📖 Extraordinary Machine Excerpt: Code-Switching & Race Lessons from Mom

This is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Extraordinary Machine: A Memoir of Trauma and Resilience, which explores my life and my complicated, unforgettable relationship with my mom.

My mother taught me many things—some I carry with me, and some I’ve rejected. One of the biggest life lessons was about race, identity, and survival.

She wanted me to be proud to be Black, but she also wanted me to know that being Black meant the world wouldn’t always see me as I saw myself.

And so, she prepared me the best way she knew how.

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Code-Switching and Other Race Lessons from Mom

Mom taught me a lot about race. Obviously, we’re Black. We should be proud to be Black. We’re descended from Africa, Jesus was a Black man, we have the best music, the most rhythm, the best fashion sense, and the most fabulous hair—and everyone in society wants to copy us.

But there was also this underlying (and sometimes blatant) feeling of not wanting to be Black—at least, not the “typical“ kind of Black. There was this constant reframing of our Blackness—we’re Black, but we’re not that kind of Black. We speak proper English. We’re well-educated. We don’t live in the ‘hood. We’re not ghetto.

“Life is hard enough because we’re Black,” she’d explain. “Don’t give anyone a reason to make it harder.”

It was confusing as a child. We were Black and proud, but my mom dyed her hair honey-blonde and spoke like a white woman when she took important phone calls.

From a young age, Mom drilled into me the art of code-switching long before I knew there was a name for it. It started with my name, actually. Mokie picked it out—she was 12 and named me after her favourite Alvin and the Chipmunks character, naturally—but Mom co-signed it because it sounded like a white name. How many Black girls do you know named Brittany? I don’t know any.

Mom said a white-passing name was ideal for navigating our world. I’d never have a teacher stumble over my name like they did the LaShauntas and Creontas in my class. Most importantly, when I got older, I’d never have a future employer skip over my résumé, deciding they didn’t want Jhermanique working in their corporate office.

“There’ll never be a President Shaniqua,” she’d say smugly. “But there can be a President Brittany Brown.”

Then there was how to speak. Mom drilled it into me young: When we’re out in public with normal people, don’t use slang, speak politely, and bump your tone up a few octaves so you sound pleasant and unopposing. Not that lower timbre I’d naturally use.

I saw her do it firsthand—when she was on the phone late at night, laughing with her best friend, Anita, it was all, “Girrrrrl!” and “Ain’t that some bullshit!”

But at my school’s parent-teacher conferences? She was dignified and refined—she sounded like a meek white secretary. “It’s so lovely to meet you, Mr. Mayer; Brittany speaks highly of you as her teacher.”

Looking back, it kind of makes me sad—being told I could be myself but also not be myself. That the way I was born, the way everyone else who looked like me existed, was something that needed to be hidden or masked.

But I know it came from a place of experience, of wanting to shield me from the things she’d faced. And it’s probably a much more universal experience than I realised. We all know the world is harder when you’re a minority. And in the United States—a country built on the backs of enslaved Black people? It was even harder.

When Nana, Troy, and Mom first bought a home in Bakersfield, it was the early ’70s—technically past the Jim Crow era, after Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. But racism didn’t just disappear because laws changed. The KKK still burned a cross on their lawn. They still threw a rock through their window. Parts of Bakersfield were still segregated for much of Mom’s childhood.

So I understood she was trying to protect me.

It just didn’t work.

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Mom placed me in predominantly white schools growing up. It was intentional—they had better facilities and curriculum, and I think, in her eyes, less chance of me falling in with the wrong crowd.

But I was always the odd one out. The one Black kid in a sea of white and beige. I didn’t belong with them, and they were sure to remind me.

“Eww, why is your hair like that? It looks like snakes,” some girl sneered about my braids in 5th or 6th grade.

Another time, a girl grabbed the end of my braids and noticed the tip was burnt—that’s what you do to hair extensions to keep them from unravelling. “Oh my God, did you burn your hair?!” she gasped, nose wrinkled in disgust.

“It’s not my real hair….” I muttered, pulling my braid back.

“It’s not?! Did you shave someone’s hair and put it in yours?”

“No,” I sighed, exhausted, even though I was only nine. “They’re called extensions. It’s fake hair.”

One day, a boy floated over at the local pool with a cheeky grin. “Brittany, I think one of your braids fell out!” he teased.

Mortified, I looked over at his hand, but he held up a stick.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the Black kids didn’t accept me either.

Usually, the white schools Mom enrolled me in weren’t in our neighbourhood, so she’d use a friend’s address or whatever loophole she could find to get me in.

But one year, she couldn’t cheat the system. She had to enrol me at the local school after our latest move. The duplex we lived in was in the ghetto (and I truly mean ghetto—our unit was overrun with cockroaches, instilling a lifelong fear in me, and there was a drive-by shooting a few blocks away just weeks after we moved in). The school was predominantly Black.

These weren’t Black kids taught to code-switch. They weren’t named after ’80s cartoon characters. And they did not like me at all.

“Why you talk like a white person?” a girl bluntly asked me on my first day.

“I don’t know…I just…talk this way.”

Soon, a little clique of girls started a rumour that I thought I was better than them because I was bookish, well-spoken, and “acted white.”

One girl, in particular, hated me. She’d mutter threats in class under her breath, throw things at me when the teacher wasn’t looking, and one day after school, she tried to jump me. She followed me home, taunting me and throwing things at my back.

Crying, I went home to my mom and told her. “The Black kids hate me. The White kids hate me.”

A few weeks later, she pulled me out of the school, and we moved again. “This neighbourhood is too ghetto, anyway.”

I never got away from this feeling.

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I had a brief reprieve at the start of high school in Sacramento. I got into a gifted school with smart, well-spoken Black kids like me, whose parents also taught them how to code-switch.

I joined the Black Student Union and made my first real Black friends. Our school was diverse. We weren’t judged for being Black—not by each other, not by the other kids. We could be Black and also like rock music. Or watch Jackass. Or date white kids and no one cared.

But then we moved to Reno.

Reno is a very white place. If you see a Black person in public, it’s rare.

My high school had—maybe—five black kids. Two of them were related to one another.

There was no BSU. No real sense of belonging. There wasn’t overt racism, but

microaggressions were constant.

“I forget you’re Black sometimes. You’re just like us!” one of my (white) best friends told me, meaning well.

When I was in college, two older Latina women at work listened to rock music as we prepped the restaurant for opening.

“You know this song?” Betty asked incredulously as she heard me sing along.

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging as I peeled an onion. “I like this kind of music.”

Betty turned to Rosa, and they said something to each other in Spanish. Despite my four years of Spanish in high school, I couldn’t decipher it, but I could tell by their tone and the sassy looks on their faces that they were gossiping about me.

Laughing awkwardly, I asked Rosa, “Hey, what are you saying about me?”

Rosa set aside the lettuce she was working on and grinned ruefully. “Oh, nothing…Betty was just saying she didn’t know Black people liked this music. And I said you’re not really Black anyway.”

My ears grew hot. I wanted to ask, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” But another of my mom’s lessons was respectability politics. Push it down. Don’t be the stereotypical angry Black woman they expect you to be.

I just shrugged, said I liked all kinds of music, and returned to peeling the onions.

But later, I cried.

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It wasn’t until 2020, after George Floyd was murdered and Black Lives Matter forced these conversations back to the forefront, that I felt brave enough to address anything publicly.

I made a Facebook post:

“The microaggressions (intentional or not) lead to bigger hatred, reinforcement of negative stereotypes, selfishness, ignorance. Those ‘I didn’t mean it that way’ comments continue to lead to diminishment, ignorance, and bigotry…flat-out racism. I can’t tell you the amount of ‘little’ things people have said to me (yes, even some of you I’m friends with on this very site) that were racially insensitive, hurtful, and based on stereotypes. I’ll give some examples:

• People commenting on the way I talk. ‘You sound so well-educated.’
• ‘You act so white.’ Been told this my whole life.
• There are so many more examples, but I’m mentally and emotionally tired.”

It got a lot of reactions. A lot of heartfelt ones. Some of the people who replied were guilty, thinking I was referring to them when I wasn’t. Some friends I had been talking about acknowledged it. Some ignored it completely.

That’s fine.

I wasn’t trying to assuage their white guilt anyway.

But Mom was always right—life is harder when you’re Black.

She never told me that sometimes, it’s hardest when you don’t fit into anyone’s expectations of what that means.

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