Reclaiming My Identity
I had my first racist encounter at 15 years old. I was sat waiting for a bus and had racial slurs hurled at me, by an adult. At the time it didn’t bother me, you never really think it would bother you. I quickly accepted what had happened and tried to forget about it. Only, you never really do forget your first racist encounter, it sticks with you, it replays on your mind, forever.
From that moment on, my life was painted with microaggressions that I simply couldn’t avoid. Having people touch my hair and tell me ‘Wow, it feels like carpet!’, white women looking twice at me in shops, being stared at by my white classmates when that word came up in ‘Of Mice and Men’ and constantly hearing ‘Is it true what they say about black guys?’. Little things when piled up and examined really took a toll on my perception of myself and others like me. I tried not to draw attention to myself in school but to my teachers, every parent’s evening comment was ‘He’s got so much potential, he just needs to apply himself more’. I always did more than what was asked of me just to be side-lined with my peers, who associated my efforts as me ‘doing too much’. You can’t be put into a category that just isn’t there.
For as long as I can remember I’ve had big hopes and aspirations for my life. I always wanted to encourage other people to learn about my culture, about what it meant to me to be black. Telling people my Great Uncle was the chief of a village in Ghana seemingly translated to ‘Wait, so you’re the prince of Ghana?’. It’s one thing to hear your classmates talking about it, but having teachers ask me felt like a smack in the face. No one takes the black kid seriously.
It became very easy for me to fall into the stigma of mental health that is embedded within the black community. The ideology that ‘men aren’t supposed to cry’ and that they should ‘deal with’ their problems is perpetuated through generations and is the reason behind why many black men suppress there innermost personal feelings. The fear of being deemed weak or vulnerable is the reason why black men don’t reach out, it’s a reason why I didn’t reach out. Growing up it was hard to talk to people about anything because there just wasn’t anyone like me. I found myself having feelings I was too scared to explain or express, simply because of the lack of representation of black people like me in my area.
When I began having feelings and attractions towards men, my world completely shattered. I was beyond terrified and there was nothing I could do about it. I got so deep inside my head I began to question the life I was living. I became so unhappy and my mind was a very scary place to be in. The issue at hand that I and many other black individuals who identify within the LGBTQ+ community is the lack of representation. Life in an African household saw heterosexual relationships paired with patriarchy. It was a lifestyle that I just didn’t feel I represented, but I didn’t know any other way of living. I knew then I couldn’t talk to my mother or my father about the way I’d been feeling due to fear of rejection so my life became very isolated from theirs. It was very easy to distance myself from my relatives purely because I had always been different from them. Unlike the men in my family, I wasn’t sporty and I wasn’t active so no one really payed me any attention.
Once you think negatively on yourself, there’s no changing your mind and I truly hated myself. I felt ugly and disgusted with the way I looked and I told myself I wasn’t loved. I wrote short stories about my pain, praying it would go away, that I would go away. Nothing seemed to work. I had concocted this narrative that I would never see my dreams to fruition and that my life as it stands was pitiful. I struggled claiming my identity and I still do to this day. All my accomplishments came from a place of pain and everything I worked for was fuelled from all the negativity in my life. But slowly, I started to dismiss the guilt of my accomplishments and recognise my worth. I began to realise I didn’t need validation to move forward and I sought out truly understanding and appreciating my background as a black man.
I found pride in my skin colour. I look in the mirror and I see my Ghanaian parents, I see beauty. It’s hard to actually question if I regret not speaking up when I needed to the most, I guess I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I did. I know, looking back, I needed to be beaten down into that dark place for me to truly understand who I am, and who I can be today, for myself and for others like me.
Article by Selorm Torkornoo