Corinne's Blog

Last Fall a few months into the school year and before the cold of winter I attended a student of Color retreat. The retreat was open to anyone of any race but it focused on issues faced by students of color in not very multicultural schools.

The focus of the retreat and the topic of the weekend was ‘The Masks we hide behind’.

I am very familiar with a person’s so called masks because when I was growing up I had to change my mask to fit the people I was talking to in order to save my face.

>When I went home I had to put on my obedient black child in a over protective, over crowded yet educated world mask.
>When I went to school I had to focus on myself as an smart young African American Female in a primarily Caucasian world and I had a mask for that.
>When I talked to people in my church and the way I carried myself in church as well as the way I carried myself while around my parent’s coworkers and friends…

they were all different masks that I’d use to work and focus on different people. When people saw me in one place they’d see a different me in another.

Yet at the same time there were rules to my world of masks that had been set for me or that I’d learned through what I’d seen and experienced, for example:

Family business- Family “business” was anything that happened to me behind the closed doors of my childhood home such as spankings, financial trouble and health issues, fights and abuse. I was taught that family business stayed in the family.

When I was at church I was quiet because School work is always going well when you are asked by people at church because you didn’t want people to think that your parents weren’t reading you stories to bed every night (though they weren’t) also in church it was bad to talk about financial problems useless you were homeless and ungrateful so I never talked about my families lack of money while I was growing up.
In School- you don’t really talk about church because it causes a lot of debate and drama. Also family business was not talked about in school because of the fact that the teachers might call child services and have you taken away to foster care if you tell your teachers that you still have welps from spankings.

Drama that happens at school doesn’t come home with you for fear that your mother might go to school to have a ‘talk’ with the teacher….or my favorite example: while 7 months or so along in her pregnancy with my little brother Eric my mother tracked down a bus driver who had yelled at me for no reason and made me cry while I was in Kindergarten…The drama caused was appropriate but because of that drama the bus driver gave me an assigned seat and was rude to me for the rest of the year.

When it came to family business I know the most trouble comes in masks. I remember my father yelling and me and making me feel terrible while he drove me to school He used to tell me that I was going to become pregnant by the time I was eighteen and that I wasn’t his daughter.

I remember when I would get to school how I would have to change my whole being before entering the front doors of the school so that when I got to the classroom I looked like every other happy kid.
Or when my father would be mentally abusing me and my siblings right before a field trip and when he got inside how he would act like a ‘super dad’ and put on a happy father face when I was hating him inside.
Or when my mother would be yelling at us kids and the phone would ring, she’d change everything from her tone of voice to her facial expression to make the house seem less chaotic to the person on the phone. It was a definite survival method.
I saw it many times when I was hanging around my black cousins or other family members of color…I noted how their voices would change to be more formal and less filled with slang and twang when they addressed white people verses people with their own skin color.
I remember being in an environment that was predominately white then changing to one that was predominately black and watching as people reacted when my voice didn’t change into twangs and slang…all of a sudden people called me an oreo and they said that I ‘didn’t act black’…I’ve never heard of a defined way that Black and white people should be acting but according to these people it was a matter of survival to know where you came from and stick to that.

My siblings and I seem to break many stereotypes and we wear many masks in order to get ahead in life.

I thought that masks were socially acceptable until I discovered how bad they can be. When my father was abusive to me I kept my mouth shut to the people who could have been helping me the most.

I’m writing this down because I found a picture from an exercise we did while we were at the retreat. We had a sheet of paper with 2 blanks masks on them…on one side we wrote down how people might see us, and on the other we wrote down how we want other to see us and what we really are inside. I found that sheet of paper, and I’d been keeping it for sentimentality reasons as a reminder to me that I have masks that I have to destroy.

Left is what I'm Not Right is what I want people to see...

I personally don’t want to have to carry that piece of paper around with me anymore and I am planning on throwing it away. Before I got rid of it though, I wanted to share it’s message and share some of the masks that I’ve hid behind and that I’ve noticed my family, friends and acquaintances hiding behind….I wanted to share the mask’s message.

My boyfriend and I got into a fight a little while back because I wasn’t considering how other people saw me when I decided what I wanted to share on the internet. I’ve decided that I want to be free of masks and I try to treat everyone in my world the same regardless of race and class. I will try to be true to my character and myself as an individual.

I’m done with hiding behind masks and I’m willing to be honest and open with everyone who asks me what’s going on.

My mother now says that I share every bodies “business” but I just feel like I am going to tell it like it is.