Child,
Now I am finally at the age when I have the privilege to be “old and wise”. Some people became wiser with books or education, but for me, I learned from my adventures and experiences. I want you to know that exploring inward—your identity and your true self—is as important, if not more, as exploring the outside world. But I realized that I would not need to elaborate much on that. You have always looked inward; you have seen the other side of me that I successfully hid away from most people: how I was abused, how I abused you, and how I could turn from a kind soul to a beast in seconds. Sometimes I think you know more about myself than me, but I wonder whether you have applied the same scrutiny on you as well. Now that you have grown up to embrace this stage of life and the so called identity crisis, I want to share some of my experience and “wisdom”—if you wouldn’t mind—that hopefully will shed some light on your journey to discover yourself.
The identity that has defined the rest of my life, in my opinion, is the racial identity of being an African American. Racial identity not only possesses the power to shape other people’s perception of you, but also possesses the ability to twist, change, and “racialize” other identities and other parts of my life. Scholars today call it a “metalanguage”.
You might be puzzled by the term I just threw at you, and rightly so. Signs of racism have become much more implicit these days. One of the first time I discovered the power of this metalanguage was during my piano recital when I was 12: even though it was my concert, my parents were forced to move to the back row to clear the space for the white people. Much like the first class seats of the segregated train, the “front row” should have only represented socioeconomic success or cultural prestige, but it was racialized. Why? It was racialized to provide white people with the “wages of whiteness”, to unify the White Americans of opposing socioeconomic classes under the same racial flag, and to stabilize the race-based hierarchy. Obviously, all of these came as hindsights. At your age, I was not as educated or informed as you on these topics, but I knew I needed to resist: I refused to play until they were allowed to sit back in the front row.
You grew up seeing me continue my fight through music, but that was not the career my parents had planned out for me. They wanted me to receive a good education, find a job that provides stable income, and slowly join in the American middle class life. In a certain way, they wanted me to “pass” with my profession and to “advance” myself to a higher socioeconomic status, but they failed to realize that all these paths have been racialized too. The first blow to their plan was that I got rejected by Curtis, presumably due to racial discrimination. Then I ended their dream when I secretly started to perform in bars with the name Nina Simone. I thought the duty of “racial uplifting” placed on me was a myth in the first place: how could you uplift when the institution itself was rigged for you to lose so that the status quo of the society can be preserved? Thus, equipped with my musical knowledge, I continued to challenge the societal norms.
Yet, that does not mean that I did not have a moment when I struggled with the concept of racial uplifting. During my marriage with your father, I kept the beating and abuse within the family quiet; part of me, perhaps, was thinking about the negative impacts it would bring to our community of African Americans. At that moment, I bought into the “politics of respectability”.
You might have noticed that I have been talking about how racial identity has impacted other identities of mine: gender, socioeconomic class, among others. But what is racial identity on its own? I think of it as a bewildering question I could never answer. Racial identity can be contradictory, just like the other identities. It could unify white people of different classes while separating women of different races. It could be considered a collectively conceived social construct, or an enduring biological feature and a permanent way for people to organize themselves. I cannot give you an answer to these question, simply because there might never be an answer.
You are going to need to find your own answer to these questions, and these answers might change frequently. Throughout the 60s, I tried to rally all African Americans under the Black Nationalism and Black Power. Sometimes this even means building unity from grievances and even hatred: music like Mississippi Goddamn conveys this message. But that is only my voice: now, many people want to find intersections of different identities and create more sub-categories within the African American community. Even if your goal is to pass as a typical White American middle class woman, put faith in your voice and pursue it with your full intention.
That is all I can say from my experience to help you on your journey to find your identity. I know you might never forgive me of what I did to you when you were a child, but I still want to share a few words with you.
Sincerely,
Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone)