CHAPTER 6: TRYING TO BE THE
PERFECT BLACK PERSON
A: My market salad from Chick-fil-A was hitting the spot as I sat on a couch in a small foyer at church, chomping on my lunch. The worship team and I had been working on a project all morning, and hunger had finally won out.
“Hey, Adaeze,” one of my teammates called from the room behind me, “did you accidentally grab my order?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, my mouth still full as I rummaged through the plastic bag on the coffee table in front of me. She came over, and after failing to find her order, she wandered back into the other room to continue her search, where a few other team members were eating their lunches.
There was music playing in the room, drowning out whatever conversations were happening. I had chosen to sit separately, in part because I’d been feeling very separate from my teammates that whole summer. It was 2020, and at a recent meeting, I had finally spoken up about the racial unrest that had been dominating the news that summer. I wasn’t blaming my teammates—I just wanted to be seen and heard that I was struggling. But their response, or lack thereof, showed me that my energy would be better spent elsewhere. Later on, a couple of them offered me condolences for the fact that no one had really responded to me.
It was my sixth year as the only Black person on a staff of more than 150 people, and the crappiness of 2020 had finally uncovered my tiredness. I was tired of always faking it. I was tired of repeatedly having to choose between being my most authentic self and feeling safe. I’d stopped trying so hard to be liked by and to fit in with the white people I was surrounded by all day, and I’d stopped trying to protect their feelings at the expense of my own. Though nobody said it out loud, it had been clearly communicated to me that I should “just be happy to be here,” which I quickly learned meant, “Don’t stir up trouble by pushing against the white status quo.”
Subconsciously, I hoped that distancing myself would make it a little easier to deal with the painful reality that my white teammates and coworkers didn’t care enough about me to make any changes when racial and spiritual problems within our church were brought up. So I started doing what I needed to do to feel safe. On that particular Thursday, that meant eating in another part of the room, with a literal wall dividing me from my teammates.
I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but because the door was open, I heard the word loud and clear.
“Something, something, something . . . N-----!”
I froze midchew. I recognized the voice of the person who’d said it, but I couldn’t make out who all had laughed afterward, though it was definitely more than one.
“What?” I said loudly in the direction of the room.
Silence.
That’s it, I thought.
“Never again!” I said out loud. I hoped the strength of my comment masked how hurt, vulnerable, and unsafe I felt in that moment.
Silence.
I put the clear plastic top back on my salad and stuffed it in the bag. Tears were beginning to fill my eyes, but I was determined to fight them back until I could get out of there. I quickly grabbed my personal belongings, which I’d left on the floor just inside of the doorway. My teammate who had been looking for her lunch seemed to be the only one who saw me. She told me quietly, “I didn’t say it.”
Wow, want a cookie? I thought bitterly. I couldn’t even look at her.
Without a word, I walked out, grabbing my lunch in stride.
I didn’t see anyone on the way to my vehicle. I got in, my hands shaking as I put the key in the ignition and drove off. I didn’t even know where I was going. My heart was pounding, and I was still straining to hold back the tears when I called my campus pastor. When he didn’t answer, I called my boss, our senior pastor. When he didn’t answer, I called Chad.
C: I was finishing up with one of my physical therapy patients when I felt the buzzing in my pocket. Adaeze knows it’s difficult for me to answer my phone during the day because almost all my time is spent face-to-face with people. The fact that she was calling tipped me off that something important was happening and I needed to answer.
I shooed the person out the door just in time to pick up.
“Hey, babe!” I said lightly.
A: That’s when the tears finally began to fall.
C: She wasn’t even able to formulate words at first—all I could hear was her visceral sobbing. I immediately sprang into action at the clinic, moving some appointments around so I could leave right away and find Adaeze.
After about a minute, Adaeze’s voice cleared up enough to speak short sentences.
A: “I think I need to be done.”
C: “What do you mean?”
A: “Remember when I told you, about a month ago, I felt like I needed to leave my job before something worse happened that would make me leave?”
C: “Yeah . . .”
A: “It just happened.”
C: The last word there hardly made it out of Adaeze’s mouth before the sobs returned.
I could tell that Adaeze was in her car, driving. Fear started to well up inside me now that I realized the gravity of the situation. Adaeze was overflowing with grief, so a car didn’t seem like the safest escape.
“Adaeze, where are you?”
A: “I don’t know.” I honestly didn’t. I was so blinded by pain and frustration that once I got in my car, I just started driving. I didn’t even think about where I was going. All I knew was that I wanted—no, needed—to get as far away from that church as possible.
C: “Okay,” I said. “Pull over, drop a pin in Maps, and stay there. I’m coming.”
My heart racing, I jumped in my car and sped toward her. I had visions of her curled into a ball, gasping for air through her tears.
We had made plans to drive to Glacier National Park. This was definitely not how I’d envisioned this weekend starting. Unbeknownst to Adaeze, I was planning to propose. In fact, I had just received the engagement ring in the mail the day before. Right now, though, all I cared about was getting to her as quickly as I possibly could.
When I found her, she was parked in an empty lot across from a McDonald’s. She had made it about thirty minutes away from the church.
When I opened her door, she just clung to me.
There were no words.
We moved to the back seat so we could sit without the console between us, and Adaeze just cried. I stroked her back and sat with her. After a little while, she told me what had happened.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “What do you need?”
A: “I think I need to be done at this church.”
C: I wasn’t surprised to hear her say this. Honestly, if she hadn’t, I probably would have said it for her. She had told me about some of her struggles at the church before, and I knew she was at the end of her rope. This moment just forced the inevitable.
“Yep,” I said, “I agree.”
I was scared. She didn’t know I was planning to propose in a few days. Now I couldn’t help but wonder how I was going to support us and what our lives would look like after she resigned. But to be honest, it didn’t matter. All I knew was that I needed to protect Adaeze and be ready to do whatever the Lord was preparing us for.
A: I didn’t know what I was gonna do next. I wondered if I even wanted to stay in ministry or if I should stay in Denver. For the past six years, I’d been recognized around town in association with this church, and I knew I would need a break from that, if not a complete departure. It felt like my life had officially blown up. I’d devoted so much of myself to that place, and now it was the place I most needed to remove myself from. What would happen to my relationship with Chad if I decided I needed to move? I had no idea what my future would look like now. Everything suddenly felt unfamiliar and unknown.
APPARENTLY, I’M THE PROBLEM
A: This was the main section of the text I copied and pasted to my campus worship volunteers and a few others the day after the incident. I will never forget the subsequent phone call I got from the senior pastor, in which he yelled at me that I was trying to burn the church to the ground and accused me of not including any balancing statements. I swiftly followed up my text with this addition:
C: I have to say, I was fuming during her phone call with the senior pastor the day after her resignation. We were on the sixteen-hour drive to Glacier, and Adaeze spent all sixteen of those hours doing damage control because, somehow, a white person using the N-word had been presented as (and had become) her problem.
A: Here’s the thing. Being in a predominately white space usually means that Black people are expected to protect white people’s feelings at all costs—even when Black people are the ones being hurt.
In this case, even though I’d voiced the truth about what happened, I did it in a way that made some of the white members of the team look and feel bad—hence the “trying to burn the church down” comment. They would have preferred me to just leave quietly without saying anything.
But I’d been in an environment where I’d felt utterly alone, rarely stood up for, and largely unseen for so long that I had reached my breaking point. My anger in the moment was used to vilify me to the rest of the church staff. Aside from a few people who reached out to tell me, “You did nothing wrong,” I was seen as the one who had acted inappropriately. Even though I was neither the one who had used the N-word nor the one who laughed at it, I was the problem.
I was told later that when the incident was recounted in an all-staff meeting the following week, the senior pastor (who wasn’t present when it happened) quoted me as having said, “Oh, no, you didn’t!” in a stereotypical “Black girl” voice, casting me as the angry Black woman of the situation.
As for the guy who used the N-word? Though he was eventually let go, for weeks he was defended by the leadership and other staff members because, “You know him—he’s a good guy.” I never once got, “Well, we know you, Adaeze. You’re a good gal.” The fact that the phrase, “He shouldn’t have said that, but . . .” prefaced virtually every argument in his defense while I received no such grace made it abundantly clear that, as far as they were concerned, I was the problem.
It hurt to hear messages like this, especially coming from the very community I wanted to believe was safe. I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling this way either. All it takes is one false move, and what we believe to be a safe community is suddenly revealed for what it really is. If Black people aren’t okay with the injustice we face and we dare to speak up about it, we are blamed. This only reinforces discriminatory and unfair standards for Black people.
In the weeks following the incident, a teammate said to me, “But, Adaeze, you know we love you.” While I do believe they loved me, it became clear that their love only extended to the width of their boxes for me—boxes never designed to encompass all of me. I realized they loved me, not so much as myself, but as “the token Black person who won’t upset the status quo.” When I finally spoke up, it became difficult for those who said they loved me to see and love me for who I truly was. In other words, they only loved the “perfect Black person” version of me.
This is my definition of the perfect Black person. The perfect Black person shows no emotion in the moment and feels no pain. The perfect Black person has somehow thought ahead to every possible racial situation they will ever be in and has pre-fought battles so they will know exactly what to say and do in any situation so as not to offend anyone with their pain or discomfort.
Had I been the perfect Black person, I would have just laughed off the derogatory comment and said, “That’s cool. It’s fine.” But it was not cool. And it was not fine. Had I been the perfect Black person, I would have left quietly without saying a word. But I’d been quiet long enough. Had I been the perfect Black person, I would not have gotten angry or made my white coworkers feel bad. But I was angry—not only that the incident happened, but that nobody got angry on my behalf when somebody did something that made me feel bad.
Sometimes overtly and sometimes between the lines, my white coworkers communicated to me how I should have reacted—how they would have reacted if they’d been in my shoes. But what they didn’t seem to realize was that the N-word wasn’t an isolated incident, as injustice rarely is. For me, this wasn’t just one unfortunate comment. It was the culmination of countless microaggressions I had quietly tolerated over the course of six years in an attempt to be the perfect Black person.
I held that weight for a while, but make no mistake: it was heavy. The second I was no longer able to be the strong Black woman they expected me to be—when I’d finally had enough—the facade fell off, on both sides.
I CAN’T. I WON’T. I MUST.
A: Too often, Black people carry the pressure of figuring out how to act “right” based on the white people we’re around. Even years after “I can’t breathe,” we have grown so accustomed to feeling like we need to appease the white majority that we’ve forgotten to respect what we need and what our bodies are telling us. We’ve forgotten to care for ourselves so we can better care for and respond to others.
I’m a believer in the Word of God, which says, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). If I’m not careful, I can feel like I have to constantly put my own feelings and needs aside for others. But the redemptive and freeing part of that verse—“as yourself”—helps me keep things in balance.
One afternoon, when Chad and I were visiting his grandparents in Virginia, we were sitting outside in a circle on the front lawn. After learning that I was a worship pastor, a friend of Chad’s grandparents leaned over to me and said, “You know, our church puts on a ton of programs throughout the year, but the Black church up the road can’t afford to put on programs. So our pastor goes down there to help them.” Then he leaned back in his chair, a look of self-satisfied heroism on his face.
Did that old white man really just brag to me about the fact that there are still segregated churches in this town, where I’m pretty sure I would actually hear “Get out” if I tried to attend? And did he act smug about it, as if he’s some white savior?
Yep.
What I wanted to say was, “So would I not be allowed in your white church because I’m Black?” But the Holy Spirit stopped me. Don’t you say that, He gently urged me. I don’t want you to go there right now.
As draining as it was to be the stand-in Black person on the other end of that ignorant comment, the Lord graciously reminded me that this wasn’t really about me. The only way this man knew to connect with me was to talk about the segregated Black church up the road and how his church “helps” them.
Now that particular battle could have been mine if I’d chosen to step into it. But it could also pass me by without diminishing my value or my energy to fight for what I believe in. This makes it easier for me to figure out which situations and people are worth my time, breath, and energy—like the staff I worked closely with for six years—and which ones aren’t, like a comparatively harmless old white man in Virginia I’ll rarely see again. In other words, it becomes easier to decide which situations and which people get my “I just won’t.”
It’s not a “can’t,” because Lord knows I could. Rather, it’s a “won’t” because I’ll never be able to control what other people say or do around me—especially ignorant white folk. I can, however, control how I react.
It’s a “won’t” because I’m not a puppet. I’ve had to learn to delay my reactions at times and wait until I’m in a safe place to feel out loud. I’ve had to learn to not let my mood change based on how others act around and toward me or on how others want or expect me to feel. I’ve had to learn to take back my own body in such a way that I—not others—control if, when, and how I react.
It’s a “won’t” because it’s not my responsibility to live up to other people’s perceptions and made-up expectations of me.
I can absolve myself from burdens that aren’t mine to hold. Just because racism and microaggressions happen around me doesn’t mean I must fix them. Nor does it mean I must be silenced by them. It means that I get to choose if I want to use my voice against them.
Of course, “I just won’t” is one sharp side of a double-edged sword. In order to survive, I constantly have to choose between that or the other sharp side of speaking up.
Sometimes loving my neighbor means not having another difficult race conversation at work, not teaching a white person about Black culture, or not entertaining a curious white person’s question of, “Is all that your real hair?” Sometimes I have to remind myself that just because someone wants to engage in those conversations doesn’t mean I have to. And I don’t need to explain why. My boundaries are worthy of respect without an explanation. I don’t have to jump just because someone else says so.
It’s not that I can’t. Because I definitely can. In fact, I have—and I will again. It’s just that sometimes, I won’t. And for me, that’s perfect.
CATCHING IT FROM ALL SIDES
A: You know what’s the worst? When we gotta be the perfect Black person . . . to Black people.
When Black people feel the pressure to be perfect from all sides, it can be beyond exhausting. Even who we fall in love with gets put under an unrealistic microscope of everyone else’s opinions, standards, and expectations.
It’s mind-blowing how loud a Black person can be in support of me and my art and my giftings, but as soon as they see I’m married to a white man, it’s all, “You’ve married the oppressor.” It’s the “You can’t say you stand for Black justice when you’re married to white supremacy” idiocy.
Are we not allowed to be us and be free anywhere—even among our own race? Isn’t it just another form of oppression to tell me who I can and can’t love? The world continually tries to tell Black people who we should be, as if we couldn’t possibly know or figure that out for ourselves.
In 2020, a few days after George Floyd’s murder, a friend and I started what we called Black Hangz, a small gathering in my home where members of our community could come together to eat, mourn, heal, worship, laugh, cry, whatever—together. As it is, Black people don’t have a ton of places where we can go to lay down our burdens in free and unedited ways. Gatherings like this help us lighten the load as we lean into a community of others who are feeling what we’re living. Joining our voices with others going through similar experiences is empowering and uplifting, and it reminds us that we’re not alone.
Yet when I posted about this on my Instagram account, I got pushback from a Black family member because we were “excluding white people.” Apparently two of his extended white family members had commented that they were offended by it. So even when we as Black people try to create a safe space to process and mourn and be together, it gets put through the white strainer. The message is that if white people aren’t okay with it, even celebrating our Blackness becomes “reverse racist.”
How can you be the perfect Black person when even Black people don’t give you their stamp of approval?
One of the most painful things about the church incident I described at the beginning of this chapter was that a well-respected Black pastor from a church in another state was called on to see if I was reacting “correctly,” if I was “right about this,” or if I was “overreacting.” That would have been bad enough, but because his experience at his own church was so different from mine, he couldn’t fully appreciate all I’d been dealing with, and he ultimately sided with the church leadership.
Though it hurt to realize that I couldn’t even look to a Black person in a church leadership position for support, I also realized that just because we had the same skin tone didn’t mean we’d had the same experiences. Our different experiences influenced the way we perceived the world. He simply couldn’t recognize the weight of my specific situation that he wasn’t in. That wasn’t so much his fault as it was his reality.
There’s so much more I could say about church trauma. So I did. Check out the appendix at the back of this book if this is something you’re walking through too.
Once I recognized that not everyone understands or has the bandwidth for what I’m going through, it took off some of the pressure to be the perfect Black person. By the way, not getting it doesn’t make these people monsters. It makes them broken and imperfect, like all of us. And once we come to grips with that, we can have more grace for ourselves and for others.
I will never be the perfect Black person. So instead of constantly preparing for the next fists-up moment, I try to focus on the present. I’ve done the former for years, and it’s a great recipe for burning out. As for the latter, it’s easier said than done. But that’s okay. I’m a work in progress. We all are.