Andre’s clothes in the Hey Ya video, I considered the word color and ultimately decided that I had no idea what she was talking about. I shifted my gaze from the sign to Fran’s puffy, sun-burned face.

“What do you mean, colored?” I asked.

Fran laughed cruelly. “You guys have black skin, I’m white, so that means I’m better than you and I’m in charge.”

“My skin is not black,” I argued. “It is brown.” At least that’s what the crayon said.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re still colored, and colored people have to listen to white people.”

 I looked over at Ebony and found her glaring at Fran. Focused. Fiery. I always wondered what she was thinking in that moment.

I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of that.” My whole family is white. Not once had they told me I had to listen to them because our skin looked different. Because I was a baby, sure. But skin?

She continued from there to spin her philosophy. She explained to me what I was worth. And apparently, that was very little. I didn’t look at Fran again. I just stared at Ebony.

I went home that afternoon and never talked about it again, not with Ebony or my mom. I just carried that word and the feeling it came with around with me.

Colored.

When I hear Andre 3000 sing, I still think about it and her. Fran, the girl who danced with us to OutKast, then thirty minutes later, stood over us and called us colored. I still hate that word more than any of the others.

A wise man once said, “Y’all don’t want to hear me, you just want to dance.”

The Word I Carried

I carried that day with me for years.

But I also carried the music.

In a town where Black culture trickled in through MTV and the radio instead of neighbors and classrooms, artists like André 3000 and his work became some of my earliest teachers about identity, contradiction, and voice.

In fifth grade, a show called Class of 3000 came out on Cartoon Network. I loved that show. Not just because I loved music and Andre, but because, for the first time since Proud Family (which was also on the list of faves for me), I was seeing a diverse group of kids on TV. Kids who looked like me. And it wasn’t just one token Negro. It was a full, colorful, weird cast of kids. I had never felt like I belonged somewhere so deeply. The wounding part of that was knowing that it was fictional for me.

By middle school, I was full force in the delusion of being a writer/singer songwriter. I watched MTV and VH1 every morning and wrote poetry on my arms in Sharpie at school. Growing up, songs like Idlewild Blue and Morris Brown changed how I viewed lyricism. They were part of what helped me understand tone and meaning.

After Idlewild, Outkast was gone, but their influence is buried deep in my upbringing. Their songs are the soundtrack to my figuring out how a “colored girl” and her words fit into the world.

Yesterday

Today, I write almost exclusively about the experience of being a little black girl in a majority white neighborhood, because it is my truth. And I refuse to write fantasies that don’t have at least a little truth.

Yesterday, as I combed my hair, I was vibing to my Blended Roots playlist (check it out on my previous Sound Check post), which surprise, surprise, features OutKast.  As I sang “sh- shake it like a Polaroid picture,” shaking my wet hair and shoulders, I could almost feel the carpet in Ebony’s living room under my feet again.

And as Andre hopelessly slipped into, “Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just want to dance,” everything shifted. The summer heat, Ebony’s face, and my confusion, it all hit me full force.

I’m not confused anymore. I’ve known it for a long time, but I felt it again yesterday. I grew up in a place where black culture was only allowed to be on TV and the radio. And while it was a safe haven for me, for my white neighbors, it was permission to love black culture while simultaneously hating black people.

I wonder if Ebony knew that when we were seven. I wonder if even today she hears an OutKast song and is reminded of that day, like I am.

I hope that it’s a safe place for her, too. My attachment to Andre 3000 as an artist is deeper than one racist encounter. I admire his otherness and the willingness he’s had over the years to share it. But Ebony and I will always share that moment in time, where we loved music, dancing, and the color of our skin before someone tried to tell us why we shouldn’t.

I hope that the music still makes her dance and feel both the love and the rage, the way it does for me. Because it all matters, it’s the truth, and we shouldn't be afraid to say it out loud.

I leave you with a poem out of Messy Little Negro that I wrote about that day. It probably won’t be regarded as my most intellectually stimulating poem, but it offers a perspective of a seven-year-old girl and the way a word could take on different meanings and make us all feel different things.

Colored Girl

Green street signs

Yellow lines

Grey roads

Colored Girl

White school

Blue books

Purple shoes

Colored Girl

Red lights

Orange ball

Pink skies

Colored Girl

Brown skin

Brown eyes

Brown hair

Colored Girl

Me and Ebony at the lake, Summer 2003