by Ian Williams
Except for the question of my lips.
Of course, I understand now that I was a poor French horn player because of my ears, not my lips. I simply couldn’t hear and match the notes I was supposed to play. Forget leaping from one note to another if they had the same fingering. Of course, I know that dazzling Black brass players exist. My uncle and my cousin both play trumpet. And despite those facts, the music teacher’s assessment weighs on me. She seemed to prophesy from the beginning that I was not anatomically suitable for the instrument. Maybe I was naive to think that my lips could purse or vibrate like all those thin-lipped white kids. I wish that I had proven her wrong and overcome systemic biases through determination. But this is a story of defeat.
Biological determinism, the belief that our abilities and behaviour are fixed by our genes, and racism go hand in hand. Linking physical characteristics to musical potential is an example of how race gets tangled up with everyday pursuits. After that assessment, I believed that I had physical limits and physical advantages linked to my race, sometimes simultaneously. When I sank in pools, people said, You’re so lucky, you don’t have a shred of fat on you. Biological determinism dictated that I couldn’t swim but that I could sprint. As proof, it offered that the three fastest sprinters in my grade were all Black. The Fastest Kid was phenomenal at all sports, in fact, first pick and team captain always, and we all knew that he was robbed (see Taylor Swift/Beyoncé, MTV Awards circa 2009) when he didn’t win Best Athlete at the end of middle school. The prize instead went to a white kid who was aiiight—skilled, agreeable, smart, attractive, a textbook all-rounder. I saw the Fastest Kid outside a walk-in clinic twenty-five years later. He was a star athlete through high school, but hadn’t gone pro or anything. As we talked, it became clear that the major force that determined his life was not biological at all, but economic.
Braces
Around the time of the French horn fiasco, there was a civil war in my mouth. Northern teeth against southern teeth. Big teeth versus tiny jaw. A widening ideological gap between my front teeth. Multiple teeth settling the same land. Overcrowding that led to unsanitary conditions.
My mother insisted that we get my teeth fixed.
You can’t go through life with teeth like that, she said. She loved us, and although all identities intersect with beauty, my mother knew that living as a Black person in North America meant being judged immediately by what’s on your surface.
I wore braces for about six years, two years longer than I needed to, in my estimation. After four, my teeth were straight and it was clear that braces were not going to solve the bite problem. The delay at the orthodontist was not about teeth, but about money. My teeth would stay incarcerated until my family had paid the uttermost farthing.
In those days, each patient received a paper chart where the orthodontist would record the treatment. At a glance, he could look over his instructions and my progress. Once insurance ran out, the staff stapled past-due notices to the front of my chart. Each visit, they ripped off the old notice and stapled an updated notice with a record of their attempts to get payment. My chart was covered in staples. Countless raised scars. I tried to hold my chart in such a way that the other patients wouldn’t see, or put it face down on the tray so the attending dentist wouldn’t notice the record of poverty. But the chief orthodontist, when he made his rounds, would always read the history of finances before looking at me. What’s going on there? he’d ask me. I’d mumble or shrug, embarrassed in front of the white children. Then he’d read the history of treatment, look into my mouth for a few seconds, and write, Adj. Adjust.
I wish the history of my mouth was simply of eating and smiling and talking and laughing, and not a site of biological determinism or, in this case, economics. My mouth represents a past of poverty, of monthly pain as regular as rent. It represents my parents’ investment in future prosperity. Good teeth meant I could stand a chance at an interview and secure a job, buy a place to live, and onward into the echelons of the middle class. Through my mouth, the prerequisites and unpleasant reality of Black–white relations were translated. Never was there the thought that I might be the one interviewing another or determining the class of another person. I needed straight teeth because I would need to smile at someone who held my future in their hands.
Smile
I almost always smile in photos. When I don’t smile in photos, people say I look angry or sad or tired. I’ve also heard scary. The same thing happens to the speaker in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. A friend sees a photograph and “wants to know why you look so angry.” The speaker thinks she looks relaxed. But the friend is made uncomfortable by an unsmiling Black person “and he needs you to account for that.”
I’ve accounted by almost always smiling. At some point, post-braces, I stood in front of a mirror and practised all the smiles available to me and chose teeth, very wide, slight eye squint. The last detail came from Tyra, who taught the world to smize, to smile with their eyes.
There are many reasons why I smile, but few involve happiness. I hereby notify you that I will not rob your store. I will not come after you in this parking garage. I will not stay too long or take up too much space in this coffee shop. I’m not carrying anything that can be used as a weapon. I will not assault you in this elevator. Aren’t my teeth lovely? I will not bite you with my expensive teeth. As you can see, most reasons involve not being a threat.
But I would like to have the privilege of a neutral face.
For all of my efforts to smile, I’ve developed a frown. People mirror back the frown more readily than they mirror the smile, although the frown is far less complicated: I have slight astigmatism that I don’t correct with my contact prescription, so I frown a little to sharpen people into focus. What concerns me is that these expressions, smiling or frowning, are not in fact expressive. I don’t do these things because I am happy or angry. As a Black man, expression as a sign of my feelings is secondary to the reception of my face. When I smile, my face is the performance of a face conditioned to be agreeable in order to advance. In other places, parts of America, for example, the performance of facial mugging or facial docility would be a matter of survival. To be honest, when the pandemic hit, I didn’t fuss that we all had to wear masks. My mouth was one less thing to worry about. Wasn’t I wearing a mask anyway?
A NOSE
When Michael Jackson died, a rumour resurfaced that he had no nose, that it had collapsed years ago and he had been wearing a prosthetic nose over a hole in his face.
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My whole life I’ve suffered from problematic breathing. I wake up in the morning full of phlegm. As a child, I used to get head colds while my brother got chest colds. I don’t have asthma. I don’t have allergies. I breathe through my mouth when my mind drifts. Until recently, I was excluded from luxury diagnoses like sleep apnea. Doctors don’t take your symptoms seriously if your body is Black. One dentist advised me, Just try harder to breathe through your nose.
Try harder.
So when, under police restraint, New York cigarette seller Eric Garner and Minneapolis cigarette buyer George Floyd wheezed, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I had a physical reaction. Not only did I recognize the Blackness of their bodies, the hazard of their gender, I felt the sensations of those final moments—wanting air but being obstructed, wanting the stabilizing yawn of a deep breath, wanting to breathe as easily as the people around you.
In their slow deaths, the men were unable to help themselves—they could not try harder to live—and they received no help from others.
George Floyd’s death took eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Because America is still America, you can now buy T-shirts with this number.
* * *
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Like many anaesthetics, propofol works so quickly that in ten seconds you can be unconscious.
Michael Jackson’s doctor claims that he adm
inistered the drug after Jackson begged for it, monitored him for ten minutes, went to the bathroom, and two minutes later, when he returned, Jackson was dead.
To be precise, people don’t die of an overdose, of propofol toxicity, not exactly. They die because propofol induces “respiratory depression.” Another source calls it “airway obstruction.”
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In response to an Instagram post about the disparate treatment of George Floyd in Minneapolis and white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof in Charleston, someone with a private account comments, “George Floyd died from a drug overdose, read the autopsy report.”
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Could one believe a man is suffocating and continue to asphyxiate him unless one wanted to kill him?
I wonder—in my need to make sense of the senseless—whether the police officers thought Floyd and Garner were faking their distress. Did they think this was a performance? Do they find our reality unconvincing and implausible? To white people, does Black agony seem exaggerated? Staged?
* * *
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At his Super Bowl halftime performance in 1993, Jackson leaped out on the stage and stood still for two minutes. Imagine the temerity of such a move at a live show, a sporting event no less—standing still for that long. His stillness became a statement.
When he finally moved, it was a simple turn of the head, to give us another angle, as if he was saying, Go ahead, take a good look at me. Take me in.
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Ten days later, in her famous 1993 interview with Jackson, Oprah asks about the change to the colour of his skin. Jackson says he has a skin disorder that destroys the pigment in his skin (later confirmed by his autopsy). Then he adds, “What about all the millions of people who sit out in the sun to become darker, to become other than what they are? Nobody says nothing about that.”
About his nose, he becomes equally defensive.
Oprah says, “You had your nose done, obviously.”
Jackson, sharply: “Yeah, but so did a lot of people that I know.”
His irritation in both cases seems rooted in the double standard whereby white celebrities have cosmetic procedures without too big a fuss while he, a Black celebrity, becomes tabloid fodder. To be sure, he’s neglecting the scale of his fame and the nature of his surgery, but he does make a point. Nose surgery on a Black person signifies way more in the popular imagination than a facelift does. I hardly need to state the assumption: he’s trying to be white.
This assumption continues to circulate, although the most common facial cosmetic surgery procedure is rhinoplasty for white and Black people alike. It persists even when the language of ethnic surgeries softens from whiteness to Westernization. It persists although doctors report that Black clients “desire some form of nasal refinement without loss of their ethnic identity.” Black patients ask for reduced width, nasal tip definition, and higher projection. They don’t want to look like Michael, Janet, or Latoya Jackson with the pinched nose of the 1980s.
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Playing out on our noses are major questions: What is universal? What is individual? What is the relationship between the two?
More broadly, the nose, the mouth, and the eyes are common, universal features of humans that we point to as evidence of our equality. It’s a rather rhetorically elegant, if oversimplified, response to the pseudo-science that ascribes significance to phenotypical differences among humans. It’s so obvious, it’s clichéd. Aren’t I human? Look, I have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. The other comparable cliché is: If you cut me, won’t I bleed?
Despite the equal distribution of eyes, noses, and mouths among individuals, their variations have nevertheless been used to foment division and classification. We may all have noses, but your nose is not like mine. When the white nose is held up as the standard nose, as the default nose, as the Platonic golden nose, then any variation becomes deviation—which is a hop from deviant, a skip from devious, and a jump to demonic, until simple variety becomes a stairway to hell.
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The nose, the skin, and the hair are major sites of racial migration. Michael Jackson is not the only Black celebrity to transform himself through those features.
In 2016, Lil’ Kim posted photos to her Instagram that left fans shocked. Her hair was blond, her skin was bleached, her nose was slimmed. She assumed the coy angles and postures of white Instagram models and further processed herself through filters. It was the end of the Obama years and people had been throwing around postracial. Is this what postracial looked like? Rachel Dolezal had been exposed the year before. Was there a new category of transracial emerging?
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Treasure, a Black teenager, believes she is white. Her mother brings her on Dr. Phil for help.
In the pre-recorded segments, we learn that Treasure is not simply under the impression that she is white; she is, in fact, a white supremacist.
She says, “When it comes to Black people, I think they’re all ugly and I have nothing in common with them.” And: “My nose is not giant like African-Americans’.” Her mother informs us that Treasure used to decapitate her Black dolls or make them the slaves of her white dolls.
The audience is stunned. How to explain this? Quite likely, Treasure has ingested serious anti-Black propaganda. Possibly, she has a mental disorder (such as borderline or narcissistic personality disorder or sociopathic tendencies) that is expressed most visibly on this issue. Maybe this behaviour is a manifestation of grief over the death of her white stepfather. Possibly, it’s a hoax. That’s what her sister claims.
Nevertheless, Treasure is asking the same question that Michael Jackson and Lil’ Kim pose with their bodies. Can we migrate from one race to another? It’s important to note that the direction of these transracial desires is overwhelmingly from Black to white. When a white person expresses something similar, they may be accused of “acting” Black rather than trying to be Black. When a Black person “acts” white, it’s assumed that they want to be white. The movement to whiteness seems to be aspirational, while the movement to Blackness is only provisional, temporary, to be put on and taken off when Blackness becomes inconvenient.
I can’t definitively explain why some people of colour wish to be white. The reasons vary. Treasure’s reasons will differ from Michael Jackson’s or Lil’ Kim’s. Moreover, the desire is so coated in disapproval that it can never be expressed. Yet I imagine that a cluster of reasons involves ease: to have opportunities appear, to move through life more easily, to be treated better (or just fairly) at first sight, and to have the barrier of their appearance disappear.
There’s a difference between wanting to be white and wanting to be human. The error of transracial desires like Treasure’s lies in the assumption that being white is the same as being a human. People of colour don’t want to be white; we want to exist at full value—and the only people who seem to occupy that class of existence are white folks, hence the metonymic slip.
Treasure’s YouTube name is Treasure the White Queen.
* * *
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The King of Pop. Most of us have never seen Michael Jackson in flesh and blood or in a context outside performance or tabloid. From our vantage, beholding celebrity, he’s all persona.
The word persona comes to us from the Latin word for mask. Person, personality, personal, though ostensibly marking authenticity, all emerge from the same make-believe place.
It’s possible to characterize Jackson’s physical changes as a kind of fusion of persona and person, of art and artist, under the hegemony of whiteness. Yet he seemed to be reaching beyond whiteness; his ambitions seemed not transracial but transhuman, more metaphysical than physical, more futuristic in his theatrical military getups than present.
; TWO EYES
Portrait
I mentioned that I attended an arts high school. My particular field was visual art. The curriculum included an art history component that began with the cave paintings of Lascaux and ended in the present. By grade twelve, we had worked our way up to modernism. We drew the blinds and sat in the dark to look at slides. Picasso and Braque and Gris and Miró burst upon us. Suddenly, there was African art—but no African artist. Everything African was filtered through white men. The word appropriation never came up. The presence of Blackness in European art was cast as revolutionary, rebellious, radical. Blackness didn’t share the same language as, say, the gentle Japanese influence on Impressionist art. And looking at the faces of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, at the discoloured, distorted, inexpressive faces, I understood, through no fault of my teacher, that the African presence is what made modern art ugly, upsetting to most viewers. It’s what caused art to fall apart.
Some years later, the Sudanese model Alek Wek interrupted the modelling world with her dark skin, round face, short hair, with her small eyes, flat nose, large lips. The fashion industry congratulated itself on smashing beauty standards. But André Leon Talley, editor of American Vogue at the time and a Black man, was not duped: “It’s a unique kind of beauty that the world is not ready for that. [sic] The world is saying it’s multicultural and global but it’s not ready for that look, I don’t think, on a broad scale.” On Wek’s youthful optimism about being embraced by the modelling world, he said, “She’s naive. She’s having a naive vision because there are obviously prejudices against her look.” He believed she was being used as proof of diversity. One Black face was not enough to undo centuries of white aesthetic bias. In fact, Wek’s “unique kind of beauty” points to something more sinister at work. Her presence as the representative of Blackness among the sheer number of conventionally beautiful white faces was inscribing the racial idea of the superiority of white beauty. Ask anyone who they’d prefer to look like, Alek Wek or any other model on that runway. I say the following only because I feel protective of Wek. I think we are being mocked by a white fashion industry that uses her face like a substitute for blackface.
