No longer a puppet for the white gaze

I refuse to continue to be a marionette for public consumption. Pretty privilege has only one result which makes whites comfortable, and I'm never obligated to make anyone comfortable outside myself.

I know I need to write, but I don’t have a clue what I want to write about. Everything feels like gossip, and I can’t figure out why. When I started writing on Substack, it was for me to write into the void; however, now my daughter thinks readers are waiting on the edge of their seats for my next post. Do I desire to be that author with readers holding on to my last piece until the next? Today, I don’t know the answer to that question because today I just want to write…I need to write.

With two drafts sitting for months, I start this fresh new page, and those two drafts have to continue to wait their turn. It seems I may be writing from my emotions, but the reality is I am grounded as ever and have never been clearer.

The title and the words that flow through me from this point are the results of such clarity. In the middle of my reiki-meditation, as I was aligning my chakras, I heard the words, “You are now free, no longer a puppet of the male gaze.” Returning to my desktop, the title flowed as No longer a puppet for the white gaze and here we are.

I was strolling through my old Instagram posts, looking for a video of me explaining the spiritual benefits of a Rose of Jericho to show my wife. It’s something about how a photo or a thirty-second glimpse of your past can bring up so many memories that come with unresolved emotions. I grew disguised with this version of me shaking my ass in front of a smart phone to post on the internet, as a mother, now as someone’s wife, and activist. My disguise was with my desire to be picked by a man, a Black man, to be specific. The type that would be looking to pick the type of Black woman shaking ass on the camera phone.

That feeling came up in the meditation, leading me to pull the cord connected to that disguise to unpack those rooted emotions. As I flash back to my mother chasing after a local rapper co-playing as the street thug she desires, I immediately realized that behavior was learned. All of the relationships I had as examples growing up demonstrated a woman suppressing her dreams and desires to be a sexualized trophy for Black men. Light skin with the body men desire was deemed high value in my household, and my mother knew her worth, yet her lust for a dark skin man, heavily street involved, kept her in unfulfilling relationships. The thought that a man would change his ways to build and grow with a strong Black woman who already had her own kept my mother easily disappointed.

I recognized the cycle at a young age, and somehow, I still experienced the cycle for myself. The pretty face girl who the dark skin boys always picked because of my “pretty hair” and big butt kept me in situations that taught me to value my outer appearance more than my thoughts. What I have to say is not valuable, but how I look is what gets me picked - that was my mindset for years. So I went to college for fashion and dropped out to work as a makeup artist for MAC Cosmetics full-time for nine years. It took me nearly three years to pick up a makeup brush again due to the trauma of physical abuse from Black men over and over throughout my makeup career. I used to wonder if I only fell into the career to cover up my scars.

Idealizing being a puppet to Black men transitioned me into being a puppet for the white gaze, which, in my definition, is white approval. I thought being a successful entrepreneur would earn my respect, but I never fully understood who I was looking at for that credited respect I desired. Again, this mindset was taught to me without much background on why, just a “because that’s just how it is” as the answer always.

I grew up in houses with only my mother’s name on the mortgage. We had two cars in the driveway most of my life, both paid off. Her credit score has always been an 800-plus, and we’ve always lived in white neighborhoods, so “I could sit in the classroom to learn what the white kids were learning”. My high school graduating class had roughly two handfuls of Black students, including me. The white gaze taught me early on that the better the performance, the more likely the approval.

Raised by “I’d rather be a house slave” mentality. The saddest part is, I can see it as clear as day that this mindset has conditioned my entire bloodline. Darker skin in my family is not appreciated and valued, yet met with caution to stay out of the sun to lighten up. I have memories of the elders in my family telling me to “stay from outside, cause my skin was getting black” as if it hadn’t always been. When I’d rebut with that and they’d say “but you have that pretty caramel skin,” and it wasn’t until I learned about brown paper bag testing that I learned why my skin was so “valued” in my family. My mom and I are the only ones who would have “passed”, so we were treated differently, better than everyone else.

Black men often picked me, so it was not difficult to detach from a relationship and walk away. That is what made the cycle clear. White approval would be in my face with opportunities to better myself. Every time both my mom and I walked away from an abusive relationship, our lives would drastically change for the better with just one opportunity. But the opportunities were always, in the end, just as toxic as the relationship with mental and emotional abuse, daily.

Whether you realize it or not, we’ve all been subject to the white gaze at some point in our lives. Going to college to get a good job, the white picket fence dream, to be skinny, to meet whatever current standards of beauty, to get a NY Times Bestseller, all of this is conditioned belief that white approval means we are accepted, or that we made it.

The word conservative has been a real buzzword in my life recently, and I’ve come to have a clear understanding that my bloodline is very conservative. I used to just think of it as being from the south, but these points of view I grew up with have started to challenge my own life. I’m in a same sex marriage, yet I take my ring off when I see my mom or FaceTime my grandmother. I used to be outraged in silence at the idea of two men raising a child, but now I am raising my daughter in a two-woman household. I’ve been dealing with impostor syndrome because I’ve been my own inner hypocrite. Judging other people’s lifestyle decisions, but deep down, secretly desiring to have that freedom of my own. I’ve found a new aspect to define freedom.

I want out of all limiting conditions. All of the things I was taught were to keep me modest and humble. Being with my wife has catapulted me into a timeline that I thought I’d have to reincarnate to experience. My teenage self at my senior prom with my best friend, who was there with her stud girlfriend, could never imagine that I would one day be able to live in my truth as a Black lesbian. Growing up girls liking girls is a sin and I’m going straight to hell for licking coochie. Point blank period, these were the exact words I heard when bringing up my sexual preference. I was forced to date only Black men or separate myself from my family.

So I eloped to create our own family, and moved to California to live out my inner teenager’s wildest dream. I can see things clearly because my mom is trying to fulfill her inner teenager’s wildest dreams, too. However, her experiences are uncomfortable for me to watch. I’m angry because I moved away because my lifestyle was not accepted, and I’m still forced to deal with the judgment. I don’t understand why she’s here in the same city I settled in to cultivate home for myself and the family I created. We don’t operate from the limiting mindsets, we freed ourselves from the bondage of the bullshit lies. I am at peace with my family disowning me because I decided to run off to California and marry a woman.

Can I be real?

I made peace with it when my Daddy died. The last time we talked on the phone, he was voicing his pain that his favorite girl eloped, and he wasn’t able to give me away. I could hear the pain in his voice, and he heard the pain in mine when he realized why I had no choice. He called my mother to ask her about my marriage before he and I talked, she called me and my wife every type of dyke bitch and my father had to check her for talking about me as if I was not her child. We made peace that day without knowing that would be our last phone call, so fuck whoever doesn’t approve of my marriage!

Cutting the strings from the control handle allowed me to stand on my own two feet as my own person, in my authentic individuality. I stand grounded in who I am because I’ve had time to spend alone with myself to find me and all the versions of myself I grew disguised with over the years. I gave all of myself grace and found unconditional love for all of me through acceptance. No longer seeking the approval of anyone outside of myself. You see, it’s not just about race, it’s about our desire to be validated by people outside of ourselves. We must only go within for the answers we seek, no one knows our life assignment better than us, so stop living a life that was cultivated for you by someone else.

xoxo, 
Jacquie <3