Column: Having a black body in the age of Obama

By ChaToyya Sewell

Published April 9, 2010

Once I stood in the checkout line at the bookstore, minding my own business, purchasing a book and enjoying the leisurely afternoon.

Out of nowhere I felt a tug on my ponytail. A sharp tug. I spun around expecting to roll my eyes at a friend, mouth already curling into a sarcastic remark, when I was confronted with a stranger before me.

He looked sheepishly down.

"I just wanted to know what it felt like," he mumbled.

"Felt like," as if I were some mystical creature — she of the black hair! I was livid, livid in the can't-breathe, red-faced, sputtering-cuss-words sort of way. Livid in the I-dropped-my-magazine-on-a-table-and-stormed-out-the-bookstore-before-I-got-myself-banned sort of way.

The man might not have intended to ruin my afternoon, but with one sharp tug, with the slide of his hand down my ponytail, it was gone.

Fleeting into the winds of what could have been. Instead of lounging and reading, I spent the afternoon tense, frustrated, recounting the experience to my mother and my friends, searching through my phonebook for a bit of reassurance, a smidgen of understanding.

This is what a body on display feels like.

Historically, black women's bodies were not classified as fully human, fully women. They existed in the gray, readily available for white men to exploit the same femininity they denied existed. They armed themselves with excuses for their crimes, because black women were unable to be raped.

I felt sick; the weight of my grandmother's turmoil translated onto my 21st century body.

I am not presenting the false equivalency that this is equitable to slave rape; it is clearly not. It is a subverted extension of the historical tropes of the past. We have progressed greatly from the days of sundown towns, the days when thousands of people of color were lynched yearly. This is a joyous progression, momentous in history; unfortunately, sometimes it is used to give the impression the fight is over and we are done. The Klan fires might be dying, suffocating in the smoke of their hatred, but there is still work to be done.

In the subconscious of our nation, we remember a time when black women were not considered by those in power to be women. Their bodies were property, and we are so inundated we unknowingly act upon that. The bodies of black women are thought to be available for discussion and dissection.

The Saartjie Baartman of 18th century France is the Buffy the Body of today.

With every article analyzing the meaning of Michelle Obama's ass, with every unwelcome advance, every hand in my hair, I am reminded.

Blogger Tami Winfrey Harris calls this the dull ache of racism.

It's a fitting phrase for the experience of being an anti-racist advocate in a town that in the same instance can be welcoming and infuriating. It is waking up each day with the knowledge you will be thought of as an other in some way, some instance in which you can choose to shout or be forced by the circumstance to be rendered mute with rage. It is the little changes we make to assimilate, the fact that I spent years of my adolescence looking down, lest I be thought sassy or loud by my peers.

It is all the little things that add up to my experience of being a black woman in the age of Barack Obama.