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chapter 8
foundations
of identity and
early influences
“One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl. I wear colors that I really like, I wear makeup that makes me feel pretty, and it really helps. It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see.”
—Gabourey Sidibe
It was the beginning of the fall semester of my junior year, and I was in a panic. Big time! I needed one more class to fill my schedule so I could be considered a full-time student. I needed that status to qualify to stay on scholarship. As a student at the University of Florida in the early ’90s, I was the recipient of what at the time was labeled a “minority scholarship award” from the Knight Foundation in Miami, Florida, to increase the number of students from “underrepresented” backgrounds attending school for journalism.
It was the 1990s. All of the discussion around Rodney King, racial equity, and police misconduct, as well as how those incidents were reported in the news, led to a rush to recruit high school students across the country. At my predominantly Black high school in Fort Lauderdale, I had been the editor of my school newspaper, the anchor on the morning news show, and had graduated fifth in a class of two hundred students. However, since arriving on campus, I noticed that the encouragement, nurturing, and guidance I received from teachers, coaches, and mentors was severely lacking.
The high school I attended, Dillard, has a rich history that deeply impacted my education and personal growth. Originally established in 1907 as Colored School Number Eleven, its opening marked the beginning of monumental African American achievement in South Florida. All that time, Fort Lauderdale was a farming region where locals found it unnecessary to educate African Americans past the sixth grade.
Two decades later, the school progressed under principal Dr. Joseph A. Ely, who added more classes and sought to educate African American students past the sixth grade. He was also responsible for the school’s current name, a nod to James Harvey Dillard, a white educator from Virginia who was a Black education advocate.
In 1943, at a time when jazz was still a relatively new and rapidly evolving genre, Dillard’s well-known jazz program was led by Julius “Cannonball” Adderley. Adderley would later rise to prominence as one of the best-known jazz musicians in America, and his legacy was a beacon of inspiration throughout my journey at Dillard. Adderley brought new life to the school and helped instill the importance of jazz in the students. He taught jazz when it had not yet been accepted as a classical art form, and while he was teaching jazz, he was also teaching Bach and Beethoven.135
Teachers at Dillard never let us forget how great we were and the legacy of greatness we were expected to uphold for the school, our families, and our community. Most of the students were Black, with only around two hundred of the two thousand coming from other ethnic backgrounds. Even though most of us qualified for free and reduced lunch, our teachers schooled us on the riches we couldn’t see.136 Most of our teachers were Black as well, community leaders, involved in politics, and members of Black Greek-letter organizations. No matter our circumstances, they expected nothing but excellence from us. They instilled in us the sense that, regardless of what we had heard or thought, we were the descendants of royalty—Kings and Queens—whether we knew it or not. They expected us to act accordingly. Therefore, we were not permitted to make excuses about the old building, the musty, torn textbooks, or the blood-stained carpet in the hallway resulting from a knife fight where a teacher had his arm sliced in breaking up two girls.
Despite our school’s storied past and the challenges we faced, once we stepped into our classrooms, we were encouraged to focus on our education. Here, teachers adorned in kente cloth and black medallions guided us, and we expressed ourselves freely, often rapping and beating on desks before class. Our sing-song voices reverberated through the hallways, and everything about us was celebrated because everyone who came into contact with us wanted us to win. It was there that I was introduced to African Origins of Civilization by Chiek Anta Diop and The Isis Papers by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, and I started to wonder about the untapped power inside my body.
My eleventh-grade African American studies teacher was the man who had his arm sliced. On the first day of class, he excitedly passed out copies of The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson. He had bought them himself, unpacking them carefully from a brown carton and handing one to each of us. He warned us to read it and understand it because we would be discussing the concepts in class. The sleeves of his button-down shirt were rolled up slightly. We could see the knife scar on his arm, and we whispered about it to each other. Why did he stay? Why was he still here at this dilapidated school? We knew it wasn’t for the money. Teachers always complained that they didn’t make enough. He never did! He was involved in local politics, a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., and had owned a barber shop for years in the neighborhood not far from our school.
His actions spoke louder than his words: he spent countless hours after school tutoring us, organized field trips to expose us to the world beyond our neighborhood, and always had an open ear for anyone who needed to talk. He was there for us, no doubt, and his every action was a testament to his words that he loved everything about us and would do anything in his power to ensure we knew the truth of our identities. One day, he brought in a book brimming with African names and their meanings. He passed it around, inviting each of us to select a name that would be our identifier in his class. When we walked into class, that was the name he would call us. Everyone else in the class was instructed to do the same. When the book was passed to me, I flipped through the pages and selected one of the first names I saw. It spoke to me.
Amina: Trustworthy, faithful (ah-MEE-nah—Arabic, North Africa; Swahili, East Africa). Amen (Mende, West Africa). Popular name with the Hausa people of West Africa. Form of Aminah, the name of Muhammad’s mother: peaceful, secure (Arabic, North Africa).137
I stared at that entry for a few minutes before telling him my selection. “Alright, Amina!” he confirmed with a smile. I smiled back shyly, glad that he approved, and handed the book to the student sitting at the desk behind me. Each face in the classroom was turned toward us. Each student anxiously awaited his or her turn to choose the African name that would define them in this classroom. I savored the meaning of my new name along with everything else he suggested—for us to empower ourselves by reading about our African history and culture. My whole mind frame shifted within the months that I took this brand-new elective that had been rolled out because this teacher had pushed the administration to offer us this gift—an opportunity to learn who we really were.
I have to admit that up until that point, I had been conflicted. And I had thought about it quite a lot. Who was I? In theory, I was a young Black woman growing up on the predominantly Black eastside of Fort Lauderdale. But I was also an immigrant, born in the United Kingdom in London. My parents had been raised in London, but both arrived there as teenagers after spending their formative years in Jamaica. My Dad’s side of the family proudly embraced their Cuban roots, but none of us actually spoke Spanish. This was much to the chagrin of Spanish speakers I met, who were everywhere I turned in South Florida and recognized the origins of my last name.
Despite the empowering environment within my school, once I stepped outside its gates, I found myself surrounded by an environment that often left me feeling lost and confused. In this environment, amidst the chaos and the questions, I found myself grappling with a harsh reality. The poverty of our neighborhoods, the unfamiliarity with the African experience in America—it was like standing on the threshold of two different worlds, a personal microcosm of the larger societal issues I would later dedicate myself to understanding and challenging. I asked myself why my only frame of reference was a television show called Roots that I had watched as a child in London. Why was everyone at my school Black? Coming from a primary school in southeast London, where I had been one of only three Black students, this was a real culture shock. Now my teacher was waving this book by Carter G. Woodson as he stood at the front of the class, telling us there was so much more to our story than Roots. What did he mean? Why were the only white kids who attended bussed in for the Performing Arts Magnet program? Why did they take classes in a totally separate building? There were so many questions that needed to be answered. But the one answer that my teachers continued to reinforce was a question I hadn’t asked. They told me I was royalty. They told me my ancestors built the pyramids. They told me they expected the world from me. They told me I was a queen.
Our classrooms were spaces where we not only learned about who we really were, but also where our teachers, often better than many of our parents, nurtured us. Many of our parents were immigrants going back to school, or had low-paying jobs. Some worked more than one job to pay the bills. Their form of encouragement usually involved stern talks to let us know that reports from teachers about our misconduct in class wouldn’t be tolerated.
We knew we had to pay attention to the teachers because they admonished us emphatically to ignore all of the background noise, including the depressing neighborhood filled with aging homes, the fact that our parents had to work two jobs to keep a roof over our heads, the poor test results, and the books that were falling apart. None of that mattered. We were told to hold our heads high and not make excuses.
My American History teacher had made that fact abundantly clear the year before. She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and had zero tolerance for excuses. In fact, on the first day of class, she gave us one assignment. If we completed it correctly without any mistakes, we received a perfect score of 100 percent. Any mistakes would earn us a zero. We were to go to the podium at the front of the class. She had us recite a mantra that became our rallying cry against mediocrity: “Excuses are tools of incompetence used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness, and those who use them seldom specialize in anything else.” This mantra, she explained, was a call for us to take responsibility and strive for excellence in all we did.
Of course, I got a perfect score! My high school years shaped me significantly, and I graduated fifth in my class. However, as I transitioned to the University of Florida, I found myself missing the nurturing teachers and personally invested role models I had grown accustomed to at Dillard. I was on a campus where few looked like me, and most people I encountered looked through me as though I didn’t even exist. I was an inconvenience who didn’t belong there. The fact that I was there on a minority scholarship was all the “proof” they needed that I had taken a spot that I didn’t deserve, at least not in their blue, green, and hazel eyes. It was the early 1990s, and even though Black people represented 13.6 percent of Florida’s population, only 5 percent of the school’s almost 27,000 students were Black.138
In my freshman year, I was drawn to one particular professor, the only Black professor I had that year. He taught Introduction to African American Studies, a class fondly referred to as AFA 2000, and was a beacon of understanding and guidance for all the Black students on campus, including me. This class was a shared experience; every Black student had taken it at some point during their time there. His name was Dr. Ronald C. Foreman, Jr. He had earned his BA degree from Hampton University, a historically Black college in Hampton, VA, in 1949, and a master’s in English from another HBCU, North Carolina Central University, in Durham, NC, in 1950. Finally, he had a PhD in mass communications from the University of Illinois.
Prior to teaching at the University of Florida, Dr. Foreman taught at a number of historically Black schools in the South, including Shaw University, Knoxville College, and Tuskegee University. Subsequently, he was hired by the University of Florida in 1970, where he was among the first group of tenure-track Black faculty members to be hired. At UF, he served as the first director of the African American Studies department, a position he held until his retirement in 2000.
He had a special interest in the origins of African American blues and jazz music, an interest that became a core component of the curriculum he taught the many students who took his AFA 2000 class at UF during his thirty-year teaching career.139
He was soft-spoken and thoughtful. He always took his time to fully answer any question we asked during his class. He was the only professor I confided in when I was falsely accused of shoplifting and arrested my sophomore year after being racially profiled in a local pharmacy. He listened sympathetically, without any judgment, and encouraged me to stay strong, reminding me of the history and legacy that were a part of what I was experiencing. I had filed a civil lawsuit against the company that had had me arrested, even though I had a receipt for the two-dollar item they accused me of stealing.
In his class, all young men were required to remove their hats. He explained the importance he had learned growing up in the South of removing his hat when ladies were present. He was always sure to carefully remove his plaid, snap-front newsboy cap whenever he entered the classroom. He expected us to be on time for class. He asked that we be ready to discuss the books he reminded us were required reading for his class: The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, and The Color of Water by James McBride. I read each one voraciously, feeding the appetite that had been awakened during my high school years. I needed to know everything about myself, and this was just one more pathway to understanding.
And the conundrum I faced during the spring semester of my junior year seemed to have a solution very much in line with my hunger for knowledge. I needed just one more class to meet my full-time enrollment requirement. It was a condition for maintaining my scholarship, which was not just an award for me but a lifeline that kept my academic dreams alive. I frantically searched through the schedule of open classes haphazardly posted with Scotch Tape at the reception desk in my college dorm. Wait! There was a class that caught my eye!
AFS 4335: Women in Africa
Explores issues of gender, development, and culture through memoirs, ethnographies, narratives, and films about women in Africa.
This was exactly what I needed to complete my bare minimum of twelve hours to be a full-time student while learning all about women in precolonial Africa. Sounded interesting… And even better, there were only a handful of students currently enrolled. I was in there, like swimwear!
But the first day was a huge disappointment. At the front of the classroom stood a petite, white lady with a blunt-cut bob of salt and pepper hair. I had anticipated learning about African history and women from someone who shared the same roots and experiences, and her presence initially struck a dissonant note. She was dressed in a plaid skirt, sensible low-heeled shoes, and a brown cardigan. “Where is her kente cloth?” I hesitated at the entrance of the small, brightly lit room and quickly glanced at my schedule and the room number to make sure I was in the right place. I was. “Hmmmm… Okay…” I thought to myself, sliding into a seat in the front of the class. I slumped over, reading the school newspaper and reviewing the syllabus, while I skeptically waited for her to begin the lecture. What I would learn from this woman over the next sixteen weeks of the semester changed not only the way I perceived the African diaspora, but specifically how I viewed myself as a Black person and a Black woman.
