Know You Belong – Without Jumping Through Hoops

What if the thing you've been searching for isn't fitting in, but being fully seen? Explore the freedom that comes with genuine acceptance.

By
Published July 31, 2026
illustration of woman walking on a sidewalk past three women hula hooping
Justine Ross

This was supposed to be an article about hula hoops.

I’d been asked to write a story reviewing weighted hula hoops and ranking their effectiveness for exercise. I had to turn down the assignment. I confessed to my editor, “I know I will lose my Black Girl Card for this, but I actually have never been able to hula hoop.”

This surprises most people because I’m a decent dancer and I can jump rope with the best of them. But put a hula hoop around my waist, and it’s on the ground in seconds.

In her wisdom, my editor suggested that I instead write about this notion of not feeling “Black enough.”

My lack of hula hoop skills is one of many offenses that have threatened to take away my Black card. I’ve been told “You talk like a white girl” more times than I can count, and I’ve always listened to as much rock as I did rap. Plus, I have a slight obsession with Elvis Presley (who, by the way, did not say all a Black man could do for him was shine his shoes).

I threw a post on social media asking if any other Black women would be willing to share their stories of feeling like they weren’t being accepted by their people. Responses ran the gamut. Some said the “not Black enough” comments were playful and lighthearted, prompted by things like not sleeping in a bonnet, never having seen The Color Purple, or being a bad dancer. “I have 15% rhythm,” declared Danielle Blevins, a lawyer and non-profit co-founder with roots in Birmingham, Alabama and Washington. Other comments were more serious, as one woman lamented being criticized for being in an interracial marriage.

But they all had one thing in common – the feeling of not fitting in. And for many of them, the seed of the idea that they were not Black enough was planted early on.

Kitra Sheppard, 48, recalled an experience from her college years. She was a student at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and she loved it. But when she took an off-campus job, she found herself struggling to become friends with her co-workers, who were students from a nearby HBCU.

“I truly felt the chill of ‘she think she white’” Sheppard shared. “There was a group of students that would look at me, living my Carolina girl life with my school crop top, ripped jeans, ponytails and Keds sneakers, happy go lucky, in la-la land and sneer.  I would hear the not-so-quiet whispers as I walked by, calling me Deon (Stacey Dash’s character from Clueless), or Blossom. I was not one of the ‘round the way girls’ L.L. Cool J rapped about. Even when I tried to do what the other Black girls were doing, it fell flat. Yes, I went to a Biggie/Junior Mafia concert when they came to my school. But the long Bohemian skirt and flower straw hat were definitely not doing me any favors!”

For as long as she can remember, Linda Mims has gotten curious looks from other Black folks for her strict use of standard English.

“I am 75 years old, so I’ve been ‘proper’ a long time,” said Mims, a retired educator who lives in Chicago.  “Even before I majored in English and became an English teacher, Black people constantly asked me where I was from.”

While these comments and this in-group policing of speech patterns and wardrobes can be hurtful, they are also a sign of how much we value solidarity. We are looking for common ground and ways to connect.

For Mims, sisterhood prevailed, and she found acceptance among her peers. She may not have spoken like the other Black women around her, but she still understood them.

“There was something about sisters bonding over the same doubts, problems, and struggles that made them warm to my little proper-talking self,” Mims said.

And though Sheppard’s college co-workers assumed she was detached from her culture because she attended a PWI, she said her school experience helped her build relationships with other Black students on campus.

“I felt community because there were so few Black faces,” she explained. “We recognized each other, saw each other. It was a shared experience that we all understood connected us.”

Most of the women I spoke to said that nowadays comments questioning their Blackness don’t faze them much because with age comes a sense of self-acceptance that keeps getting stronger.

Mims admits she once tried speaking like her peers but eventually gave up.

“There was always someone around the corner waiting to call me out on that. ‘Linda? Why were you talking like that,’” Mims said. “See, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. So, I’ve learned to live with the raised eyebrows.”

When Erica Bryant Barnabas of Rochester, New York, told a friend at work that she didn’t know how to play Spades, and her colleague retorted, “You lose your Black card!” she was unbothered.

Barnabas says she has both age and her parents to thank for that.

“My parents were the first generation of Black people to move into Pittsford, which is the ‘fancy’ suburb outside of Rochester, New York, where I grew up,” she explained. “The real estate agents wouldn’t even show Black people houses there in the 1970s, but my parents somehow bought our house. There were no Black people on our street, and I grew up around a lot of white people. But my parents did a really good job of making sure that I understood my heritage and culture, and that I was proud to be Black, and that I understood that there are all kinds of Black people. So, from a young age, I knew that no matter how I talked, or where I lived, or what I wore, or what music I listened to or whatever, nobody could actually say I wasn’t Black.”

Likewise, Blevins has also been holding on to wise words from her past. Blevins was in college at a predominantly white institution (or PWI) during President Barack Obama’s first run for office. Conversations about race were intense, and she struggled to figure out how she fit into it all.

Along the way, she received guidance not only from family but also from mentors and friends she’d met at school. One friend, she shared, paraphrased the words of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, and said, “There are 40 million Black people in the US, and there are 40 million ways to Black. We are not a monolith.”

Blevins found the confidence to blaze her own path to become the woman she wanted to be.

“Whenever I get in my head – and that is often – I tell myself that I am both part of the collective and an individual,” she said.

Sheppard still hears phrases like “wit’ yo’ white-actin self” at family functions, but they don’t shake her sense of self.

“As I got older, I just embraced that I’m a blend of my environments and stopped trying to fit in with someone else’s idea of Blackness,” she said. “Black is so many things; we literally are the inspiration and engineer of so much that almost everything is Blackness.”

Through community and sisterhood, perhaps we’ll see that there’s room at the cookout for all of us, even if we can’t do the electric slide – or hula hoop.

So, the next time you see a sister rocking an Elvis tee, just compliment and let her know that her Black Girl Card can never be revoked.

Javacia Harris Bowser is an award-winning freelance journalist and essayist based in Birmingham, Alabama, and she is the founder of See Jane Write, a community and website for women who write. Javacia has written for USA Today, Heart & Soul, Good Grit, HerMoney.com, and a host of other media outlets. She’s the author of Find Your Way Back, a collection of essays that explore how she’s used writing to cope with cancer and everything else life has thrown her way. Find Javacia on Instagram and Twitter @seejavaciawrite.