In addition to food and exercise changes in my life at Syracuse University in the fall of 1983, I also started “courting” girls, as my father would put it. In the process I also under went a cultural and spiritual transformation. I will talk about the cultural transformation first. I started my first consciousness relationship with a girl I met at SU’s Shaw Dining Hall. I say conscious one because growing up in lily white Croton, my mother had a mantra, “don’t bring home no blue eyed Suzy, I want someone who looks like me!” About three years ago, I was surprised to learn from white classmates and the white girl in question, that I had actually dated someone in high school. I must have been in denial during the said relationship, because I never called the person my girl friend or anything other than a good friend who was a girl. Psychologically, the fear of my mother’s wrath must have prevented me from seeing the relationship on any other terms. You see, I suspect that many black youth like me that played high school lacrosse in white suburbs went through a similar cultural experience as me. Our parents relocated to a New York, New Jersey, Maryland, or Pennsylvania suburb to give us better educational opportunities. But they didn’t know what it would do to us emotionally and culturally. As black folks who grew up “courting” in the 1950s Jim Crow south or the more insidious de-facto Jim Crow north (i.e., the treatment MLK received when he tried to desegregate public housing in Chicago), many of our parents feared what would happen if their black male children dated “Suzy.” This was especially the case during my youth; I attended middle school and high school during the height of the Black Power movement (for more on Black Power see chapter 8 in my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/excerpt). Thus our protective black parents drilled into us a message like my mother gave me. Most of us did get a better education in the suburbs; and some like me earned college scholarships to Division I schools like Syracuse to play “white sports” like soccer and lacrosse. But most I would also argue experienced a white acculturation that made us functional in white youth circles and inept and embarrassed in black ones. It’s like Hispanic kids who grow up in similar scenarios who never learned how to speak Spanish fluently or dance the mambo, salsa, meringue or bachata. Your embarrassed and ashamed. You feel like you should know this stuff but you don’t. I will continue this theme tomorrow.
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