I remember the one and only time I was called colored. I was in Hilton Head, South Carolina with my BFF Rachel. We were hanging out with some thugged out White boys (its like Jumbo shrimp, they truly exist and they are surprisingly yummy on occasion)
The crew we’d stumbled upon had a thinly veiled affinity for fashioning themselves after the gangs in ‘Bangin In Little Rock’. (An awesome documentary that you MUST see if it slipped through the cracks for you)
The Thugged out White boys possessed all sorts of qualities that Rachel and I looked for in male suitors at that time of our life. I’ll provide you with some highlights….
For one, they were dressed in an abundance of the color blue, in various forms of plaid, solid etc etc.(Crips anyone?) They had hydraulics on their cars.
They listened to strictly ‘West Coast’ like Dre and Snoop.
Yes indeed! They were wildly entertaining for some
East Coast spoiled brats like Rachel and moi. Giggle fits commenced as we tried to wrap our heads around the concept of building a car meant for hopping down the street. We just DON’T do that in DC!
I believe the year was 1996, which would have made us 16. We were several Long Island ice teas deep and I had wandered off to the bathroom of some pizza parlor to pee or vomit, or possibly perform a spectacular combination of both at the same time. You know, butt on seat; head in sink…(don’t pretend you haven’t done it before)
A male admirer of mine from the ‘Bangin In Little Rock’ crew asked Rachel, “Where did your colored friend go?” after he’d noticed that I was MIA for an extended duration.
Rachel, horrified, ran to the bathroom and proclaimed, “Um Katie, I think these guys are racist or something! I think we should get the hell out of here.”
Lets motor forward in the long history of my life to last weeks NAACP image awards in LA. My gorgeous mother was one of the corporate sponsors for the NAACP Golf Tournament. We were enjoying a luxurious Saturday tooling around the beautiful Braemar Country Club in Tarzana California, high fiving Chris Tucker and getting swing tips from Lee Elder– when it suddenly hit me that the name NAACP is a bit bizarre to my modern sensibilities.
NAACP stands for The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and what Black person wouldn’t find it a little backwards to be called colored in this day and age? I didn’t like it at 16, and I don’t particularly like it right now. I’d never really thought about that before. So, I challenged my mom as to the logic of the name. The NAACP was started February 12 1909. I mean, is it perhaps time after 100 years of being an essential organization for civil rights in this wonderful nation of ours to consider “upgrading” the name?
