I remember trying to count all the Black kids that I saw in my first week of boarding school – I found 12, in a school of easily 850+ students. 12, can you imagine? We were like grains of pepper in a saxa salt shaker; it felt like we weren’t meant to be there.

I didn’t really know any of them, except for one; Chris, we’ll call him. He was in my year and over time, he and I became good friends.

We were both quietly aware of our school’s poor diversity, though it’s something we very rarely discussed. Looking back, I think it was because as teenagers, we didn’t yet have the language or understanding to explain our struggles with race. I also think it was due to our contrasting experiences. Being ‘the Black one’, impacted us both in very different ways and that’s because we were not the same kind of ‘Black one’.

For 1) he was a Black boy and I was a Black girl, where the experiences of Black men and women, no matter how intertwined, are not the same. Misogynoir for example, is something uniquely experienced by Black women and it’s something I felt at times while there. 2) We came from different socioeconomic backgrounds, which had an impact on how we were treated and the value that some felt we added. And 3) we were our own people, in that we responded to the way we were treated and processed being ‘the Black ones’ differently.

For example, being a person of colour in a White school made me feel invisible and unattractive and at times made me shy, where he was out there and seemed to thrive, especially when it came to dating.

I remember us walking to class one day. We were discussing his latest crush and which girls had recently made moves on him. I made a comment about how he was always with someone, while I, on the other hand, was not.

“You’re like a mystery; do you know that? We both are”, he responded as he placed his hand on my shoulder and lowered his eye line to meet mine. He told me that he was aware that a proportion of the female attention he received was due to his race, but that it didn’t matter at the time, because the girls were fit – typical teenaged boy much.

“You could be getting with people too”, he explained, for much like how his Blackness was a sought-after commodity, I too was a curiosity because of mine.

“None of them have gotten with you. None of them have been with the Black girl before, you’re a mystery,” he repeated.

I’m not sure if he realised it at the time, but it didn’t flatter or ease me in the way it felt that he hoped it would. Because essentially all Chris did was highlight the fact that we were fetishized, something that he somehow managed to make the most out of, while I seemingly crumbled.

Unlike Chris, confidence was a myth to teenaged me: my insecurities exacerbated by the fact that Black women continue to exist outside of western beauty standards. My hair, skin and features have never been the ideal and overtime a younger me internalised that rejection and had it reinforced by the environment that I was in.

I felt rejected and somehow also a fetish.  Though I wasn’t familiar with that word at the time, there was a chilling feeling that washed over me every time I felt it disguise itself as affection. But, that didn’t stop me from accepting it, because teenaged me was desperately seeking a validation that I would never find in such a whitewashed environment.

It was a complicated time that I admittedly never learnt to navigate. I felt both invisible and unattractive as the Black girl and simultaneously fetishized and therefore ‘wanted’, because of it. There was no in between, no soothing when I had been burnt by White teenaged ignorance and no Blackness around me to teach me otherwise.

“Ok but when did you realize you weren’t ugly and that you were just a POC around too many white people”

– Twitter

Thankfully, the more diverse my surroundings became, the less ugly and fetishized I felt. Thus, the more comfortable I have become in calling people out when they minimised me in that way. Sadly however, this didn’t begin to happen until I left school; until I was no longer a Black girl solely surrounded by Whiteness. Until I was no longer that misplaced grain of pepper in a salt shaker. Lost, wandering and forever not the ideal.

I often wonder how many Black people, both men and women, unknowingly accept fetishization as a form of affection either because they’re unaware of what they are experiencing, they’ve convinced themselves that it’s acceptable or because they, like I once did, believe that a fetish is all they will ever be. I wonder if they, like I did, still feel unattractive, undervalued and unworthy, when the truth is that we are worth more than what this society has taught us.

Having said that, society is yet to fully embrace us and so it’s up to us to pull ourselves and each other out of the darkness that it western idealism and into the light.

Since leaving school I have learnt how important it is to surround myself with my likeness. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t diversify, we should. In fact, it’s imperative that we do. But also surround yourself in an environment that celebrates you. See yourself in your friends, read books that depict your racial journey, absorb media, films and music, that praise natural hair – or whatever your hair texture is. Surround yourself in an inclusive environment, however one that also takes the time to specifically acknowledge you. Because this society will really have you thinking that fetishizing is it, but it’s not!

Speaking of, I should go call Chris and make sure he’s not still accepting that shit. *Sips Tea*

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