I'm afraid of white women. I'm afraid of your accusations. Afraid because I fit every description for who your rapist, robber, or murder could possibly be. Afraid because you can take me out, unarmed in seconds, and never receive a guilty sentence. 

I'm afraid to bring a white woman home. To have my family judge both you and I and to look at me like I don't like my own people. Afraid that the only thing you want from me and my genes is curly natural hair and pretty green eyes so your kids can look "exotic" like they're an exhibit for your white friends so you can show off how pretty your mixed babies look.

I'm afraid of white women. I'm afraid of what you're telling your kids so that they look at me with big eyes and wide mouths. I'm afraid of what you think i would do to you that makes you hold your purse tighter when I pass you on the street. I'm afraid that you don't even want to try to pronounce the names of my sons and daughters because the beautiful assemblage of consonants and vowels, the hymns of our home land, won't sound right coming out of your white mouth. 

I'm afraid that you see me as a project. That you will put on your cape and rescue me from the hood I come from and put me in your white institution, teach me how to speak, eat, dress, walk, sit, stand, agree, disagree, give me a respectable 9-5 job and save me from being too black. That you will come rescue me from my doomed fate, put me on your sports team, and together we'll make a cute copy of the blind side. Maybe VH1 will give us a show too. 

I'm afraid that you want me to be your black friend, prizing me more for the "as you call it" exotic color of my skin more than you prize the character of my heart. That you can go and tell your other friends "Oh, I can say nigga because my best friend is black." That you can sit there and objectify me in the name of lighthearted humor. 

I'm afraid that my children will call it talking white and acting white when it isn't. It's talking like I sent you to school and acting like you got some goddamn sense. I'm afraid that they will adopt black as an adjective. That she doesn't love herself so she acting black and that he wasn't raised right so he acting black. My color is not an adjective. 

Stop judging my color. Stop generalizing my color. Stop putting us in boxes we don't fit in. Stop being so afraid of me. It's me who should be afraid of you.