Still Salty: A Black, Queer, Trans Perspective on the Shortcomings of Whiteness Studies and White Folks

There are few fields I would consider myself an expert. Whiteness is definitely one of those fields. Black folks have been observing white folks of the American variety since we were less than cordially escorted here from the shores of Africa. As a scholar of race and ethnic studies, both inside and outside the ivory tower, I was curious what Whiteness Studies as a field could teach me. As a bitter queer, trans, Black sack of cells I was excited for an opportunity to better grasp the psyche of white folks to maybe foster a sense of compassion. Some of my best friends are white, heck even my mother is.

This was not the case.

While the historical, political, and social implications of whiteness on society were nothing new to me, the level of ignorance I encountered was terrifying. I don’t mean ignorance in the sense that it’s often used in liberal racial discourse to lazily excuse microaggressions, I mean a refusal of empathy that is a necessary part of buying in completely to whiteness.

I’m a firm believer that data is not the end all be all of understanding and upending oppression. The rigid epistemology that steers research and policy embraces a colonial system that is built to ignore what’s deemed as “non-traditional” or Black, Brown, and Indigenous ways of knowing.  The terror I have felt as a trans person, as someone read as a Black male at a best and a gender offender at worst (and most honestly), in the wake of the countless murders of trans folks of color and extrajudicial shootings of Black men, this terror is unquantifiable.

I’ve used various methods to get through to white folks throughout my life. When my life stories, the experiences of my ancestors, and the state of affairs fail to be enough to impress upon a white person that racism and white supremacy exists, we turn to numbers. This inherent disbelief in people of color and our testimonies is proof enough that racism exists. If we are suspected of being inadequate narrators of our own lives and experiences, what else can white people not see of us? This essay is a critical reflection on whiteness studies and white folks in general, from my perspective as a Black, queer, trans, salty scholar. I will not be citing any sources but my own experience, because my life should be enough.

There is not a moment in my public life that I am unaware of my race. That I am unaware of my faggotry. That I am free of worrying how my existence makes others feel. This is not the universal experience, which to translate it for white folks, the white experience. Both in this class and in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election I have been astounded at the blindness white folks have to race relations in this nation. I refuse to believe that their shock and surprise stops at Trump and believe it goes deeper to not trusting the truths that people of color have been saying for centuries.

It’s a bittersweet "I told you so", but mostly incredibly disheartening. Realizing the suspicions I’ve had my whole life and leaning in to double-consciousness completely hurts. Every second glance and hugged purse is not a specter of my imagination. 

I have friends here who actively avoid white people, refusing to be in establishments where their brown bodies stick out. I’ve never had the opportunity to do that until now, and it feels incredible. I cannot trust white folks right now, and I don’t think I should. Even the ones that mean well, to be academic, don’t know shit. I’m tired of activist work that has to begin with me proving my humanity to a white person before any work can get done.

That being said, white activists, abolitionists and anti-racists alike, need to step it up. I found most of the writings done by white folks we read in this class to be masturbatory. I have no room in my heart to read about and the formation of a white psyche and the damage that causes. White activism means nothing to this nigger. I don’t want your words, I want your bodies on the line and your money where your mouth is.

I think studying the formation and historicization of whiteness and white supremacy is a worthwhile cause, but I’ll leave the dissection to white folks to wonder why white women voted more in favor of Donald Trump or why the working poor votes against their best interests. I know the answer is white supremacy and my, and other folks of color time, is better spent outside of these arguments.

Whiteness studies could greatly benefit from a greater analysis of gender. I feel like all of the works I have been exposed to in my limited purview of honkies historicization has been more interested in unpacking the psyche of the white working class and white women instead of engaging a discussion on the formation of gender categories as well. Coming from a background in queer of color critique and Indigenous queer and Two-Spirit critique I am always seeing the racialized nature of gender and sexuality and vice versa.

I argue that gender formations as we know them are intimately tied to the creation of whiteness. Whiteness, femininity, and masculinity needed foils in order to be created. The savage images created and perpetuated of Black and Indigenous populations to justify colonialism were heavily gendered. The social formations created in the colonies directly impacted the metropoles. Victorian bourgeois ideas of gender are some of the most insidious and overlooked byproducts of colonialism, both for white folks and people of color. Using stories from my life I want to demonstrate how entangled race, gender, and sexuality are. 

As I’ve transitioned my relationship to my Blackness has shifted. Growing up there were no Black women in my life. The womb I swam in was white, the hands the braided my hair too. My Black grandmother lived across the country and all my aunties were dead in one way or another. This vacuum popped up in various ways throughout my childhood. Strangers congratulating my mother for adopting third world children, the classic Black kid with a white mom fucked up hair phase, but the loss didn’t begin to manifest and be mourned until I went through puberty (the first time).

A rite of passage for Black girls, that thankfully I see phasing out, is your first hair relaxer. I was going into seventh grade, moving on up from my elementary school to the joint junior high/high school. I was officially grown. I was ready to abandon my childish and giant afro poof for a more acceptable and professional look. Junior High and grownuphood are not about being seen or taken up space. I was already one of the only Black kids, changing the color of my skin was difficult, but the texture of my hair could be changed for the low price of $200.

My dad was in charge of finding hair places for me and my sister. Even though are mom was in charge of almost the entirety of our day to day lives, including doing our hair daily, finding a hair dresser was in his Black jurisdiction. We went to a salon in the mall instead where one Dominican women held the key to our white salvation.

The whole process of initial hair relaxing takes approximately forever. Mariana went on and on about my good hair. It’s something I’d heard from my grandma before, and other Black women, meaning just Mariana. What white person in the US goes days without having a conversation with someone from their background? Weeks? Months? What have I lost growing up Black and mixed in a white habitus? I digress and distress.

One of the main chemical components of hair relaxer is lye. Other ingredients that make up this cornucopia and chemical wasteland give it the ability to eat through an aluminum can in about an hour. I sat in a salon chair much too big for me, with a stinky white paste slathered on my scalp. The longer you leave it on the straighter it gets. The more it burns the better it works. I was so excited when I went in. Everyone reassured me that some secrets of supreme femininity that were soon to follow. I was ready to finally be beautiful. I was ready to look whiter. It wasn’t until much older that I realized this was one of many failed rituals to embrace my Black femininity in a way that feels honest and grounding.

I would repeat this ritual every six weeks. Me and Mariana were usually the only Brownish Black folks in the salon, tucked away in the recesses of the impressive Tippecanoe Mall. She would talk about her daughters, her white American husband, and the island home that she missed. I had never met someone from the Caribbean before and was confused by her and I think we were mutually confused over our Blackness. 

White women would be in the salon with me, also following their own chemically destined beauty. I’ll never forget one of the last times I went to the salon. I was sitting in the chair. The familiar burn and smell of the magic concoction forming my conk. A middle aged white woman sat across from me with curlers in her hair. She commented on my straightener and her perm saying, “guess we always just want what we can’t have!” with a friendly smile. It made my stomach turn. I wasn’t sure this is what I wanted.

The last time I saw Mariana was at her house. She had quit her salon job and was only seeing the handful of Black and Brown girls. I remember being so nervous about going to her house, anticipating not quite squalor but definitely a life different from my bourgeois Black life. She lived across the river in Lafayette, where most of the people of color live. My family lived in the countryside, but I went to school in West Lafayette. My school and community was predominantly white and Asian. I don’t think I’d been in another Black person’s home that wasn’t a relative at this point.

I was surprised when we turned onto a street lined with tall old Victorians. How did I never know that she was, by all appearances, wealthy? I’d digested the message that Black and Brown folks were always tied to a lower socioeconomic class without critiquing what that meant about my own life. Being Black, trans and queer I find many excuses to leave the rare areas where I do have privilege unchecked, especially when it comes to class.

We set up in her kitchen with her daughter. She was in college at Purdue and was probably the coolest human I had seen in person in my fifteen years on Earth. She had piercings, tattoos, and short natural hair. I sat in the hard wooden kitchen chair watching the mother and daughter laugh back and forth and felt a deep ache. Mariana mixed the familiar potion and slathered it on my scalp. The burn set it, killing my kink. Mariana was cleaning up the kitchen while we waited for the lye to start eating at my flesh. I still, and will always, have scars from getting my hair relaxed.

Her daughter turned to me and said, “man, I do not miss that feeling”. Mariana led me down the basement steps and into the laundry room. I had a few more minutes to let the relaxer do its magic, so I was left bent over a big sink while she left to fetch more supplies. Out of instinct she shut off the lights. In the darkness of this Dominican's basement, with lye beginning to roll down my neck and nip my ears as it lightly stripped the flesh, I wondered what the fuck this life was.

None of my friends would ever be in a situation like this. No one’s parents had to set up shop at the dining table with the phone book, run through every salon listed, trying to find anyone who could do their hair. No one else I knew spent hundreds of a dollars a month and took hours out of their weekend to sit still. No one else I knew was a Black girl. In the cold basement I decided this was the last time I would desecrate my crown.

I’d argue that the decision to stop relaxing my hair and go natural was actually the first step in actively pursuing transition, proving that gender and race are inextricably entwined. As I’ve taken more steps in transitioning, not identifying as male, but being read as such, this fact of race and genders relationship is undeniable.

Literally the way everybody treats me has changed. White men who wouldn’t give me the light of day when I was read as a masculine of center woman, laugh uproariously at my jokes and compliment my style. They call me “brother” and it takes all of my willpower to not roll my eyes so far back they never return. After shows I’m always approached by older white men complimenting my style, asking me where I was trained, and how long I’ve been playing. The main singer, guitarist, and songwriter still has men approach her with “tips” on guitar. I suddenly have authority.

White women have always feared me. The chorus of car doors locking as I walk past, the hugged purses, literally white women yelling “I see you” at me to just to make sure I don’t commit some crime. Hands down the most surprising thing that’s happened since the testosterone kicked in, is white women suddenly finding me adorable. I think this is largely due to where I interact with them most, work.

I work at Self Serve Toys, the fanciest sex toy shop and sexuality resource center in the Southwest. Self Serve has prided itself for about a decade, as we should, for being women owned and run. Well, until I showed up. Being trans in the workforce is like being trans everywhere else, not easy. I can say with total confidence that I have probably the best work environment for a trans person. Having coworkers who already know what’s up, and who simply respect my name and pronouns is an unfortunate luxury in the trans world. It’s been an honor and a privilege to be the first boi in the girls club, and it’s been a fascinating field study on gender and race.

It’s satisfying and empowering work, and one of the strangest jobs to have while transitioning. My gender confuses folks, and I love that. Before I grew out my beard I would have hetero couples in the shop who would assume I was each of their respective gender and thus an expert on the products I was selling them. Groups would leave arguing about my gender.

I think most folks read me as a Black gay man now, guessing from the amount of secondhand phrases from RuPaul I get shouted at me in clubs by drunk white girls. Black Jesus help the next Becky to yell "werk" at me. Working a job that entails talking to strangers about their genitals more than most, can be a minefield for trans folks. It can also provide a bevy of examples on the interconnected nature of race, gender, and sexuality. One example that sticks out, are when hetero couples trying pegging for the first time prove to be a fascinating interaction.

Pegging is a delightful act where typically a woman identified person wears a strap-on to anally penetrate their usually male identified partner. It’s an activity that excites not just because of the range of new sensations, but also the changed dynamics and perspectives. It allows men to enter a space of vulnerability not typically permitted in our heteropatriarchal society dripping with toxic masculinity. While the individuals engaging in the act may not identify as queer, the radical usurpation of normative roles can be read as a politically queer act. Would I argue that pegging could be a solution to unlearning some of the lies of masculinity? Yes. Could one argue that the anus is a portal of untapped methodology? Absolutely. But I digress.

One particular couple stands out in my mind. I was working the Sunday shift alone, so they were lucky enough to have me assist them/stuck with me. When folks come in we like to introduce them to the space to help them feel more comfortable. This may be surprising to learn, but for some people who come into the store it’s their very first time seeing an Ikea candle holder used to hold dozens of dildos.

I read them as white, but New Mexico has really pushed me to challenge my racial assumptions about others. Coming from Indiana, and from my family, I still find myself slipping into a binaristic Black/white understanding of race and ethnicity. The woman was warm and immediately open with me. She told me their pegging dreams and we set out to find the right harness. Next step was the dildo, an especially daunting task. The man was a wee bit shy and nervous, so his friend tried to set him at ease by saying, “don’t be worried, he’s an expert!,” and laughing.

I’m going to walk through the layers of double-consciousness that I experienced in this instance to demonstrate the racialization of my gender and my gendered race. My first thought, given our white girl and gay besty vibe that we were rocking and her pronoun choice for me, was that she read me as a sexually experienced Black gay man. As a sex positive individual, and a proud slut, I strive to not place value judgements on folks based on their sex lives. That being said, I know this not the case for most folks in this heteropatriarchal hellscape of a country.

Was my presumed promiscuity based on my Blackness, a reiteration of myths of the hypersexual Black man and the plantation Jezebel combined? Was it my presumed sexuality? What value is placed upon me with her presumption? How did that steer the interaction? Another possibility that came to my mind second, is that she was referring to my profession as a sex educator. The order of my reactions is a reflection of my incredible ability to always question white folks’ words and actions.

I argue that without the added understanding of how my race, gender and sexuality are connected this interaction would seem unremarkable and void of methodological potential. This is where Whiteness Studies falls short as a discipline. And for me personally, I question its worth for people and scholars of color. I contend that as an expert in White Studies, and as a trans and queer person of color, the field has proven more violent than eye opening.

When I say I’m an expert in White Studies, I mean I’m well versed in the Western Canon. The first book I read by a Black author in school was my final semester of high school in an AP English class. I may have been born in raised in multicultural education’s heyday, but for fuck’s sake what kind of curriculum can be considered “multicultural” given those circumstances? My family lived in Valparaiso, Indiana when I was in elementary school. In me and my sister’s elementary school you’d be hard pressed to find some melanin. There were no teachers of color, and probably only a couple of Brown kids.

Often the presence of my Black body in the room was the only catalyst for a discussion about diversity. One instance that shines especially bright in my memory happened in first grade. I was in Mrs. Dirks class and it was story time. We were all sitting on the floor “Indian style” as all my teachers called it. She was a white woman, not a shock for an elementary school teacher. She beamed out as us and announced, “today we’re going to learn about a very special holiday that someone in the class celebrates.” I excitedly looked around the room, I had no idea we had a Jewish student! I was ready to settle in and hear all about the Maccabees.

She held up the book, giving us the full story time sweep so we could all see. This was not a Hanukkah story. The kids on the cover were Black, and despite the fact that I was in the highest reading group, the word on the cover was foreign to me. All of my white classmates faces were turned to look at me, an experience I have had every year of my nineteen years of formal education. She launched into the story and told me to interrupt if she mispronounced anything. I was so embarrassed I made my family start celebrating Kwanzaa so no one would know that I was a phony. And so I could get more Legos. But mostly so people wouldn’t think I was a liar.

Awkward multicultural moments like this happen everyday in classrooms. I would have preferred to have no representation compared to bungled attempts at multicultural education. In high school we were reading about Buffalo Soldiers. The teacher asked if the class could pet my naturally textured Black to understand where the term came from.

This failed multicultural education is violent when it happens, and I argue that this trauma stays with students of color for the rest of our life. This year I was surprised by how triggering it was to hear how little white folks actually knew about the reality of Trump. Sitting in class and hearing a woman who had been in educator for decades be surprised that racism existed in such places as school, churches, or this country was terrifying. An excuse for white racist liberals is often, “I never learned this”.

   As a person of color, witnessing this realization in a classroom, felt like a tripling of my pain as a result of education. I was used as a multicultural teaching point, a tool for education like my ancestors used in experiments for the sake of medical progress. I have to go through the process of educating white people in order for them to see me human. I have to sit in a classroom and watch revelations cross a stranger's face when they peak at a pain I’ve never had the opportunity to ignore. .

   My college education was a crash course in whiteness. I went to St Olaf College, a historically Norwegian university with a population that hovers around 95% white, and majored in classical viola performance. Music is something that roots my soul, and has been passed down in my family for eight generations. I'm pretty confident that my roommate had never talked to a Black person before she met me. Our first night together she explained how surprised she was that I didn’t “speak Black”. The definition of Blackness that gets distilled by media and consumed by these cornfed Midwestern kids is not an image I’ve ever lived up to.

  In college I was in a prestigious program called “The Great Conversation”. Only sixty people from the incoming class are chosen every year. The program is a five semester long crash course on Western (read white) history, philosophy, literature, and religion. At the time that I was in the program I was also enrolled in Ancient Greek and music classes focusing on theories created in Medieval monasteries. I was the only Black person in all of my classes that first semester, and most semesters.

 I was determined to prove myself. For folks in the class, their interactions with me were the only time they’d talk to a Black person that week. The thought of being late to class and reinforcing negative stereotypes about my people would keep me up at night. A wrong answer felt like a step backwards in the history of African American progress. I sat in a prestigious orchestra, my afro shooting out from the viola section, a lone bush in a sea of wheat, knowing how hypervisible I was.

 I was seriously depressed my sophomore year. Three semesters of nothing but the works and praises of white male corpses left me dead inside.

So I went to Ghana. Black artists running to Africa in times of crisis almost feels like a trope to me. I followed in the steps of Maya Angelou, Dave Chappelle, and Nina Simone. The first time I saw Ghana from the plane, I wept. The project I had designed and received funding for centered Black women. I strove to capture the threads of Black femininity that stitched together the quilt of the Black Atlantic. Shortly before I left, I  panicked. I realized that the only Black women I had really had conversations with were my Grandmother and Mariana, my hairdresser. I ran to the library and tried to read my way to identity.

I did not find my Black womanhood in Mother Africa. Which makes a lot of sense looking back four years later with a beard on my face and a baritone voice. Being in a place that was mostly Black, spending most of my time making music, and smoking and talking with Rastas - were transformative and healing experiences for me. But I still lived in fear about being found out as queer. Homosexuality is technically still illegal in Ghana. I had never adhered to gender roles more in my life. Wearing long skirts, bouncing babies in the interludes, and learning to carry loads on my head. I walked through the steps, I read the books, I immersed myself, and I never found the Black womanhood I was seeking. I found something much more valuable. An understanding of my true gender, and an appreciation for the very real and very necessary Black Girl Magic that exists around the world. I went back to school with my love for music deepened, my connection my ancestors created, and a determination to study race and ethnic studies.

 I have always been vocal about race, but not always in a helpful way. I was always cracking jokes about being the only Black person, and when I would make real critiques, I would seldom be taken seriously or would be met with anger. The rhetorical tricks of whites had me to the point of believing that it was all just in my head, that I was exaggerating.

 After my very first race and ethnic studies course I felt intense validation and fear. I felt my truths heard and rearticulated back to me, and I also heard what scared me most made true. I was a menace for the remainder of college. Calling out the school on their overrepresentation of students of color in advertising, especially me. My light skinned, afro, racially ambiguous face graced some form of advertising every semester I was in school. Pictures of me playing viola, a Black student in the top orchestra were the most predominant. I often felt like folks seeing me play classical music treated me with a sense of wonder one reserves for watching a dog walk on its hind legs.

 I spoke up when things upset me, trusting my belly to be the first guard against injustice. The first time I stood my ground was during Christmasfest. Every year St. Olaf College puts on a giant Christmas music festival beloved by Norwegian sweater clad grandparents across the land. One year PBS came to film us, we were even live streamed into theaters throughout the country. The fest features all five of the school’s choirs accompanied by the real star, the orchestra. We didn’t see the choirs pieces until the dress rehearsal. The chorus for freshmen boys was performing a Zimbabwean number. In the spot that called for jubilation a hundred choir boys, just two of them Black, threw their shoulders back and wiggled their body performing the dance known as “the Bernie”. It immediately drew laughter from everyone at rehearsal, save for me with my ears burning in embarrassment at the only display of my peoples art included in the program. I wrote an email, and apparently so had many others. It ended up on the air, but I learned that for my own sake, speaking up was better than sitting and simmering.

One thing that I have been reflecting on as a result of this purview into whiteness studies has been unnerving. The unsettling truth is, I don’t know if I will ever know my own culture as well as I know whiteness. I may be new to whiteness studies, but I am well versed in white studies. I’ve been to Ghana, taken dozens of race and ethnic studies classes, and gotten Harriet Tubman tattooed on my body. But, a reference to Greek mythology comes to mind quicker than I can recollect a Yoruba deity, my djembe skills fall flat in the wake of my viola playing, and the Ashanti dances I’ve learned have all become jumbled in my mind.

What is Black American culture? A patchwork of pigment held together only by shared oppression. What is my heritage? Lost to time and violence. With the vagueness of my background and the loss of traditions comes great sadness. I will never truly know who my ancestors are in a Western sense, but I believe I carry them with me always. From slaves to sharecroppers to scholars, my family has seen it all. When we have no model it can be scary, but that is also wherein lies an unlimited potential.

 One place where I’ve found personal liberation and freedom reprise from the settler colonial heteropatriarchal capitalist cesspool where we live is in interpersonal relationships. Building community and loving as resistance fuel me. Inhabiting my body and exploring all it can do in the BDSM scene, and eating picnics with new friends and kin on dungeon floors. Seeking out alternatives to the normative narratives I’ve been fed all my life. Daring to be myself and risk sharing my life and love with others, despite what whiteness has taught me. Being myself, loving myself, and living freely is an act of resistance and a delightful “fuck you” to all of the systems that benefit from my oppression

  This notion of the expansive nature of liminal spaces is where queer studies shines, and where I’ve been able to make the most sense of myself and this world. Trump enters office in a month. My trans family scrambles to get our documents in order, get our surgeries, fill or prescriptions, our fear for the future propelling us to productivity. I don’t want to waste my energy trying to understand his psyche, or that of the white folks who elected him. I want to be with my community, and strengthen it. I want safety for all of my racialized gender and gendered race freaks and family. I want freedom. I want love.

 I know whiteness, and I tried to find compassion for white folks. This is not my job. The time and energy I feel trying to take trying to explain my existence to white folks and care take them when I upset them is much better spent taking care of myself and my people.  My feelings are valid and I am allowed to still be salty about the legacy of white supremacy in America, and the inadequacies I see in white liberals and supposed allies. Save your white tears, and maybe use the salt to actually season your food.