And now for some breaking news.
High school senior Aidan Taylor is joining the raceAhead team as an editorial intern for May.
He’ll be shadowing me virtually, assisting in preparing story summaries, transcribing interviews, working on a special project and doing some original reporting. When I explained the raceAhead beat to him, Aidan shared an essay he had written for his college applications that explored how he had come to understand race, society, and himself while growing up a few miles, yet a world away, from his father’s home town of Ferguson, Missouri. I’ve shared it, with his permission, below.
Aidan loves theater and has been performing since he was a child. He is nearly fluent in French and has been studying Chinese for the past three years. He plans to attend New York University in the fall.
The Coconut Effect: The Story of My Race
From the title, you’re probably thinking, “Coconuts?? What’s a sweet tropical drupe have to do with race?” To that, I say sit down, grab a bag of SkinnyPop and get comfy because you’re about to find out. Race, no matter how badly you do or don’t want it, is something you’re born with. Sure, there are people who “changed race”. Take Michael Jackson for example, who looked whiter than Paris Hilton by the end of his life, or Sammy Sosa who’s getting whiter by the day, and Rachel Dolezal who went the opposite route. But personally, it took me a while to truly identify with the black half of me and to think of myself as a black person. All my friends have heard me say this, but I used to identify most closely with a coconut, as Mindy Kaling once put it. No, not because I have a hard head and my body is made of mostly water, but because we’re both brown on the outside with a white inside. This whole “coconut effect” stems from my childhood.
My grandparents lived in the now infamous Ferguson, Missouri, and every week my younger brother and I spent Sunday with them and slept over at their house. I got a taste of a different neighborhood than the predominantly white one I lived in. Ferguson has an African American majority and the houses and stores are not nearly as expensive. The littered and grimy streets are lined with “Beauty World’s”, “Beauty Brands”, “Beauty Cities”, and even “Beauty Towns” all of which sell the exact same weaves and wigs as the next. There are also numerous used car lots, Shop n’ Saves, and dollar stores which are often getting robbed. It tells you something about a community when the dollar stores are getting robbed. This is drastically different than the huge stone mansions and the cute little boutiques you would find in other parts of St. Louis where I lived and went to school. I’m thankful that I had the time in Ferguson when I did because those trips were very important and enlightening for me to see how different groups of people live. It gave me perspective. But even when this side of my life was very prevalent, the part that stuck with me the most was the more “caucasian side.”
Luckily, my parents did a great job of educating me about my family’s past. My dad would buy me and my brother all sorts of books about prominent African Americans and the civil rights movement and read them to us before bed, so I knew a lot about African American history before we even learned about it in school. Even with the trips to Ferguson and my Dad’s lessons, it wasn’t until going to a very diverse high school that I started really identifying with that trait of mine. I’ve gotten the chance to meet many new people from many different backgrounds. In fact, there were only a couple of black kids in my class in elementary school and absolutely no kids from anywhere in Asia. I’ve made so many new friends and, actually, most of them aren’t white and we have one of the most, if not the most, racially and socioeconomically diverse friend groups in our grade. From black people lessons with my Dad, weekly trips to Ferguson, and the caucasian majorities I’ve learned and lived around for my whole life, I’ve become a very open-minded individual who’s aware of his cultural surroundings.
Now I’m proud to be black, inside and out, and it’s one of the most important parts of my identity that I’ll carry forever. You may be able to change religions, social class, gender, political views, and geography, but your race is here to stay, whether you like it or not, so might as well get used to it.
On Point
On Background
Aidan Taylor assisted in the preparation of today's summaries.