Stamped: August 28th, 2007 | Toggle Similar
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The icicle Christmas lights framing the roof on my dad's house in suburban Atlanta (AKA country back woods) have been hanging up since I was a senior in high school.

That's 7 seven years. For seven full years, Christmas lights have been up at my childhood home. My dad argues that it's easier to keep them up then to take them up and back down again. This is also the same man who loves being at home so much that we used to order take out from Waffle House. In fact I didn't even know that you could eat inside Waffle House until I was a senior in high school. During my adolesence, my mother designated Wednesday as Eat Out Night. Her idea of eating out? We drove up to the main drag by the interstate and got to choose from McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wendy's or KFC. If we were lucky, she'd let us choose treats from two places. My brother's idea of a fun time includes sipping from Miller High Life 40s while driving in circles around the parking lot of the mall twenty minutes outside my town.

It's time for me to accept the truth. I am black but I still come from a family of rednecks. I told my grandmother that I was thinking about taking a trip to Paris. She asked me how far outside of New York, France was. This same grandmother remarked on Thanksgiving after I got back from the store with a gallon of milk that "Only a Muslim would have a store open on Thanksgiving. They got no religion."

From the ages of birth to around 5 or 6, white people were a mystery to me. From what I'd gleaned from my family and television, whites didn't go to church, they were constantly disobeying their parents, and most problems that befell any member of my own race could be attributed to some white person some where around. My parents instilled the fear of racism in me early on and I remember several sleepless nights after I learned about the Klux Klux Klan. When we had a mock school election in 1988, I was in second grade and confused on who I should vote for. My dad told me that Republican stands for Racist so I immediately penciled in my vote for Dukakis. I thought that all white girls must be so happy because their hair was just like a Barbie's and their moms let them wear it down instead of in braids smothered in hair grease that pulled at their scalps with the weight of the multicolored barettes that hung at the ends of them. I used to get really uncomfortable in elementary school whenever history class would lead to any kind of discussion on civil rights. I always felt like all the white faces in the class were on me so I often raised my hand to let everyone know that neither my parents nor my grandparents had never been and were not currently slaves or sharecroppers.

The racial makeup of all of the public schools I attended was 50/50. But somewhere along the line, maybe in 1st or 2nd grade, it became obvious to my teachers that I was maybe on a faster track than the rest of the kids in the class. Seven-year-olds rarely spit out 20 page long stories complete with illustrations. And rarely were other second graders indulging in books of poems by Frost. So I was put on the accelerated track and as is usual the stereotypical case, my classes went from being salt and pepper with a little Asian and Mexican sprinkled here and there to being mostly salt sprinkled with one or two Jews.

My school days, and then my college days and now my work days, I'm the lone dark face. In most cases, if a white person were to show up and be surrounded by black people, he or she would be a little apprehensive. Everyday I show up and I'm the only black person in my office but thoughts of a white mutiny never really cross my mind.

My roots are back in Georgia, with my very black family in my very country town. No matter how citified I try and make myself, the expensive jeans, the iPod, the roll of the eyes at slow moving tourists along 5th Avenue. . . .I'm still Brandy from McDonough. The girl who spent her first five years not knowing that white people bathed. The girl who until college thought that a real meal out was Chili's or Applebees. The girl who's dad's house has Christmas lights hanging from the gutters and the bushes year-round.

Last 5 posts by Brandy

• Hell House - November 9th, 2007
• 36 going on 11 - October 9th, 2007
• College was a good time. - September 25th, 2007
• I'm the easiet girl ever to break up with - September 18th, 2007
• Why I am not a middle school speaker - August 22nd, 2007