Oct
19th
Fri
19th
It was my first day at Sidwell. A black student who had been at the school for a really long time was assigned to be my buddy and adjust me to the environment. And he asked if I knew what an Oreo was. We were in the first stairwell of the upper-school building, in the southeast corner, I remember all this. And I really thought he was talking about cookies. I said, ‘Yeah, it’s the cream-filled cookie from Nabisco.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no man. Oreo’s someone who is black on the outside and white on the inside.’ And then he made an example. He pointed to a kid across the way and said, ‘That kid’s an Oreo.’ And I didn’t know the kid’s name at the time — I saw this nerdy black kid with glasses hanging out with white friends … And that was the first introduction of this concept, inauthentic blackness because you’re comfortable around whiteness.
