‘Anomaly’
— Reneé Bibby
One of my favorite moments in Jazmine Ellington’s essay, ‘Anomaly’ is when she concludes, “…you understand why people say race is a social construct.” As a black woman who operates in cultural spaces that are traditionally cordoned off as white, Ellington has the rare vantage point to explore the sociological intersection of race and culture.
Nothing is clear cut, no one race has a monopoly on polemics. Her black family criticizes her for whiteness, people deny her blackness, some people try to usurp her blackness, and still others reduce her to only her blackness—until the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram for safe spaces shrinks to nearly nothing.
As a mixed-race woman facing the crisscrossing razor wire of race and cultural expectations, I found Ellington’s essay an interesting mirror of my own experience—especially as she examines the specific situation of being a writer of color in a white writing community. Her points about the anguish and overthinking of trying to figure out one’s own material while also negotiating racial dynamics within workshops was heartbreakingly painful.
Ellington doesn’t build to any big conclusion or solution, but through each point, layers the idea that we could, all of us, re-examine our racial constructs, expand them and give ourselves and others a little more room to exist without cutting ourselves on the sharp boundaries.