Short personal essay about the white man's spell.
By: Sameera Rachakonda
My whole adolescence I only ever had friends that looked like me. Sure, there were slight distinctions — the differences between caramels and dark chocolates, coffees sweetened with the lightest of creams or cups black as midnight. These discrepancies were painfully obvious to us, but they didn’t register for anyone else. So we trudged through, laughing awkwardly when teachers purposefully placed us on opposite sides of the room to help themselves remember our names (it never did). Or when they did a double take and asserted that we must be sisters, amusing themselves with how silly, and original, this nuanced observation of theirs must be (it never was).
When I got to college, I was determined to make a change. It would be a fresh start, a clean, new white slate. I was utterly convinced that the grounds for this unrelenting, nagging feeling of embodying an outsider was simply because I never had white friends. Friends whose parents let them hang out alone with boys. Friends whose houses didn’t smell of curry and masala.
Admittedly, I have light skin. Lighter than everyone in my family and most South Indians. I embarrassedly held myself in high esteem for it when I was younger. It was hard not to when bottles of Fair and Lovely, a popular drugstore skin lightening cream, lined the bathroom cupboards of my friends and cousins. And I’ve always only ever faced racism under the most translucent veil, a discrimination incomparable to a black woman.
My first attempt at finding white friends in college failed. My roommate was black, we became inseparable within days, and then the third of our trio was another Indian girl. We became best friends instantly with a quickness facilitated by a fish bowl of freshman dorms and dining halls. It was a connection that, like most throughout college life, had an expiration date. It’s hard for me not to look back and equate losing that friendship to losing a part of myself. It was confident and adventurous and naive; it waltzed through the world in a smoky haze of wildfire. That was the part of myself that had dreams spilling out from every inch.
The next friend group and all the subsequent ones were made up of whom my middle school self had admired from a distance. I have a lot of friends now, more than I could have dreamt of. But I cry more these days. More than when I had two friends, but not as much as when I was alone.
I think there’s a sweet spot somewhere, a balance that keeps eluding me.
Before I lost my first college friends, I sat with them on the floor of my bedroom and cried because my new friends were prettier than me. Are they prettier or are they just white? one of them asked. I was convinced that was why boys never crossed rooms to talk to me. That had to be my cop-out. Because searching the depths of the darkest corner of your mind to find a superficial reason to pin to your unrelenting sadness is not a quarter as crushing as reaching the far more probable conclusion that maybe, just maybe, it’s your personality.
While we’re talking about boys, there’s also the fact that I tend to go for white boys. Part of it is that I’m not brown enough for the Desi boys. It’s exhausting living in the in-between, the liminal space where you’re not enough of your own ethnicity to fully embrace it but taunts of whitewashed echo in the background of everything you do.
My first boyfriend was white. In the early morning when the sun was peeking through the curtains, shedding light in the room, I’d look at our bodies molded together and watch in awe as the fractals from the sun bounced around the room, landing softly on our arms wrapped around each other. It reminded me of my favorite kind of songs, the ones with melodies as sweet and sticky as pink bubblegum while the lyrics feel like razors slicing through your flesh. Or the kind of songs where it’s quiet and soft, but then right when you’ve given up, right when you’ve accepted it, the bridge or the last chorus kicks in with a heavy drum and the singer’s screaming and despite your best efforts you can’t help but smile and think that it’ll all be okay. An Uber driver called it out a while ago. He asked if we were dating.
“Huh,” he remarked when we said we were. “Bet your parents weren’t too happy when you brought a white boy home,” he said to me, grinning. “That is if they even know.” My boyfriend later told me that, until that moment, race had never crossed his mind regarding our relationship, and he thought the whole conversation had been weird. It shocked me more than it should have, I suppose. All I knew was I wasn’t able to write the driver’s comments off as bizarre because the first question my mother and my friends from home asked when I told them I was dating someone — Is he white?
I lay awake some nights wondering how it ended up this way. In bedrooms all over the world, every woman apart of my bloodline, all at once, wonders the same thing. They groan and ache and scream but I ignore them, continuing as I am. I never notice it unless I make a conscious effort to observe what’s around me. And only then do I realize how much of the minority I’m truly in. Except I’m not in the middle of bumblefuck Oklahoma. I did this to myself.
So I send a silent apology to my ancestors and continue with my day. It’s not just my ancestors I have to apologize to though. Maybe I should apologize to the boy at the bar who said the friends at my birthday party were just white boys. He’s white. How does that work? Or maybe the white boy at the party (a different one, but maybe they’re the same — is that racist?) who called me racist for not liking Soundcloud trap music. To him, I sincerely apologize. In elementary school, you spend a science class learning that the color white is every color combined. I often find myself dragging the computer mouse across the color wheel, watching it move from darks to lights, the roses to the forests. Perhaps we are all the color white. Each of us a canvas splattering of every person we’ve ever met. I’ve found that that is the best way, and the only way, to think about people, because otherwise you’ll go crazy missing them. How comforting it is to know that you never really leave someone, you live forever as part of them. That if they were to break any one of us open, I think they’d find a hundred souls of varying hues holding each other. That even the friendships with expiration dates never truly expire. We’re all nothing more but clusters of every fascinating, wonderful, awful, beautiful person we’ve ever known and ever loved.
⋅•⋅⊰∙∘˗ˏˋ ˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ˎˊ˗∘∙⊱⋅•⋅
Sameera Rachakonda is a 23 year old Philadelphia based writer. Her work has been featured in Adanna Literary Journal and The Wild Word She enjoys traveling, books written by women, dirty Shirley Temples, and posting excerpts from her diary to her substack for everyone to read thematureage.substack.com.
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