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She looked capable and her pre-recorded, button-activated voice
was confident. But she was a black Barbie and I was disappoint-
ed. It was as if my mind kept asking me to be white, while still
feeling ashamed that I wasn’t properly black.
In any case, seeing these dark-skinned people doing things I
had never imagined that people did brought to mind the uncom-
fortable thought that the owner of this video was my dad.

My father looked young for his age and women hit on him
everywhere he went. He didn’t mind. He was quick to smile and
saw a joke in everything. I remember watching cartoons with
him one Saturday morning, both of us slumped on the couch
in front of the big screen TV in the living room, side by side. A
frantic Patrick Starr, desiccating in Sandy Cheeks’ waterless
Bikini Bottom bubble home shouts, “What is this place?” while
my father tips over laughing, the look in his eye saying that what
he was laughing at was too funny to be believed. For the rest of
the day he’d turn to me at quiet moments and ask, “Nika, what is
this place?” We’d both lose the composure we had regained after
our last fit of giggles and give ourselves over to the hilarity again.
Unlike my mother, it seemed the only weight on his shoulders
were the bags of concrete he sometimes had to carry at work,
building houses. He was black but I didn’t feel like a misplaced
other around him like I did with Tara: like I had somehow failed
at being a member of a race I was supposed to belong to. He was
simply my dad. I loved him without reason or reservation.
One Summer, a couple years before I watched my father’s
tape, when Tamagotchis and Nano Pets—those handheld digital
toys with three buttons and a small screen inhabited by a pixi-
lated “baby” that demanded attention at all hours—were deemed
absolutely necessary by every girl under the age of 13, I sat in
the passenger seat of my dad’s white pick up truck sulking with
childish jealousy. Tara had gotten a Nano Pet that day and I’d
had to spend the whole time at her house pretending to have fun

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