Smith may dislike the stereotype, but she cannot help internalizing it. She feels unfinished because she is regarded as unfinished, and even members of her community urge her to straighten her hair. This is completely different from the joyous, affirmative sigh "I am complete" at the end of Morales' poem. Just as Morales admits that all experiences with racism and discrimination are different, Smith's poem demonstrates how African-American women frequently lack assurance of their sense of self and that their physical qualities are regarded as alien to what is considered 'good' and 'American.' (The young Smith's wearing white to cover up one's tallness seems an attempt to mask blackness and presumed 'badness' with clothing). Morales' instability of identity lies in multiplicity of national cultures, but Smith, even as a young, black girl, but carefully balance her sense as an American and African-American with even greater care and psychological discomfort that Morales. This is not immediately obvious, which is why the title of the poet suggests that Smith is instructing the white reader, rather than merely stating a list of external identities possessed by the poet like Morales.
The extent to African-Americans as 'other' is hard-wired within American culture is revealed in Smith's stress upon her youth in her poem. Unlike Morales, her poem begins with the poet is a literal child, not a figurative child of the Americas, when her socialization into black female sexuality begins. The poem begins in lowercase, as if written in the voice of her nine-year-old self. The commonplace rituals of black girlhood, like getting one's hair straightened are revealed as negative socialization techniques to make the author mistrust her inherent beauty as a black woman. The sense of not being 'okay' and not being accepted is reinforced by the child's own community. Although Morales in her interview speaks of the tensions of being both Jewish and Puerto Rican, Latina and American, the struggle is far more visceral in Smith's poem as she portrays her hair being straightened with harsh, white chemicals, echoing the experiences of many black women: "Even though I could tell from the way my grandma touched my scalp / she loved me / what she was lettin' me know / maybe god didn't love me & my brown krinkly short head of hair was a mark / lettin' the whole world know / god is not on this chile's side" (Sekyai 2003:1). A black woman may be regarded as sexual by the dominant cultural norms, but never as beautiful: "African-American women are not seen as the archetypal symbol of womanhood, as is the case for White American women. Notions of womanhood in the United States inevitably include standards of beauty" that are difficult for white women to attain but are literally impossible for black women to aspire to emulate (Sekyai 2003:1).
In Smith's poem, still speaking in the voice of a 'black girl' acquiring sexuality is seen as a negative, rather than positive transition, a disturbance, rather than a positive act of growth, rather than Morales' voluptuous celebration of hips and garlic in her sense of herself as a Latina. For Smith, becoming a black woman:
It's finding a space between your legs, a disturbance at your chest, and not knowing what to do with the whistles, it's jumping double dutch until your legs pop, it's sweat and Vaseline and bullets, it's growing tall and wearing a lot of white, it's smelling blood in your breakfast, it's learning to say fuck with grace but learning to fuck without it, it's flame and fists and life according to Motown, it's finally having a man reach out for you then caving in around his fingers.
Some aspects of Smith's coming to puberty, like menstruation (referenced in 'smelling blood in one's breakfast) could be said...
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Race and Cultural Minorities Two centuries ago, Washington and Dubois debated the concept of race, a social construct based on an imagined demarcation that separated one group of human beings from another. Even then, the nuanced paradox of falsehoods and importance were at play; what seemed like a clear difference between some skin colors and ethnic groups was muddied in others, and the socio-cultural ends met by nominal means were indisputable.
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