Oreo Dues, the Foolishness of Black on Black Racial Profiling
the people were always after somebody for selling crack.” Like most adolescents, in her teenage years she craved acceptance. From her knucklehead neighbors whose parents let them run the street ‘til all hours in the company of God knows who. She began following a bad example, staying out late, drinking, smoking and sniffing. Soon as Mom got wind of it, that was the end of that. Paula had her nose put to the academic grindstone. “Mom taught me to value education. None of my friends liked school and they didn’t like me when I started to. After I wasn’t getting in trouble and doing drugs, they started calling me names. ‘Oreo’. Stuff like that. It’s sad. Because I didn’t hang out in the street for very long, because my mother taught me to value something and to be somebody, my friends turned their backs and said I was trying to be white. As if only white people want some good out of life.” She left her friends behind and didn’t look back. “They didn’t like me to be myself, because I was different from them. How that means I wanted to be white, I’ll never know. I wasn’t trying to be white, I was just being me.” In her early 20s, Paula was able to leave the area and promptly did, getting work as a bank receptionist and a part-time job nights as a janitor. She got herself an apartment – in a decent building in a decent neighborhood that, yes, all happened to be mostly white. She welcomed neither drug traffic nor rowdy, ignorant street behavior. She told what friends she was still in touch with that could come to her home as long as they respected it. They could not come in smoking dope and raising hell. Again, she got bad-mouthed. Those friends talked to the other friends. “It wasn’t said to my face, but people would come and tell me what was being said behind my back. Things like, ‘Well, if she’s so ciddity, let oreo be by herself up under some whiteys.’ Why was I wrong because I wanted my home – that I paid rent for, where I paid the bills – why was I an an oreo because I wanted my house respected?” Years later, Paula G. would spot former acquaintances, roaming the streets, raggedy and scarred, looking like something the cat wouldn’t bother to drag in. Those who hadn’t been in trouble with the law, were well on their way to getting there. And the gossip still kept getting back to her. Looking back on it, she shakes her head. “They’re like crabs in a bucket. One tries to crawl out and others would rather drag him back in than climb out after him. I’m sure they’d’ve been very happy to see me lose what I had and have to move back into some rundown rattrap. Well, I got out of the ghetto and don’t have any intentions of ever going back.” Mary Broussard dark-skinned, soft-spoken, moved from New Orleans to Minneapolis. “Back home”, she says, “people teased me as a child for speaking too correctly and told me I talked like a white person. Because I tried to be polite and because I spoke too well, they criticized me for trying to act white.” Broussard carries herself with a reserved demeanor. It doesn’t sit well with certain individuals in her apartment building who regularly loiter in front of the stoop, drinking beer and “convasatin'”. They’re there when she leaves for work in the morning, they’re there when she gets home at the end of the day. If a one of them earned a legal dollar she’d be surprised. But her behavior is wrong. It was wrong, back home, when she worked at a New Orleans hospital, assisting the nursing staff. Coworkers got on her case for being correct. “Work is not a place to play. I keep my social life and work life separate. The others would congregate in hallways, goofing off and talking loud. I didn’t do it. I did my job. And since I didn’t hang out with them and instead went for lunch and coffee with people who seemed more serious about the workplace. I was told I think I’m better. And, yes, that I think I’m white.” Failure to meet idiotic expectations is punishable by derision. Tonya Bailey was development manager The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. She’d attended Washington University in St. Louis, minority student population about 10% — including Hispanics, Native, Asian-American and black. Bailey had never been much of one to run with the herd and, accordingly, did not join a black sorority at Washington U. “I didn’t want to join AKA (Alpha Kappa Alpha), she recalls. So, people figured I was a race traitor. Just because I wouldn’t be part of, of all things, a Greek sorority. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t going to let membership in some in-crowd decided my identity. To them, that meant I didn’t have the first idea who I was.” Didn’t help that she had a gossiping roommate, one who didn’t like it that Bailey was dating a white boy. Whether the roommate didn’t believe in dating white or was just mad because he didn’t see her first is up for grabs. Point is, homegirl picked at Bailey about him and, then, “had it on the grapevine that I thought I was above other black people. People