Being the Only Black Person

Yesterday, México lost its game to England, which was a sad sight to behold not because football matters more than most issues, but because of how it happened. On the Mexican team, there was one Black player: Julian Quiñones, who is originally from Colombia and who was recruited to play in México. During his first few games with his new team, the crowds made monkey noises and shouted racial slurs at him, nobody considering him a part of the team despite his naturalization as a Mexican citizen. This year, everyone was pretending like none of that had ever happened, and were praising him as the star of the team. What no one respects is that Quiñones had to pretend along with them, while also knowing that none of his “fans” actually respected him as a true teammate unless he literally broke a record with the amount of work that he did. Even then, he knew that the second he failed, they would return to the monkey sounds and racial slurs as if he had done nothing.

Being the only Black person in the room is an experience that I am intimately aware of because baby boomer Black parents thought that the most important move they could make was to force Black people into white spaces in an effort to make Black presence known. We dealt with teachers who hated us and made us discipline problems all the time, school administrations that sneered when we had issues, and ruthless parents who loathed the very sight of us–all in the name of equality. Most of the time, we knew that any non-Black “friends” that we made would become absolute monsters when presented with an audience, so we learned to keep to ourselves as much as we could. Once we graduated from the white spaces, we were hated even more because of people who felt that we took their spot, never to have a moment’s respite from the belief that we were animals.

Sadly, some of us took the position of being the only Black person as a symbol of pride, and turned it on those who were still “unchosen,” pretending that the empire is a place of equal opportunity. In my 20s, I remember desperately wanting to be “chosen” until I saw that it meant mistreating other Black people and using my fear of losing my position as an excuse to abuse other Black people. So many Black people would prefer that inequality remain so that their positions as the only Black people would stay validated, and they sabotage the efforts of other Black people in the name of “racial standards.” Honestly, as a demographer, I see that even if I had been “chosen,” there are not enough Black people living reasonable, comfortable lives to justify the personal degradation, so I would rather have stability than mobility at this point in my life.

Black people who are alone in the rooms are responsible for relentless calm under vehement pressure in a world that sees us as amusement. If the toy “breaks” and we express something other than tranquility or superficial happiness, we will immediately be labeled as “problems,” and accordingly punished. When Quiñones left the field for a player substitution, it was clear that the team had been relying on his drive to make all the points, despite some of his teammates’ subconscious belief in their own superiority. As the only Black person in the room, it was never a gift, but an unyielding burden, and many of us have been working tirelessly to set that burden down.