The Brown Girl World

About Coco

Coco Kelley grew up in Silicon Valley during the Seventies and Eighties without learning how to use a computer and always had her face buried in a book. She was a college athlete on scholarship who defected to become an English lit student on student loans. Through most of her graduate program, she suffered through the classics until she discovered the post-colonial writers of Africa, India, and the Caribbean.

She eventually gravitated towards African dance and drums and for the last 7 years has been part of an all women's Sabar drum group. She spends most of her time outside of her day job in a West African, Congolese, Haitian, and/or Cuban dance or drum class.

A native Californian living in Oakland, she loves the diversity of the Bay Area. She can eat fried chicken, Mexican food, Caribbean food, Vietnamese and Thai food all within a mile of her home.

When she is not working, dancing or drumming, she likes to knit hats and scarves, but not sweaters. She still likes to read; just not the classics.

You Can Call Me Coco

By Coco Kelley

When I was very young and asked by grown-ups who didn't already know me about my racial identity, I told them that my father was Black, that my mother was Orange, but that they could call me Coco. (I never liked the question "What are you?" and had my defenses up at an early age. My mother was actually White-Canadian and my father was Black-American with a Creole family.) As the story about my name goes, right after I was born, we were living on the beach in San Diego and my mother was admiring how dark my father's skin had become from the sun. At that very instant, my parents both looked over at me and named me Coco.

The question of race remained. Inevitably, I had to ask my Orange mother which box designating my racial category I was supposed to mark. Until that time, I suppose she had been marking the box for me, but at some point (in school, I would guess) I was given the opportunity that we have all come to experience of marking and thereby identifying ourselves. Her actual response to my query was: "What am I chopped liver?" and then she told me to mark the Other box. I remember wondering if there was a space to write in my name after checking the Other box. I don't remember the exact details at this tender age, but I do remember not feeling right about Other.

Whenever I didn't know the meaning of a word, my mother told me to look the word up in the dictionary. And although Other is not an identifiable racial group in any dictionary I've ever read, it was clear that I was different. I was different because my parents didn't resemble one another and because I didn't look anything like my mother. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Sunnyvale, California and I was one of a few biracial children with even fewer being Black. I had a mix of friends - Asian, Latino and White and my face blended into the other brown faces of my classmates. Unless I had to mark the box, I felt okay. Different, but okay.

Other never did satisfy me, and so I grew up, partly out of respect for my mother, not sure what box to mark or even what to call myself at times. It wasn't until I worked as a substitute teacher in San Francisco with a majority of Black and Latino students that I discovered a category that kind of fit me. After introducing myself to the class with my grown-up name neatly written on the chalkboard behind me, they would immediately ask with curiosity but also with respect: "Are you mixed?" And I would say, to my own surprise and also with gratitude: "Yes, but you can call me Coco."