A few friends from high school went 'round the border to Windsor, [Ontario] Canada for the night and oh, what a night 'twas. It was pretty fun--some of the music wasn't my style (I cannot dance--in the way which I am accustomed, that is--to Fat Bottomed Girls, classic thought it may be. I simply cannot.) but other than that, it was a learning experience.
I drove with Fashion Student and another girl, and in the car it was fine, but when we all got to the hotel I felt...out of place. A whole bunch of button-cute, tiny white girls and me. Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that she never felt more black than when surrounded by white people and, well, I now know what she means. 2 and a half years at an HBCU has certainly changed, and in some ways, validated my perspective on things.
Not that a club is the prime spot to meet dateable men, but I got no "good" attention. I say "good" because guys would come up to me and the two girls I was with, and virtually ignore me. As in, guys would ask both girls, who would be standing stock-still, to dance, and get declined. Meanwhile, I'm next to them, shaking my booty to "Love Lockdown", and they'd keep on walking. I'm talking, literally, a guy would come up and speak to everyone in the group but me. And clearly it's not like I'm ugly or anything, but those guys weren't checkin' for "sistahs" at all. I felt like the "ugly friend" almost all night.
Not only the "ugly friend," but the Black Girl Who Knows Everything About Hip-Hop/Can Dance To Every Song. When played-out songs from high school came on, everyone expected me to just go crazy, while I'm like, "um, actually, I haven't 'leaned wit it, rocked wit it' since prom..." I fielded comments like "Come on, you're SUPPOSED to have soul!" and "Can you teach me that dance?" I even got a "Heyy, chocolate, how you doin'?" I wasn't trying to be the black chick who can dance really well; I'm have average dancing skills, but I just looked better by default! Seriously, some of those people had no rhythm to speak of...HIL-arious, actually.
I guess it's a double-edged sword because when one guy actually danced with me he got waayy touchy-feely. Which I'm used to at the club, but I couldn't help wondering if he was doing it because supposedly black girls are easy/all video girls at heart. Even dancing by myself I felt like a "hypersexual black female" because there would be a ton of white guys watching. For example, when Sean Paul's "Get Busy" came on, I started to do the obligatory reggae-style dancing, but I really felt weird because no one else knew the song/danced to it properly. There were girls dancing way trashier than me but I still felt like the paid entertainment sometimes. It went one of two ways either I was totally ignored or feeling like an exotic dancer at some frat house.
It's hard to put into words. I mean, the club atmosphere is mostly girls being watched, and I was able to observe just how guys watched certain girls. All of the girls I was with were standard pretty white girls, and many guys positively fawned over them. Hell, this one guy stared at my friend Blondie so intently I swear him and his probably raging boner popped up at every club we went to. But there was a distinct difference in how my friends were viewed and how I was viewed--if I was viewed at all, that is. It was only, "oh, look at that tough black girl." I didn't feel like just another pretty girl at the club. I felt like an outsider.
I guess I was just observing the dynamic; this was the first time partying somewhere other than Southern State. Oddly, I felt extremely safe--from what I've seen stuff usually goes wrong when a guy tries to talk to a girl and she doesn't accept, is rude to him, or he does something to make her feel threatened. People/guys barely spoke to me so it was cool--I mean, you can't hurt an invisible person, right? And that's how I felt to the other clubgoers besides my friends: invisible when I wasn't being gawked at. Which is no way to feel during a girly night out on the town. Especially not in a town where the (legal) drinking age is 19.
All that said, though, I was with friends, and like I said, there are advantages to rolling with hot white girls: free shots, no cover charges, VIP access, no long entrance lines, and I guess there is a certain attention by association when you're with a group of loud, pretty, party girls. And if I'm invited again, I might just go back to Windsor and club-hop, an art that is too complicated to do back at school. I just have to adjust my mindset, I guess.
Plus, out of the three clubs we hit, not one played T-Pain, which kind of totally bothered me. Just unheard of.
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