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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ibi Zoboi
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January 7 - January 15, 2020
By the time I started high school, I had mastered all of those things and could easily blend into New York’s particular brand of teen Blackness, even while tucking away the quirky parts of myself—my love of sci-fi, disco music, and John Stamos.
I started to connect my own Brooklyn Blackness to a global idea of Blackness. After all, while the girls in my neighborhood teased me about not knowing how to spit out sunflower seeds, they didn’t know how to properly eat a mango, or know Creole or Patois or any of the Caribbean ring games.
The change in his tone was immediate. Less bass. More enunciation. I wondered if he was even aware that he was doing it.
“Yo, real talk—what if that Band-Aid had some nasty disease on it, and it seeped into your forehead and is now eating your brain or something? Tomorrow you gon� wake up even dumber than you are today.� Randy’s face is dead serious. “And that’s a shame.� Jamal’s is too. “A damn shame.� So is Flaco’s. “A low-down dirty shame.� A smirk now splinters Randy’s mug like a crack in glass.
That I truly couldn’t remember the last time I’d been around more than a handful of other Black people who weren’t my immediate family. That sometimes, because of that, I feel like a fraud within my own race.
