The reason J Cole got picked on in school: “I used to get Michael Jackson jokes”
J Cole, who was born to a white mother and a black father, was different to a lot of the kids he grew up with. While he never viewed himself as white, his peers didn’t consider him to be entirely black, either—and there were times when he was made fun of for it.
Cole reflected on this during a conversation with XXL in 2011. “You know what it is?” he said. “My mother was white, but to me, I never looked at her like that. I would only become aware of that when we were in public or when she would pick me up from school.”
It was other people’s reactions to his mixed heritage that made him feel self-conscious about it. “I would be like, ‘Oh, man, everybody gonna see my mom is white. I know I’m about to get clowned.’ You would get clowned on in fourth or fifth grade.”
Cole’s peers tended to pursue a particular line of attack. “I used to get Michael Jackson jokes,” he revealed. “‘You don’t know if you black or white.’ That was the only time I’d be aware.”
Cole’s heritage meant that he didn’t sit entirely comfortably within binary conceptions of race growing up. But that was entirely other people’s doing, as he personally wasn’t confused about who he was at all. He understood himself to be black.
“I can identify with white people, because I know my mother, her side of the family, who I love,” he said. “I’ve had white friends. I know people from high school that I might not have hung out with outside of high school, but I think I got to know them pretty well, so I know they sense of humor. But at the end of the day, I never felt white.”
Cole may have had a white mother, and he may always have had white people in his life, but that does not mean he was ever immune to the experiences of living as a black person in the United States. The colour of his skin meant he never lived in the same way as a white person.
“I don’t know what that feels like,” he said. “I can identify. But never have I felt like I’m one of them. Not that I wanted to, or tried to, but it just was what it was. I identify more with what I look like, because that’s how I got treated.”
Society deals with people differently on the basis of their skin colour, and Cole couldn’t ever escape from that. “When you get pulled over by the police, I can’t pull out my half-white card,” he noted. “Or if I just meet you on the street, you’re not gonna be like, ‘This guy seems half-white.’”