What Happened to You?

I don’t remember the first time someone looked at me and asked, with a puzzled expression, “What are you,” but I remember how it felt. What am I? Well, my name is Alix. I’m a girl. I’ve spent most of my life in Texas so I guess we can add Texan to that list of whats. Christian, yes. My parents’ names – are you asking about our family tree? I’m a Carruth. But every answer I thought of, some expressed out loud and some kept inside, seemed not to answer the question as it was intended. After a few attempts at answering on my end, the other’s clarification always followed: “No, I mean, what are you? You don’t look white… Are you Hispanic, or where are your parents from?”

Oh, that ‘what.’ After a few years of being a child old enough to hold a real conversation yet young enough for the curiosity-masked prejudice embedded in the questioning to go unnoticed, I was sure this conversation starter was a standard for everyone. Strangers approached in odd places, asked a ‘what’ before a ‘who,’ proceeded by follow-up questions or maybe that’s the end of the conversation. It would depend on their prejudice about my ‘what,’ without a moment of dignity for the ‘who’ that’s been ignored for minutes now. By age 10, I was so trained in answering this question that I could give a brief synopsis on my maternal and paternal heritage, giving likely too much information in an attempt to avoid having to answer any follow-up questions, because can’t we just move on? My name is Alix. Who are you?

I don’t remember how old I was the first time someone referred to me as an ‘oreo.’ Or how many more times it happened, some light in laughter and some serious and cutting, or when the nickname ‘caramel’ got introduced. In school I continued to be referred to as a light brown food substance by people whose skin belonged in the peach family. It was exhausting. I learned to either make the reference first, or quickly think of a better, more accurate food to one-up the other person so that at least I was the carrier of the joke that continued to strip my human dignity away with each utterance. And yet again—my name is Alix.

I was in third grade when standardized testing first challenged me to take a side. We would get the scantron and walk through together, as a class, filling out the first page with our names, genders, birthdates, and races. The other 20 kids in my class, who easily bubbled in “white” then moved onto the next question, had no idea how simple their lives were. With every test, I had to make a choice. This was before we were allowed to exist in duality. This was 2003, when you had to choose. I couldn’t bubble more than one or the scantron machine was going to reject my answer sheet, so I chose. Some tests knew me as a white woman, others as a black woman, and I didn’t know which test was right. I don’t remember how old I was the first time the scantron instructed me to mark all that applied, but that day was surreal. I’m pretty sure I bubbled in a few things that weren’t actually true—whether that was a conscious choice or just an overly-excited right hand that had been chained to singularity for too many years, I’ll never know. But my 8-year-old self who was so tired of choosing one would be so relieved to learn that her 18-year-old self could finally be many, that one day she could use graphite for honesty instead of deceit.

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I noticed that my hair was different than hers, but I quickly digested that hers was the “better” one and that mine needed adjusting to be seen by societal standards as acceptable and well-kept. I was in third grade when my mom started pressing my hair on a regular basis because it was relatively high-maintenance (my words, not hers) to keep up with an active little girl’s curls. We continued pressing my hair on a weekly basis through elementary school and I started to take over that job myself when I entered teenage years. What started as more of a chore quickly became a definition of beauty that I clung to as I looked around my sixth grade homeroom and noticed that all of the pretty girls who got attention had lighter skin, straighter hair, narrower hips, thinner lips, and a smaller voice than mine. That discrepancy continued through high school, and the flat-iron stayed too. Pressing strands of my hair together though blazing plates of metal in a deep plea to be accepted and seen as ‘normal.’ When school dances rolled around and everyone else spent hours curling their hair, I straightened mine. Oftentimes, I would just end up curling it with said flat-iron, which feels painfully ironic today as I look in the mirror and remember that it was always curly. It was always what everyone else wanted, just not me.

Being raised in predominantly white, Southern, and evangelical contexts heavily shaped me. There were both overt and subconscious choices made by my peers and myself based on the races of the people around us. Language we used, things we listened to or wore, ways we longed to relate to other people but had no idea where to start. We were kids. I was biracial in precedent but white by proxy. I listened to rap music to try and be a part of this culture but had no idea the weight behind the lyrics I was hearing. I was black when it seemed fun or important to be, but could opt out when it wasn’t. I knew that I could move through the world as a white woman if I wanted to; skin just light enough, hair pressed on the regular, Southern accent coming out when convenient, societal dress code in check. I could manipulate myself to be who—or what—I wanted or needed to be in those spaces. And as an 18-year-old in Dallas, that space was predominantly white.

I was a sophomore in college the first time someone, not related to me by blood, called me a black woman. I was interning with a church in Columbia who had an all-white full-time staff. One of my fellow interns was a black woman, and one Sunday I saw her walking through the foyer into the children’s hallway with a black couple and their children. After service, she approached me and poignantly said, “Listen. It’s extremely important that, when a black family comes here, they meet you or me and know that they aren’t alone. You gotta go out of your way to greet those folks.” She would later go on to call me a black woman directly many times over years of friendship, but even in that moment, the implication was clear: We are black women. I remember feeling a weight to my story on that day that had never existed before. Or, maybe the weight was there all along. In my predominantly white contexts, I had learned to soften. To trim down, to quiet. To straighten hair and lower voices and manipulate speech to fit in where needed. But on that day Britt gave me permission to stop, and so I did.

I was in my last semester of college when protests and hunger strikes started on our campus, when #ConcernedStudent1950 called for the removal of a UM System President whose response to appeals for equity, equality, and racial justice across 3 campuses left just about everything to be desired. I was in my capstone course and flooded with schoolwork, walking from the bus stop to the Journalism School lab as I passed by tents set up across the quad. Completing graphic design assignments at midnight while catching up on the status of Jonathan Butler’s health after his 7th day of not eating. Meeting with my capstone team in the journalism building when someone was shot in the parking garage and we moved the meeting to my house for safety. Standing up for myself and my team when we were asked by our professors to start completely over on a project—at the end of the semester—so it would look “more inclusive of the diversity of our program.” A project that, I reminded them, consisted solely of photographs of the members of that “diverse” program which they wanted us to re-make to give the illusion of an inclusion that frankly didn’t exist. I finished a semester and graduated from a program in the midst of social unrest on our campus, racial injustice all over our state, and an inner turmoil that I had never felt this intensely. I was angry. As the single black member of a 30-person capstone program, I was angry. As a 22-year-old who was discovering her blackness for the first time, I was angry.

I was in my first year of post-grad the first time a child accurately articulated my skin with beautiful clarity. I was volunteering at a school on the east side of Kansas City and had befriended a second grade boy who was also biracial. He drew a picture of me during free time one day, and I received a text from the principal a few hours later: “[He] drew you today. He used both a yellow crayon and a brown crayon for your skin. He sees you.” This boy was one of many kids at that school who were biracial, and within days of being in that building I quickly felt the weight of being a mirror to them—a mirror I had never had the privilege of receiving as a child. All of my teachers had been white. All of my sports coaches, band directors, choir teachers… white. All of my memories of formative adults in my childhood and teenage years outside of family members were, you guessed it, white. But then I grew up and all of a sudden I was working at an inner-city school on the short list of “staff members of color” and I felt it. I was suddenly aware of this deep longing that had been stuffed away for over a decade, this child in me who had subconsciously scanned every classroom for someone she could look at with exhausted eyes who could say me, too. This child who had never quite known which ‘side’ to belong to, who held anxiety in her left hand and graphite in her right every time a scantron forced her to simplify her duality down to one choice, just one. This child who had never known the feeling of stepping into a classroom and not being the only or one of the few. I got to work in a place where students saw themselves in the faces of their peers, the reflection of their to-be-adult selves in my own eyes. That weighty privilege started to slowly peel back layers of stunted wounds from two decades of existence. And as those wounds saw sunlight, they ached.

Over the past four years of living in this city, I have befriended amazing men and women who have called me higher into the responsibility of what it means to be a black woman. I have listened to my black brothers and sisters cry out in anger and desperation and exhaustion and devastation and pain and grief. I’ve sat closer to these stories than I ever did growing up, and it has wrecked me. I went to sleep one day not sure which scantron bubble to mark, and woke up the next with graphite all over the paper. I feel a renewed responsibility to own the title of ‘black woman’ and to press into the realities of my story, rather than manipulate my way around them. And in the same breath, I feel the weight of also being of white descent and grappling with the realities of that heritage, of those stories, of the men and women who came before me hundreds of years ago and made choices that would in turn oppress, harm, and even kill those on the other line of my heritage. I know that being a white-passing, biracial woman means I will never fully understand what it means to be black—there is both grief and relief in that space, a burden of gap-standing that I never asked for and yet face the tension of on a daily basis.

I don’t remember how old I was the first time a family member told me, point blank, “just remember, you’re more white than you are black.” I remember laughing. I figured it was just a light-hearted comment to remind me about the beautiful complexities of the little girl God had made me to be, a multi-faceted diamond like him with too many sides to be stripped down to one simple description or trait. The words “white” and “black” were both used so it could definitely still be dignifying… right? But then it happened again. And again, and again, until I could tell the comment was coming before it even escaped his mouth based on the conversation at hand and the expression on his face. I stopped laughing. I remember wondering why that comment felt worth repeating, even as a young child. As years progressed and it continued into my teens, I remember wondering what wound was being protected by his words. What threat were you facing, and why did it feel worth the breath of ranking parts of me into percentages? Why did I have to remember that? Who was keeping score and could someone please show me the tally marks? Had I failed somewhere? What happened to me?

What happened to me?

When we spend time with kids who have experienced trauma, we’re taught to shift our question from what did you do? to what happened to you? We’re taught to see behaviors as indicators of unmet needs, of emotional expression in the ways kids have learned to do so. We’re taught to lament the realities of unmet needs rather than be overly critical of the methods used to express them. After all, these are children.

We’re taught to consider family systems, nuclear families, original patterns, modeled behavior. We’re taught to zoom out to the broader scope of things, rather than just this moment with this child in this circumstance. We’re taught to stop questioning kids and to instead start asking questions about their stories, to see them as recipients of things unwarranted, unfair, and often inhumane. We’re taught to see the need behind the behavior and to step toward that need to fulfill it, rather than stepping toward the behavior simply to stop it. We’re taught to see children as image bearers of God who need the right modeling, the right love, and the right relationship to heal from the wounds their hearts have carried so heavily for years.

When I think about the black men and women whose lives have been lost at the hands of police in the past four weeks—hell, the past four years—I think about the trauma of racism. I think about their childhoods. I think about the broader scope of 400 years of systematic injustice and oppression, rather than just this moment with this black person in this circumstance. I think about unmet needs and how our community has been conditioned, from society’s silence, to express them in ways that are often interpreted as too loud, too dramatic, too violent. I think about generation after generation of modeling. I think about how much time America tends to waste on questioning these men and women rather than asking questions about their stories. I think about how we’ve spent hundreds of years with knees on throats and are just now starting to remember the Imago Dei and demand justice instead. I think about how many people have cried out “I can’t breathe”—how many children, white and black and of all races, experienced unmet need after unmet need and cried out for assistance, only to be met with more hurt. I think about how many of my ancestors sang in cotton fields about dreams of new breathing in free places, and how many of my other ancestors stood by in complacence while those dreams were delayed or never came to fruition. And, in the heaviest and most saddening place, I lament about how many of my ancestors may have put their knee on a throat before thinking twice.

I don’t know your story. I don’t know how long you’ve been asleep or awake to what is happening in our country. I don’t know if you run to Jesus in the moments where the weight of this all feels too heavy, or if you run to something or someone else in an attempt to find justice and relief. What happened to Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and so many others is inexcusable. They are just a few in a long list of people who were treated with What are you doing? rather than What happened to you? mentalities. I’m not here to give you a 12-step solution to ending racial injustice in America because, to be honest, we won’t see that on this side of heaven. That can and should feel heavy to hear, but it’s true.

But what I am inviting you into is a new way of thinking about the person sitting across from you, whether they look like you or not. To a new way of thinking about the men and women on your phone screen who are holding up signs in peaceful protest, and also the ones throwing rocks into glass storefronts. To a new way of thinking about the men and women in uniform kneeling alongside civilians in Minneapolis, and also the ones standing by while their partners utilize unnecessary and senseless lethal force during nonviolent arrests. Until we start seeing people for people, for stories that go back hundreds of years—on both the oppressive and oppressed sides—we won’t get anywhere. Until we start asking about the wounds our family members are protecting when they remind us that we are more white than black, we won’t get anywhere. Until we start asking about the hundreds of years of dignity-stripping systemic laws and practices that are circling someone’s mind as they protest, or even riot, in the street, we won’t get anywhere. We do not exist in vacuums, in moments-at-a-time, in brains that are void of previous experiences, traumas, or triggers. We are humans who hold things in our brains and hearts that need healing, and until those stories and wounds are faced, healing will not happen.

May we all grow in empathy of the wounds and trauma each other are carrying. May we face the epigenetic effects of generation after generation of dehumanizing, oppressing, and segregating with listening ears and understanding hearts. And the next time a black brother is facedown on the concrete with a knee on his throat, may we all stop to ask what happened to you?