I Was Raised By Extremists.

And no, not the kind you're used to reading about.

I was raised by two Black Americans who happily joined a pan-African cult.

It is actually considered to be an extremist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the leader of the cult (who I’m pretty sure has found himself in my childhood homes on several occasions) was personally denounced by name by Barack Obama himself, after a photo of them together leaked.

My step-father spoke to this man loudly on speakerphone phone every single evening for a good chunk of my childhood. He would casually mention hanging out with him over dinner.

Needless to say, my entire upbringing was filled with messaging that was typical of a Black Extremist cult.

Cults start with messaging that has a sliver of truth to it-

Black Americans face oppression. The world is unfair to Black Americans. Unity is needed to counteract this.

Then the rhetoric shifts to go way off base.

Black women are put on this earth to serve black men. Being gay is unacceptable. Our homeland was stolen by Jewish people.

When I was about 10 years old, it got to a point where I was drawing pictures in school of a bunch of brown people beneath a crudely-drawn UFO while explaining to my teacher exactly what my step-father had preached to me for years:

That the mothership was going to come and beam up all Black Americans from the USA and take us to our rightful promised land. He gave me books to read that detailed this promised land, an entire planet just for us away from “The White Man (devils)”.

I remember my 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Powers, trying to convince me that all white people weren’t bad and I honestly simply could not comprehend what she was saying. I knew that she herself was a well-meaning white woman, but my brain couldn’t process that she was also “one of them”.

I grew up in a majority white area, so every time there was an issue in any context, my mother was 100% convinced that it was because we are black.

An interpersonal issue with our (Hispanic) neighbors? They’re racist. Teachers having an issue after learning that we were being regularly assaulted at home for small transgressions? “That’s just how black people treat kids, if you don’t like it you’re racist.” Issues with my mental health growing up? It’s because I have too many white friends.

At the same time, she was also quite racist herself somehow.

She wouldn’t let us hang out with one of our black classmates next door, because he was a refugee from hurricane Katrina and came from bad stock. She forced me to return a little $8 ring-watch that my friend gave me for Christmas, because she “might have stolen it.” There was no real reason to assume this, she was a great kid. My mother even admitted that she didn’t hit me as hard as she hit the rest of my siblings, because I’m the only light-skinned one, and she rationalized that the resulting bruises would show.

And it’s true, some of my siblings definitely had it worse. But that’s not my story to tell.

What I can say is that true to it’s culty nature, the isolation was also an aspect of my upbringing that I had to wrestle with.

I remember having a dear friend named Amanda who went to a Unitarian Universalist church, with parents who loved her and taught her the most beautiful mindset around humanity. It was okay to be gay, violence wasn’t the answer, there are good people from all walks of life, the works. When I came home excitedly talking about how cool it was that she got to do normal-preteen-things, I was banned from seeing Amanda because she “dressed like a slut” (reader, she was wearing shorts and a tank top during the summer).

I think that my mother also found out that I would break the strict vegan diet that she had us all on when I was hanging out with Amanda, and that was the end of that until I could sneak over to a mutual friend’s house sometimes to see her after school. I can count on one hand the amount of times I got to hang out with friends outside of school before and after that.

I did a bit of sneaking, but I was a very nervous child so I seldom did. Sometimes I would sneak food at school, because I wasn’t allowed to eat what the other kids were but I sometimes did anyways. I snuck candy from friends who pitied me at Halloween, because we were never allowed to go trick-or-treating. I snuck cookies with gasp milk and eggs during the school holiday parties, because we weren’t allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Sometimes my teachers ratted me out, because they got chewed out by my mother for not accommodating my vegan diet well enough, and therefore became enforcers of my diet themselves.

Other than the handful of times that I snuck food, I was definitely properly indoctrinated because the fear of the beatings for getting caught was a very convincing deterrent. And these beatings, all of which “never happened”, got pretty bad.

I’ll never forget the first bad one-

I was attacked for having a ‘boyfriend’ in the 2nd grade. I was forced to open my diary where I wrote about having a crush, and beaten for it. I was beat for having a dirty room, for not finishing dinner or for getting bad grades. My mother took turns assaulting us all with a belt for eating cake without permission once, and beat me more when I falsely confessed to it just to save my sisters from being further punished. On another occasion she took turns beating us for ‘stealing’ my sister’s money and never apologized after it was found (after having been misplaced.)

So when I grew up and realized that none of this was normal, I really had to work on re-discovering who I was and re-raising myself against everything that I thought that I knew.

Realizing that several of the regular “punishments” that would be dealt out to both the kids and the dog were considered war crimes under the Geneva Convention was quite the revelation for me.

But not nearly as confronting as when I heard the name of the hate-group leader that my step-father spoke to and about as if he was merely a loving older-brother underneath a news story. The more research I did, the more I had to face the fact that I actually had a lot of unpacking to do.

I’ve been deconstructing for 12 years now and here’s what I’ve got:

1. I am not an activist. I was, and I care about causes that are important to me, but I was not put on this earth to be a struggling freedom-fighter who feels so disabled by my race that I feel that trying to live well despite racism existing is futile. I am a lot more than just “black.” Shockingly enough, I even thoroughly betrayed the cause by marrying a white man, so that’s out.

2. I’m actually an extremely loving person. I was always a little angel as a child despite constantly being told that I was “too mean” yet simultaneously “too sensitive”. That kid was actually just a bit annoying at worst and loved everyone she met.

3. Violence against children and animals is the hill that I’m willing to die on.

   All of this is quite extreme, but it’s why I can’t be convinced that there is any valid reason to strike a child. Talk to your kids, and if they aren’t old enough to understand what they did wrong, they’re not old enough to understand why you’re hitting them. And the dog just shouldn’t have been hit with a bat and sticks, period.

4. I can trust myself. I know what’s right and what’s wrong, and don’t have to lean on the doctrine of violent and prejudiced people to have a solid moral compass.

5. I have a fantastic memory. All of this did happen.

One of the biggest hangovers from my childhood is my absolute fascination with religious extremist cults. They always start off with well-intended people who might even have a point, and devolve into a familiar-looking mess of oppression and violence. If I were in the Bay Area during the 70’s I would have absolutely ended up in Jonestown drinking the purple cyanide flavor-aid.

I understand how it happens, I really do. There’s nothing more disgusting than exploiting people’s vulnerabilities to promote extremist ideology that ruins lives. Some people make it out, some don’t.

But as of now, I’m just glad to be living a life that my parents find absolutely repulsive.