Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  This prompted me to call the police myself to explain the situation only to find out that Mark hadn’t contacted them. This, in turn, led him to defiantly call them to save face. Neither of us realized we were playing Russian roulette with the NYPD—it’s a schoolyard game of chicken. I’m young enough to think that two roommates, one Black, one white, same height and body type, calling the police will result in a fair doorstep trial that, who knows, might work out in my favor. (What can I say? I read For Dummies books in high school for a reason.) Fun fact, New Yorkers: if two people call the cops for the same address, a lot of cops show up. You expect two; you get seven. Neither of us, flabby beta males that we were, quite knew what to do when we opened the door. Accusations had to be made up on the fly. “The neighbors must love this,” one unimpressed cop muttered. After hearing the story, half the squadron stayed with Mark at the door and the other half escorted me out of the building, offering me a ride to my friend’s place.

  The escalation was as surreal as it was out of sync with the memory of Mark and me on the couch, with his head on his dog’s stomach and its snout resting on my lap, watching television. “The boys of apartment 4-G,” I remember him saying, mid-yawn.

  The next morning, as New York’s latest snowstorm was underway, I returned to the apartment. Mark was at work. I hastily packed my things, leaving my keys behind. As I rode the bus back to Montreal, Quebec, I knew I might not have a home to get back to when I returned to New York. Good, I thought.

  Prick.

  The anger faded quickly, soon replaced by a well of regret as I returned to the city. Montreal had been numbing and exhausting and before I had realized, roughly seven weeks had passed. Luckily, the stroked-out estranged father card will earn you some leeway, and my support system of lingering college friends came through. I never had a shortage of couches to crash on while looking for a new place . . . Still, a few blocks away, my best friend would not answer my texts or emails begging him for a phone call. The handwritten offer to grab a beer at the bar next to our apartment left at his door was declined. The thought of having hurt him that badly was a vise closing on my neck. I needed to tell him about my father’s rapidly declining health—a fact he still did not know—and to apologize for channeling my not-quite-grief into those unfair emails. My furniture was still there, after all. There was still time.

  Fancying herself a master of “friendship drama,” one of my oldest friends took it upon herself to pursue the crusade by contacting Mark behind my back. “This is what happens when men deal with their feelings,” Morgan said with a sigh. I was a “Charlotte,” Mark was a “Miranda”; there was protocol in play. I do not know what their interaction consisted of, but she eventually forwarded me Mark’s final word on the matter of my father’s health, which she had disclosed. “I’m indifferent,” he wrote. “Frankly,” he added, “I’m weirded out that Ben has been treating this like a relationship or something.”

  I could not quite process this. Maybe something had been lost in translation. I was the one kicked out under a snowstorm for giving notice; if “victim” and “bully” had to be established, my line ought to be “I forgive you,” not “I’m sorry.” Where was my friend? The guy who’d shared his darkest thoughts with me? The one I was planning on moving to Brooklyn with next year so I could get my own dog, of which he already claimed himself the uncle? The one whom I’d forgiven the hole punched in my door when he was upset? Wasn’t it my turn to get a pass?

  To say that I went “emotionally apeshit” is to underestimate the amount of primate defecation littering America’s great zoos. I had an Eduardo-Saverin-learning-he’d-been-0.03-percented breakdown. A Paris-Geller-getting-rejected-from-Harvard breakdown. An Alexandra-Forrest-is-making-a-stew breakdown. An ex once wrote me an eight-hundred-word email in college. I remember being put off by this and deleting it halfway through the read. Over the following month, I wrote Mark close to fifty emails/texts. I’m sorry, bro. I miss you, bud. Forgive me, dude. Ending these raw pleas with bro, bud, dude, broseph, brosephine made them easier to write.

  No new apartment was good enough. No new roommate, no matter how friendly or compatible, was the right fit. My just-right bowl of porridge was still the closet-size room in Morningside Heights on Amsterdam where my furniture still was and where I could hang with my best friend once this hurdle was crossed. It wasn’t too late; I had to try. I emailed a friend of his, his brother, his mother, all of whom I superficially knew. (Yes, this is the point at which you turn from your screen and wince, with “Oh, honey.”) “We were shitheads to each other; let him know I’m sorry. I’m here.” His roundabout reply eventually came, again impossibly detached. “I’m over what happened that nite. Your hyper-emotionality is stressing me out, it has not made me want to be around you,” now emailed the same guy who came into my room shirtless and teary-eyed at 6 a.m., rattled by a nightmare about his ex-fiancée he needed to talk out. “My dad had a heart attack, dude,” was still all I could think to reply, so I said nothing.

  My friend Nora, listening to me rant about the situation, sympathetically said, “You sound like me after my first breakup. I was catatonic for like, three months.” Nora was right. I am a little heartbroken. The rejection, anger, and sadness were almost identical to those I had felt as a brokenhearted fourteen-year-old, only now sans the Evanescence soundtrack. Were Mark and I both one point further right on the Kinsey scale, this might have been an impasse with an easy, passionate resolution. Sadly, we weren’t. These were the much murkier waters of two straight males, both emotionally unequipped for the journey back to where we were and only one of us apparently willing.

  Unlike women’s friendships, which allow for some tumultuousness and are subsequently made stronger by strife, men’s are defined by blunt simplicity. It’s either easy or it doesn’t exist. We ride and die; apologizing and healing is not an option. “This is what happens when men deal with their feelings.”

  A few weeks later, one of my two new roommates was now a pasta enthusiast who smiled eagerly at me when I collected snacks at the fridge and returned to my room with my headphones on and a nod. The other worked nights at a nearby hospital. The three of us will eventually go on to occasionally share a drink and even watch the Entourage movie together, collectively trying to buy into the illusion of Adrian Grenier playing an employed actor. When the first of us moves out, it is with a thirty-day notice and a fist bump. The overall experience simple, friendly, and polite—everything I had been looking for when I first crashed into Mark.

  “What’s done is done,” read one of Mark’s last communiqués to me. That was the closure, I now realize. My shell is back, reinforced, and I’m grateful for it. In time, Mark will turn into a New York City Roommate Horror Story. I’ll only remember him as the guy who kicked me out at 1 a.m. and was indifferent to my father’s health. To be fair, so was I, to a degree. I edit that part out of the story and focus on the one that paints me best. “What a selfish asshole!” people say. I’m sure other gatherings, two subway stops away, are hearing the “What a stalker!” version. Eventually, we will both believe our own tales. But tonight, I miss my former best friend. Laughter, beer, fist bumps, repeat. Move on. “Besties” are for children in pigtails and Pokémon backpacks.

  Twenty-Six

  Sure, I’ll Be Your 2016 Shithole Rescapee

  My Blackness started elsewhere, somewhere in the Antilles, and comes threefold. Being Black in Haiti means “happy.” Haitians are loud, gregarious. The entire country is a table of jocks laughing, telling stories while slamming their hands over and over again. “We’re Black Italians,” my Floridian cousin once said.

  Being Black in Canada, on the other hand, meant “polite,” “grateful.” We were first-generation immigrants. The subtext there was: Don’t make waves. Don’t make us regret letting you in. Find your tribe and stick to it. This country never belonged to you. Fair enough. You really are grateful, after all.

  Being Black in America, like most things today, means someth
ing else entirely. Haven’t you heard? There’s a quiet referendum on your value as a human being going on. It’s in the red hats wanting to make the country great again, back to a halcyon time “they” had more and you had less.

  Fun game: find a stack of calendars going back to 1776, take a marker, and circle when America was equally great for white people and people of color alike. Half the country has said “Nah” to ever building a better future. In my opinion, the only difference between “racist” and “white nationalist” is that white nationalists still inexplicably feel a bit of shame at their own views and don’t like to look their bigotry in the eye. They will dismiss accusations of racism out of hand and elevate their hatred into what they believe to be a clear and coherent sociopolitical platform, lest they are considered yokels. It’s not that they hate Black people, see? They just “respect the Western canon,” whatever that means. White nationalism requires more reading, frankly. The reading of nonsense, yes, but reading nonetheless. They’ve done their due 4chan reading in coming to the choice to rationally champion the dehumanizing of others. They are historians, not bigots. Your run-of-the-mill racist has no time for that. You won’t grab their attention with a pamphlet. No, you need another way to validate all the ugly little thoughts they carry sometimes loudly, sometimes under their breath, and sometimes in a corner of their mind that they prefer not to look at or wrestle with. These people keep their lives ordered and Caucasian and would prefer you to do the same on your side of the street, school system, dating app, mall, neighborhood, TV channel, so everyone can be happy.

  However it chooses to self-identify, that hate is still there and always so very willing to be heard, marketed to, and granted plausible deniability. And what better, more fetching attire than to dress it in a desire to make America great again? What’s wrong with that? A noble endeavor on the back of an eagle. That hate smiles at itself in the mirror while making pouty lips when it is rocking that little number.

  No Black person was surprised by Donald J. Trump’s November 2016 victory. Disappointed, yes, maybe, but not surprised. The first people I heard predict his win in 2016 were the older Black Americans in my life; those cynics who had been waiting for that Obama pendulum to swing back.

  “You ruffle waters, you stir up the crap at the bottom,” my uncle’s girlfriend Carmen says with a hand at her chin, discussing the prospect during the summer of 2016 and mixing a basket of metaphors to capture the sentiment. She hoped he would at least be a good businessman. She wouldn’t vote. In Florida, her district was only ever red. Voting takes hours out in the hot sun and she has diabetes and a bad knee. I’ve never voted in this country, so what would I know?

  The second people to predict Trump’s win were young disaffected white people—of which my life was full. I remember an old roommate, Chris, chewing his early afternoon cereal wishing Trump would be elected.

  “Screw it! Let’s blow this joint.” He laughed, rolling an actual joint as we broached the matter. He was a bartender and Columbia MFA graduate who staunchly would not vote, but claimed that Donald Trump was the shock to the system the world needed. His parents had a house in Connecticut, he liked expensive plants; he was societally foolproof in a way that the societally foolproof were never quite aware of.

  The Trump era—because that’s what we’re in at the time of this writing, an era, not an administration—was the beginning of a new unprecedented level of Black anger on my part. I began to make more jokes about white people, those foolproof daywalkers, and feel somehow sated by it. Truth to power, yada yada yada. It’s pointless and unfocused, but for two years “race” was constantly at the foreground of my brain in a way it had never been before.

  Being Black in America, like most things today, means “angry.”

  A particular spike of that anger came the week of January 11, 2018, a week during which America’s racial-targeting mechanism moved from my nebulous Blackness to my specific Haitianness.

  The orange-hued septuagenarian asshole at the center of this uptick in negative attention was, of course, the inescapable trending topic of the world. During a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries.

  It was not the first time reports of the most powerful politician in the world singling out Haitians for his outspoken racism had circulated the web. The comment, first reported in the Washington Post by a Democratic aide, came two weeks after Trump said Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS”1 during a summer 2017 meeting about immigration.

  The president later conceded to having “been tough” on Haiti but denied having ever used such crude language, just as the White House denied his AIDS comment two weeks prior. Both denials had that ring of Nananananana, prove it! to them.

  It’s still fair to say that the man known for Scotch-Taping his ties to his shirt, staring directly into the sun during an eclipse, and mismatching the red and blue when coloring in an American flag around a table of toddlers—instances all captured on camera—does not hold my country of birth in high regard. Yes, shocking, I know.

  As I write this, I can already read the one-star reviews on this part of the book.

  “Stay away from politics.”—Sunglassed selfie in a truck

  “This book was mildly entertaining until he got all pseudopolitical.”—Pixilated photo of grandchildren in front of a cropped-out landmark

  “Typical liberal making broad statements.”—Stock photo of lilacs

  Let me be clear: I have no goddamn choice here! I would much rather chronicle my poor dating choices or go on a worldwide expedition to meet all my lost half-siblings than talk about race. Do not doubt for a second that I would much prefer spending these remaining pages ranking Rory Gilmore’s boyfriends in excruciating detail. (In summary, it goes: Jess, Early Dean, Late Dean, and then Logan at the absolute bottom.)

  Not to get schoolyard about the whole thing but your boy started it. Apologies if your politics align with the clown du jour but that sheet of basketball rubber thrown over a lumpy Honda Civic repeatedly made his racism personal.

  Blackness, your race, the skin you walk in, was always political in this country. Until Trumpism kicked into high gear, I had simply made a lifetime of pretending apolitical was an option when it was simply one more privilege many do not have access to.

  DID YOU KNOW?

  The 1791 revolution that freed the island of Haiti from French Colonial rule was and remains the only self-liberated slave uprising that led to the founding of a state ruled by nonwhite former captives.

  I won’t lie to you and say that Haiti is not indeed a very poor country. One of the poorest in the hemisphere. Those statistics quickly became the refuge of those desperate to defend or at least attribute some form of logic to the president’s gratuitously racist comment.

  This is primarily achieved by downplaying the fact that Haiti and Africa were called “shithole” in direct contrast to Norwegian immigrants; a better, milky-skinned class of immigrants that America should be aggressively recruiting.

  When my mother, a Haitian immigrant, now naturalized tax-paying Canadian, heard the news, her only response was a heavy sigh and the question “But why Haiti?” (As someone who has been living in America since college, I’m now often expected to provide some form of insight into this man and his mouth.)

  The country was already heavy on her mind at the time, on what was the eve of the eighth anniversary of the earthquake that claimed 100,000 to 316,000 Haitian lives in 2010. Siblings, cousins, neighbors, friends who all live in cluttered frames in her living room. Now, she wanted to know exactly what her homeland had done to Donald Trump to be on his lips so very often.

  Why Haiti?

  It was a good question. What had this poor, little country with a population roughly one-fourth the size of California’s done to our commander in chief?

  After all, there were no geopolitical reasons as to why the country is suddenly at the center of the president’s bo
rder collie vocabulary. Trump’s focus on Haiti felt much more specific than the continental “Africa” with which it is often paired; at once personal and completely random: a point on a map for which he harbors an open revulsion.

  NO, REALLY, THOUGH: DID YOU KNOW?

  The 1791 revolution that freed the island of Haiti from French Colonial rule was and remains the only self-liberated slave uprising that led to the founding of a state ruled by nonwhite former captives.

  What I wanted to tell my mother was that it really couldn’t be any other country but Haiti.

  Our homeland sits only a short flight away from the tail end of Florida. There are also many of us around. Like Mexico, one of Haiti’s primary sins in Trump’s eyes is its proximity to America.

  Haiti’s crime of the moment seemed to be that the country was home to a suspicious number of Haitians, and two things are clear: with some Omarosaean exceptions, Black people generally aren’t the best people (for those, seek Norwegians or your blonder Russians), and Haitians constitute the very worst of Black people that the globe has to offer. On his lips, the name “Haiti” is the placeholder for bad, gross, and icky: the hole from which shit pours.

  The man sitting on top of the world these days is the worst sort of bully: the unimaginative kind. The one desperate to give labels that he hopes others will parrot; to brand those he dislikes with something that can’t be shaken off. “Crooked.” “Sloppy.” “Pocahontas.” “Little Rocket Man.” In our case, “Haiti” itself is the pithy moniker. We, Haitians, are the Black people who, through a series of events, have become Donald J. Trump’s go-to example for all the gross foreign Black people he does not want in his version of this country. All Haitians are unwanted Black foreigners, and all unwanted Black foreigners are Haitians. A logical progression from the Mexican rapists and Muslim terrorists.