Criticism & Rants

A friend of mine, Samiya Bashir, shared a link with me just yesterday (which I will be adding to my links on the homepage) and the website it brought me to inspired me to write out a two page single-spaced essay. That essay was lost sometime around 12:30 this morning due to technological difficulties (my tablet disabled the auto-save feature, but that's another rant about "smart" technology), so I my best to put what I could onto paper before I went to bed. The blog is called "Black Girl Dangerous" and is operated by Mia McKenzie, the San Francisco-based, Philadelphia-born author of The Summer We Got Free which received a Lambda Literary Award this year. She is a self-described queer woman and, in my personal opinion, one of the best voices I've come across in contemporary literature, black or otherwise. If she happens to be reading this, Thank you, Mia - it's nice to know I'm not alone in my contempt or my worldview. In any case, the following are my thoughts on a recent post on blackgirldangerous.org titled "How to be Black in America: A (Relatively) Short List".

The list is not meant to be taken literally - it is a satire - and to me reads as a way to survive white America. If you read the list in its entirety, you'll understand that when I say the the word "survive", I mean that it is another way of saying "blend-in" or "disappear". This is not a criticism of the list or the author's work, but an analysis of how the author is pointing out the ludicrous demands and psychic abuse put forth on young black men and women in this country. Points 3 through 14.5 serve as my case-in-point:

3. Don't be mad.

4. Don't reach for your wallet. Or your cell phone.

5. Who told you it was okay to walk down the street??

6. Don't assert yourself. You're scaring people. Don't scare people so much.

7. Why do you talk like that?

8. Get an education somehow. Speak properly, for Christ's sake. But don't be uppity.

9. Why do you talk like that?

10. Don't wear a weave.

10.5. Don't wear your hair natural, either, unless you got that good hair. JP Morgan Chase don't do nappy.

11. Don't exist.

12. You're really dark. Can you do something about that? In fact, if you're going to insist on being black, please be as light-skinned as possible. Have a white parent, if you can manage it. K?

13. Jump.

14. Don't have kids unless you're married. And everyone knows Black women can't find husbands so... just don't have kids. If you must have them, though, have daughters.

14.5 Don't have sons. If you do have sons and they end up dead or in a cage, that's your problem. You should have known better.

(BGD, McKenzie, 8/2/2013)

If you're a black person reading this, you've more than likely encountered at least one of these in your life, and just that one point, that one listed comment on how you do not fit in in white America, that was enough to create a hole in your heart, a loneliness shared by an entire people. Being one of those told to always speak properly and behave because white people are watching, I can tell you that it took years to bury the New Jersey accent and muddle the speech patterns of black folks with proper contraction usage and eliminating double negatives. It is, to this day, one thing I regret committing to and the one thing I wish I could forgive my parents for.

As a child, my mother told me over and over that as a black man in America, I am an endangered species, more so since I am an educated black man with two advanced degrees. After I gained my Masters of Fine Arts, my mother revisited and revised her wisdom by saying "Now you have even more to lose. If you make one mistake, if you're caught, it's all over" and as much as I hated to do it, I had to agree with her. The more you have earned, the more you've gained, the more you have to lose. That is the ethos that colored my childhood, and continues to color my adult life as a black male in America. You might say "Well that's true for anyone in America", but the stakes are higher for folks like myself. I have to be the shining example and my personal history will forever be under scrutiny. For me, there will always be a questioning of my achievements, even if it goes unsaid, by employers and administrative staff. Or, even worse, there is no question and I am included for "faculty diversity", or to be used to demonstrate a university's "multicultural atmosphere". That is what it's like to be black in America: to be unwanted, but necessary, to be permanently cast as the Other.

Now, just to get an idea of the psychic strain that black folk living in America have to adapt to, turn on National Geographic on Tuesday through Thursday. Shows like "Doomsday Preppers" and "Doomsday Castle" are the reason that your black friend "sees racism everywhere" and is so "sensitive" about aspects of daily American culture and life (See: "23. Let people who don't experience anti-black racism tell you what it is and what it is not, how it does and does not effect you, and how you should feel and, especially, not feel about it." [McKenzie, 8/2/2013]).

Let's say BET and Univision aired shows like "Compton Compound" and "Barrio Protectors" with brown folk brandishing military-issue .50 caliber rifles, driving armored Caddys and pickups to target practice in the desert, and learning how to butcher livestock. Scared yet? If these shows were on TV on a weekly basis and I were white, I'd have left the country (these niggers are out to kill us all!). But wait, all of these things are already on television. It's called the seven o'clock news and the only difference between the brown people getting arrested and the cast of "Doomsday Castle" is their hardware, the amount of money each group gets paid and where they get it from. The "Doomsday" cast gets their funding from Nat Geo, and DeShawn and Esteban get it from tax payers to the tune of 25K per year of incarceration (and they can continue their livestock butchery lessons in prison for a nominal fee of a month or two in the Hole). But, hey, see number 3 on McKenzie's list: Don't be mad. You haven't done the things the cast of "Doomsday" did before they got the TV deal, you can't expect to get paid for doing nothing. (See number 38 on McKenzie's list, if you didn't understand the sarcasm).

To lay this one out for you, to be black in America means to be judged by a set of standards and disciplined by a set of practices set forth by a group of "impartial" (read: "white") lawmakers back when "negro music" was still an acceptable term. You must also attempt to gain acceptance from whatever group you've been "determined" by the system to "belong" to. But even then your own people may not have your back. If you're a gay black man and you live in Trenton or Compton, you better stay on the DL and find a beard or find another place to live if you want to make it past 25. If you're a freak, one of those rock-music-listenin'-Oreoes with all kinds of shit in your face, you best run with the whites - "ain't nobody got time for that". To be black in America means to be a soundbite and a good laugh, a cultural footnote. We might have built this country from top to bottom, but do you see any black names inscribed on the White House foundations? To be black means to be aware, at all times, that you stand out and ought to conform to a mold too small and weak to hold your vibrancy, your passion. To be black means you have to be smart, on the streets and in the classroom and the boardroom. In summation, I'll close with another voice from my childhood, the immortally hilarious, truthful, Richard Pryor: "You don't get to be old by bein' no fool, jack, you know what I mean? There's a lot of young wise men that're deader than a muh'fucker." That's what it means to be black in America.

(And just a reminder P.S.A. - If you're reading this blog post, your communications are being monitored by the N.S.A.)