Trying to Be White

Virgil Walker | Sola Veritas

She came to Tulsa the way I had, carried in from somewhere that made the rest of us feel small. I had come down from upstate New York. She was from the city, and she wore it, the accent and the easy certainty that she already knew what was cool while the rest of us were still guessing. She said she was black and Puerto Rican, and whether that was the whole story or not, she carried it like a passport none of us thought to question. I was twelve, I was smitten, and within a week, I had decided that the distance between her world and mine was a problem I could solve.

So I went to work on myself. When my mother took me school shopping, I asked for the gear I had seen the cool kids wearing, the labels that told everyone you belonged. I started borrowing the girl’s slang and wearing the words around the house until they sounded less like a costume. For most of a semester, I made the kind of progress a boy measures in a glance, held a beat too long, or a laugh I was sure I had earned. I thought I was closing the gap.

Then the report cards came, and in our school, that was a public event. The honor roll students were handed a paper invitation in homeroom, a summons to a celebration in the auditorium, and every kid in the room knew exactly what those slips meant when they hit a desk. I waited for mine, and when it landed, I did what any twelve-year-old does. I looked up to see who else was holding one. The girl was not. Before the moment could turn into anything good, she looked at the slip on my desk and laughed out loud. “Oh,” she said. “You must be trying to be white.”

A semester of work evaporated between her words and the bell. Everything I had bought and borrowed was gone, and I understood, with the speed only humiliation can teach, that I had been measuring the wrong thing the whole time. The gap had never been the clothes or the slang. The thing that disqualified me was the slip in my hand, the proof that I was good at school, and good at school had just been translated for me, out loud and in front of everyone, as a betrayal of my own people.

I was a quick study, and that was always the problem. From that day forward, I carried my grades like contraband. I loved to read, and I loved to write. I would finish something and feel a light come on inside me, and I taught myself to put it out before anyone could see it, because I now knew what it cost to let it burn. The lesson did not stay in the classroom. I learned to keep two voices, one for the auditorium and one for the block, and to know without thinking which room called for which. I told myself this was survival. I would not have used the word "performance" because performance was the very air I breathed, and you do not notice the air.

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Here is the part I have carried longest, and the part I am only now willing to say plainly. The boy who learned to hide that he loved words grew into a man who cannot live without them. I write for a living. I teach, and I preach. I have spent my adult life doing in public the very thing a twelve-year-old girl shamed me into hiding, and she did it in an afternoon, with three words, over a slip of paper she had not earned herself. That is what the cage takes from you. It does not announce the theft. It convinces you to hand over the best of what God put in you, and to feel cool while you do it, and to call the handover “loyalty.” I buried my calling to win the approval of someone who could not pass the test she mocked me for passing. It took me years to understand that I had not lost a competition that day. I had volunteered for a cage.

Sit with the lie folded inside her sentence, because it is still doing its work in a million homerooms. The lie says that excellence belongs to white people, and that for a black child, faithfulness to his own means staying small. It is a brilliant lie, because it needs no enforcer. It recruits the very children it intends to keep down, and it teaches them to police one another, so that the brightest among them learn to dim themselves before any outside hand ever reaches for the switch. A people that teaches its children to bury their gifts will do to itself what no enemy could accomplish from the outside. The cruelty of it is that everyone involved believes they are protecting something.

What I could not have named at twelve I can name now. I was afraid, and I built my whole young life around managing that fear. “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe” (Proverbs 29:25). The snare is not dramatic. It is a slip of paper on a desk, a girl’s laugh, and a quiet decision made a thousand times after that to be less than you are, so a room will keep you. Paul asked the one question that ever cuts the cord. “For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10). I spent a long time seeking the approval of rooms that were never going to save me.

If I could get back to that homeroom, I would not tell the boy to be braver. Bravery was not his problem. I would tell him who he was, in the right order, because everything else runs downstream of that. He was first an image-bearer of the living God, made on purpose and stamped with a worth no classroom assigns, and no girl can revoke (Genesis 1:27). If he came to Christ, and he would, then the verdict that governs a life had already been spoken over him, and no auditorium and no corner could overturn it. He was a son and a brother. He was a boy who loved words, and that love was not a defect to be hidden but a gift to be spent. His color was true and good, and the last thing on the list, never the first. The day he got that order wrong was the day he handed the keys of his identity to a room, and a room is a terrible god. It changes its mind every semester, and it never tells you the new rules until you have already broken them.

You have a homeroom, too. Maybe it is not a classroom now. Maybe it is a comment section, a profession, a friend group, a crowd whose approval you are still quietly buying with pieces of yourself. You know which room it is, because you can feel the small editor in your chest that decides what to show and what to hide before you ever open your mouth. Here is what I would tell you, having paid for the lesson at full price. Stop putting the light out. Do the excellent thing and let it be seen, speak in your own voice in every room, and let the rooms that cannot bear the sound of it walk away from you. Refuse to translate your gifts into someone else’s idea of who your people are allowed to be. The approval you are chasing will not save you, and the One whose approval already rests on you in Christ has set you free to stop auditioning. The boy in that homeroom believed he lost something the day he finally stopped hiding. He gained the only thing that was ever his to keep.

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Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

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