Jasika: In the In Between
Jasika, a mixed race woman, and Claire, a white non-binary person, pose together in matching outfits made by Jasika.
Toggling between two identities is a survival mechanism that I, a mixed race person from the American south, have been employing for my entire life. Because I didn’t grow up with many kids like myself, my journey felt isolated, alien in so many ways from what my peers seemed to be going through on their own voyage to adulthood. My mother is white and my father is black, and of all the races that “exist” (assuming we can all agree that race is a social construct, much like gender), black and white people are, at least in the United States, posed as opposites. Historically, blackness has been treated as antithetical to whiteness, and black people have had to bear the brunt of this polarity in systemic and violent ways for centuries. This contradiction is effectively illustrated via my entire childhood existence, a period of my life when I dedicated myself to being the human cuttlefish of any situation I found myself in – people didn’t seem comfortable allowing me to simply exist somewhere in the middle, so I adapted to my surroundings as best I could.
At my mostly white school in the mostly white neighborhood I lived in with my Mom, I only wore white lace-up Keds during the school year because that was the shoe of choice amongst all the white girls in my classes. Unfortunately for me, my family could not afford a new pair of Keds every few months when the canvas shoes inevitably got filthy, worn in at the toe, and needed replacing, so my Mom would take me to Kmart to buy me an off brand pair for a fraction of the price. I would rush home and try my hardest to glue the blue rubber Keds tag from my old name brand shoes onto my new, cheap ones with Elmer’s, praying that no kid would notice but knowing that one probably would. There is a version of this story where I am posed as a clever and wily child, always finding ingenious ways to navigate my environment and come out on top. But the reality is much less inspiring: I wasn’t the star of a Mentos commercial, I was just trying to survive the fourth grade.
Fitting in was a constant battle for me, my embarrassment around being poor in cahoots with my internal struggle of always feeling different, topped with the shame of identifying my blackness as the culprit. Of course, my blackness wasn’t the guilty party – white supremacy was, but I couldn’t articulate that at the time. I thought that if everything else about me fit in with the white kids I went to school with – my clothes, my taste in music, my good grades, my talent – then maybe the fact that I was mixed wouldn’t be such a big deal. But it was, at least to the white kids. And it was so hard to find myself in the midst of my constant endeavor to fit in. The truth is that I did not think that plain white KEDS were particularly fashionable shoes, they just kept me “safe.” Likewise, I did not actually enjoy dancing to ‘80s hair bands like White Snake, but singing Anita Baker songs would only solicit stares and quizzical looks. (Black music wouldn’t become widely popular amongst my white peers until the release of “Tootsie Roll” in middle school.) To this day I don’t know if I actually liked excelling in school or if I just felt determined to be a good student because the expectations for me and the handful of other black students in my classes was so low that I wanted to prove my white teachers wrong. And my talent? Well, it’s the one thing that set me apart from everyone else, despite the fact that my family couldn’t afford to put me in classes. But it didn’t make me feel any more connected to my peers; listening to them groan about being forced to take piano lessons and complain about their ballet recitals was like a tiny stab in my heart each time. I would have given anything to be in their Keds.
On the weekends that I got to go to my Dad’s house however, the Keds stayed at my Mom’s and out came the shiny white K-Swiss tennis shoes (that’s what we Geriatric Millennials called “sneakers” back then). These were shoes that hardly anyone was wearing at school in my white neighborhood, but that the coolest of the cool kids in my other neighborhood, my black neighborhood, wore with pride. The kids here wore bright white sneakers only to offset the bold colors they chose for their clothes, the shiny gold of their hoop earrings catching in the sun. My clothes were absolutely boring compared to theirs – I tried so hard not to stand out in my white school that it had an adverse effect when I traveled outside of that jurisdiction. But as long as I had my K-Swiss, I felt confident, like I belonged.
Headshot of Jasika, a mixed race woman, smiling and resting her head on her hand.
Despite years of losing the battle to fit in, or maybe because of it, I managed to grow up into a woman who was able to eschew some of the confines that whiteness dictated in my formative years, and as an avid sewist and maker, my ability to make clothing for myself emboldened me in ways that I never before imagined. So many of our culture’s fashion rules are centered around patriarchal ideals, around what is considered “flattering” through the (white) male gaze, but when I was younger, I had no idea that I could actually rail against them. The irony is not lost on me that as a kid, all I wanted to do was blend into my surroundings, wearing the same things that everyone else around me was wearing, but now as an adult, I can’t bear the thought of looking like everyone else. Brands bore me and trends have little currency. I either like the thing or not; it’s value amongst others is not my concern. I no longer rely on clothing to communicate to the rest of the world where and how I should fit in, and I am invigorated at the thought of not being limited to what is available in stores, curated by other people’s taste. The thrill of making my own version of whatever I see and connect to in the world is even bigger now than finding my size in the racks of my local T.J. Maxx was as a teen.
Once I realized that the established “rules” of fashion were a bogus attempt by the patriarchy to homogenize our vast, diverse culture, I began to understand that my identity had no “rules” either. Once I completed college and finally moved out of the south to NYC in my early 20s, I gave myself permission to live in the in-betweens. I was surrounded with enough people that looked like me and loved like me that I didn’t feel the need to explain myself, to prove myself to anyone. I stopped trying to fit into a box that would make whoever I was around more comfortable. I started to name myself.
And then NYC brought me to Claire. Beautiful, handsome Claire, whose sweet nature and soft masculine energy captivated me from the moment we first met in person fifteen years ago at Brooklyn Pride. It’s no accident that I was attracted to them: there was something so traditionally all-American about their freckles and thick wavy hair and shiny smile. It is painful to admit this, but it is the truth: there was a part of me looking for someone to finally fulfill my need to belong and be seen by all those white kids that saturated the landscape of my childhood. As removed as I thought I was from seeking validation from whiteness, the desire was still there. In this way, Claire was a perfect match – from the beginning, they loved the whole of me with intention. But our relationship would have fizzled out quickly if they hadn’t ended up fulfilling another deep, unspoken need that I didn’t realize I had: to have a white peer take accountability for their personal and institutional privilege while showing me compassion, love, and support as I navigated the same but also vastly different world they did. Without me having to explain anything, they would immediately affirm every trial, microaggression, and uncomfortable experience I shared with them. They listened, they learned, they sat with me in my anger and hurt. They were committed to recognizing the power, pain, and resilience I experienced as both a mixed and black person, even though they could never fully understand it themself. It was a revelation for me, proof that the most damaging aspects of inherited whiteness could indeed be overridden with intention, education and care.
Headshot of Claire, a white non-binary person, with a soft expression against a metal background.
I have never met anyone like Claire. Even before they came out as non-binary, I did not, could not identify them as all one thing. They seemed to hold every version of how a person could express themselves in one body – glamorous and femme in one moment, studly and rugged in another, graceful and androgynous in the next; I always marveled at how everything about them just seemed to fit. I can track their gender expression through outfits of years past; H&M halter knit dresses that hugged their body and made them feel sexy until they had to maneuver through the unwanted attention these clothes got from men on the street. Loose fitting t-shirts, baseball caps, and thick soled sneakers that felt easy and comfortable but solicited a different kind of attention from those same strangers (“oh you think you’re a man??”). Discarded kitten heels and scarves and sweatshirts from my closet turned into dress-up items for Claire, safe to parade around within the confines of our home, free from the judgmental eyes of others.
But over the past couple of years, Claire has told me that throughout their life, they have struggled to adhere to the cultural confines of womanhood, that “woman” is not in fact who they are, who they were, or who they are meant to be, at least not by the definition our generation was raised with. Their truth lies somewhere on the outskirts of a binary, in some ways like mine. We are both toeing a delicate balance between two worlds that seem culturally juxtaposed against the other, one rife with privilege and power, the other constantly at odds with it. Of course the binaries of gender and race do not run in direct parallels, but they do intersect in ways that I am only just now paying attention to.
The very first garment I made for Claire was a button up shirt. This was many years ago, and only the second garment I had ever made for someone else’s body. I was startled at how much work was required to adapt the men’s indie pattern to Claire’s figure, to keep it from looking like a shapeless sack while not conforming to their curves. Even this early in my sewing life, making clothes for myself had been relatively easy (and I recognize that this is an effect not only of my cis privilege but also my straight sized privilege). Everything I made, save for some tweaks and adjustments, fit me how I wanted it to. It was mostly a numbers game, inches and seam allowances and fractions; it had little to do with who I was and how I wanted to present my gender to the rest of the world. But it wasn’t like that for Claire. It was a big deal to hear them talk about how they wanted the shirt to fit their chest and their hips, how long it should be and how much ease felt comfortable for them, knowing that I could bring that vision to life – it was such a different experience than shopping RTW. But the world of buying and making clothing still brought up feelings of otherness for Claire, of not fitting into a specific box that the world was determined to stick them into. Recognizing the distance between our relationships with clothing was dispiriting because, although I didn’t know their exact pain, I was all too familiar with my own version of it. It is so hard to name yourself in a world that seems hellbent on only giving you two options to choose from.
Growing up, I never thought twice about my own gender. The easy relationship I have had with my body and gender expression is a privilege I still haven’t fully come to terms with, and understanding my own attachment to gender through the experiences Claire shares with me has been yet another important revelation in my life. I think about it a lot now, whether I actually feel aligned with certain aspects of my own gender identity or if it’s just something I am used to performing because it is a cultural norm. There is so much to unpack, and even that is a privilege for me: I can think about it if and when I want to because my survival doesn’t depend on constantly explaining it to myself and others. Now that Claire has come out as trans/non-binary, I worry about supporting them to the extent that they have supported me over the years – I am still at the beginning of my journey in understanding all the nuances of my cis privilege, and I don’t want my learning process to hinder my ability to show up for them. But something I do understand very well is the impairment of growing up in a world without normalized examples of all the different ways our future can look. In my own childhood, I silently objected to the literal and figurative black and white thinking of my community. It was made clear that I needed to pick a side, and it was traumatic to realize that there was no room for choosing to be in the middle, because the people I was around didn’t have a language for the middle. Neither Claire nor I grew up seeing healthy narratives that revolved around existing in between the lines, but together we are figuring out a way to be the narrative now that we needed to see then. We are working to celebrate ourselves in the purest forms of who we are, not in how we think we should be, or how others expect us to be. At long last, we have found someone to fit in with.
Jasika Nicole (she/her) is an actor in TV and film and devout maker of things and stuff. She can be found on Instagram at @jasikaistrycurious.
To learn more about Jasika, you can watch her IG Live conversation with SewQueer Founder, Shannon, on YouTube by clicking here.
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