I sometimes think of how the nigger crawled from the newly forming white imagination as a denial of everything that was enlightened and human. I also think about how Frankenstein is the name of the scientist and not the monster, but the monster soon came to be identified by his inventor’s name. “Whiteness,” in the same way, may be the true nigger. Stitching together a warped reflection of yourself, each piece a rejected part of your own body, the creation is made from you, not just by you—a despised version of all your imperfections. Like the monster Frankenstein, the nigger is kept animate as much by the white fear of becoming, or, in a manner, of always having been, the thing it hates most, as by a competing fear: that it should lose control of a part of itself, yes, a black part, and a despised part, too. The loss of control is glimpsed in the black desire to be anything except the nigger that whiteness has made black folk out to be.
Yet many of you, beloved—honestly, it may be most of you—pretend not to know any of this. It may be that you don’t know many of us. You’ve got one, two, perhaps three really good black friends. Maybe you’re not pretending. Maybe you don’t know because you don’t want to know. Maybe it’s worse. You don’t have to know. Your life hasn’t depended, like ours has, on knowing what the “other” likes or dislikes.
Black folk have had to know white culture inside out. We know what coffee you like, what mood you’re in, whether you’ll be nasty or nice to us on the subway. We know just by how you glance at us as you interview us if we’ll get that job. We know the fear you feel when we get on the elevator, so we whistle Vivaldi or the Andy Griffith theme song to put you at ease. Although, just to spook you, we sometimes ask the black person we’re with how he’s adjusting to life after being locked up for murder for the last 20 years.
We know the way you clinch your white girlfriend a bit tighter when our virility marches up on you unannounced, and the woman on your arm, you fear, will want to be in our arms. So we act less threatening. We have to know as much as we can know about you to keep you from wrecking our lives because you had a bad day. We have to know all we can know about you to keep you from firing us or gentrifying our communities and shipping us to the outer perimeters of hell. As the creator of a bad racial allegory, you have all of Dante’s rage but none of his poetry.
* * *
Beloved, we know the word finds greater currency and menace in white circles than you are willing to say. The ban on its use by white people is an attempt to arrest its murderous spread. The white folk who claim that the call to stop using the word is to cave in to political correctness ignore history and black humanity. They are the kind of whites who pose as “honest.”
We have, most of us, anyway, rejected your imagining and defaming of us as nigger. We have done everything humanly possible to prove that we are not who you say we are. I am from a generation far more willing to make the effort than the one freshly on the scene. Black Millennials have little use for respectability politics; they see no need to prove their humanity before you treat them with decency. They discern the fatal lapse in your logic: Why should black folk ever have to prove our humanity to white folk who enslaved and raped us, castrated and murdered us for kicks?
Your white humanity is forever at stake with such young folk. And you know what, beloved? They have a point. Black folk my age and older have a direct memory of what it means for white folk to be blind and deaf to us even when we stood by the thousands in the streets and screamed our names for the world to hear. “I Am a Man,” we blared through a bullhorn, amplifying both our desperate desire to be recognized and our unknowing sexism. While pleading that the world not be blind to us, we couldn’t see the women by our side. “I Am Somebody,” we insisted, even when it was more aspiration than belief. All of that was our way of saying—in reality, our way of preparing to proclaim—that “Black Lives Matter.”
Beloved, there is something black folk fear, whether you can see it or not, whether some of us black folk will say it or not. Our fear is that you believe, that you insist—finally, tragically, without hesitation, with violent repercussions in tow—that, in all sorts of ways, we are still your nigger.
It is a belief you hold on to all these centuries later. It is a belief that has survived all of the marches, and bullhorns, and protests, and politeness, and good behavior, and forgiveness, and Kumbaya, and nice Negro smiles. It has survived our dancing to a song playing nowhere except in our heads. It is a song that we hoped would quiet your insistence that we disappear or die. It is a belief that has survived all our trying, trying, trying to make you see that most of us will never do you any harm. And you’ve shown a brutal consistency through the centuries by not hesitating to kill a nigger on sight.
It’s painful when black folk have so easily, sometimes unknowingly, perhaps invisibly, bought into the logic of the nigger and let it rule our minds. I saw this in my own family.
When I got into Cranbrook—a prestigious prep school outside of Detroit in Bloomfield Hills, one of the wealthiest suburbs in America—my parents and I took a tour of the school’s prosperous geography. As a white student guided us around campus, we weathered a light drizzle and came upon a puddle. The white kid stepped around it, and I stepped right through it since it wasn’t deep.
“See Ivory, the white boy is a genius, and Michael ain’t,” my father said to my mother, thinking I hadn’t heard him, or, perhaps, he didn’t care whether I heard or not.
A great grief engulfed me. It was at that instant that I completely, unforgettably, understood what Baldwin meant when he wrote of his own father that “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” I felt the same about my father. He was a barely literate man who likely had to drop out of school in Georgia in the eighth grade. He was a man whose industry and muscles got him work in a factory. He was proud of my desire to get more education, yet he lived in a prison of disbelief in his own worth. Therefore he doubted mine too. That he could believe that a white kid was smarter than me because he stepped over a puddle proved how little he believed in black intelligence and how much he bought the lie of white superiority.
I flashed back to when I was eight years old and I mimicked his pronunciation of the number four. He pronounced it “foe.” I followed suit, but he stopped me in my tracks.
“Don’t you go to school, boy?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Don’t you know how to say that right?”
“Yes.”
“Then do that from now on. That’s why you go to school.”
I could feel his self-doubt mingled with his deep desire for his son to do better than he had. But at Cranbrook that day his self-doubt led him to take refuge in caustic judgment. He projected his limitations onto me even as he wanted me to have more opportunity. This is the racial catch-22 that too many of us face. This is what whiteness does to the black mind.
* * *
I saw what being thought of as a nigger did to my father. I also see what it does to millions of my people who struggle every day to be recognized as human beings.
But I’m different, right? You may think you know me. That I’m a middle-aged man with a PhD, a minister, a public intellectual, a media personality. That I am an exception to your idea of blackness.
I am burdened and privileged by this idea of me, your idea of me. It is a fiction that traffics in long-held beliefs about race. My privilege rests on the idea that I am special, that I am different, that I’m not like “them.” That difference is partly why I get to address you directly, beloved. Why I am considered more capable of speaking to the problem of race, more articulate than “regular” black folks.
But I am not this fiction. I am like every other black American, a person caught between two perceptions. A Jekyll and Hyde of race. Dr. Jekyll is the professor that many of my people, and many of you, love. Mr. Hyde i
s the black man who grew up on the streets of Detroit, who needs do little more than return home to see a fate that could have become my fate in the face of my brother Everett, locked behind bars for more than a quarter century now.
Everett and I are the two black Americas. I am black America the way white America tells us it could see blackness if only—if only we were all respectable, successful, prominent, institutionally affiliated. My brother is the way America does see blackness—suspect merely for existing, naturally violent, obviously criminal, rightly sentenced, thankfully incarcerated. He is my brother and we are two sides of a family coin, a coin that is both biological and national. I don’t for a moment buy the false dichotomy between us. We are both tied together in a seam of racial destiny as the nigger.
I am reminded of this almost daily as I get letters and e-mails from hateful white folk. Choice examples include: “You and that worthless POS in the White House have brought back and given new meaning to the word nigger!” “You Dick head Dyson, you really are a Fucking Nigger.” Or I’m a “spear-chucking, blue-gum, steppin-and-fetchin’, uncle Tom, field nigger. Get your ass out there and pick some cotton while your mammie cooks some chitlins. Your books are shit just like you.” (I don’t doubt that even some legitimate critics feel that way.)
An especially sensitive writer weighed in with the belief that “[w]hites will always beat niggers down because they are black savages.” Another fan opined: “You being an educated man, I have always felt that you were the worst kind of Nigger, (asshole) smooth talking bastard though you may be.” Another writer could barely stand to pen anything in the body of the e-mail; the subject line said it all: “Shut the fuck up nigger.” Yet another said, “You define the word nigger.” One pen pal said, “[You are] nothing more than a hate filled nigger that was given your position due to the politically correct morons that believe you can give self-respect to those that have no idea how to earn it.” Another told me that hip-hop “is just niggers talking shit to a scratched up record.” (Okay, I have to admit, that description does fit a few rappers.)
Beloved, this is just the tip of the iceberg of hate. This is why I can never pretend that I’m in any way better than the masses of black folk. I know that no matter how much education I’ve got, how well I behave, how much compassion I show to white folk, how well-heeled I am in polite company, no matter how articulate I am, I am still just a nigger to so many white folk. And it’s not just the lunatic fringe that swells with bigots. I’m afraid that angry white folk who consider themselves part of the white mainstream have just as much venom and ire. When I used to appear on Fox News pretty regularly with Bill O’Reilly, I begged him to say on air to his sizable audience that even though he disagreed with me, they shouldn’t send me hate mail and call me “nigger.” He never made that plea. His silence reinforced the racial social contract forged by angry whiteness.
And yet we have the ability to shatter that social contract. You must stop believing that you can’t understand us, when, in fact, you choose not to understand us. You must stop seeing us as monolithic and therefore fundamentally, irrevocably different from you when we are singular and exceptional in all ways. Just like you. Our troubles will only cease when you stop believing what you know is untrue: that we are always poor despite our home-buying drive that makes you flee to the suburbs. When you stop believing that we are radical when we can be more conservative than you, that we are one color when we are a plethora of shades, and that we are related to each other and not you when you are related to us in more ways than you can count or may care to know. We are, finally, not your nigger, not in the best world we can create together.
Like it or not, black humanity has been, and continues to be, the only salvation white American humanity has. Democracy might well be a wounded bird incapable of flight without the poultice of black forgiveness pressed to its wings. When we confront racial catastrophe, black folk insist on fighting back. We have given this country the spiritual will and the moral maturity it lost in the bitter divorce of principle and practice. Our nation can only reach its best destiny when that recognition grounds our shared culture and existence. We want what you want. We want to pursue our dreams without the hindrance of racism. We want to raise our children in safety and send them to good schools. We want our communities to overflow with opportunity and support. We want good jobs and health care. We want gorgeous parks and lovely homes. We want affordable markets and department stores nearby. And we don’t want to die at the hands of either the cops or other black folk.
5.
Our Own Worst Enemy?
Beloved, why is it that every time black folk talk about how poorly the cops treat us you say that we should focus instead on how we slaughter each other in the streets every day? Isn’t that like asking the person who tells you that they’re suffering from cancer to focus instead on their diabetes? Your racial bedside manner has always been fairly atrocious.
But we are not fooled. You do not bring this up because you’re genuinely concerned. You want to win points in debates. You want to avoid any responsibility for how traumatized our communities are. You want to hide from the horror of cops mowing us down like we’re animals.
So you hurl that accusation at us like religion. But there is no righteousness in your retort, no healing in your hubris. We are dying, it is a serious matter, and you must lay down your smug self-satisfaction that we are our own worst enemies and face how you are killing us.
Just this once set aside your litany of accusations and listen. Just this once take the side of the true victims of oppression. Just this once please don’t side with the manufacturers and perpetrators of our death. I’ll be honest and admit that there are ways that black folk are doing ourselves in. But I hope you can admit that even those ways are often linked to our gutless embrace of the bigotries you spew.
* * *
Do you think we like being killed by folk who look like us? Do you think it doesn’t bother us? Our bullets are often aimed at each other because we’re too near the site of pain and heartbreak, frustration and depression. We often lack food and shelter, and we live in homes overrun with bodies, leaving us little room or rest. So we lash out at them, or at an acquaintance, or a partner in crime. Yes, it is true: sometimes we send them, or, perhaps, a stranger nearby, to their eternal reward. This is the geography of despair. It is also the pain of never having control, of always being afraid, of struggling to care for and love what we cannot protect. I learned this lesson in a perilous way.
“Give me your money,” the tall, slender black man demanded of my fiancée and me. We were near the corner of a Detroit ghetto street not far from where the ’67 riots were sparked a decade earlier. It was cruelly ironic that we were close to the entrance to a Detroit police mini-station. We were walking home at 10:30 p.m. one Saturday night after a late choir rehearsal at church. Our assailant had come out of nowhere. He announced himself ominously with a .357 Magnum revolver at the end of his shaking hand.
Terror washed over us. This was the Detroit of the 1970s, the city that had been dubbed “the murder capital of the world.” It was also a city in transition. America’s manufacturing strength had showed the first inkling of bowing to a thriving service economy. All those well-paying factory jobs that had been an elevator to the black middle class would slowly begin to disappear. Coleman Young became the city’s first black mayor in 1974. He won in large measure by promising to reform a brutal police force. Most white folk scampered to the suburbs after the riots in ’67. That left black folk in charge of shrinking resources and facing the rise of drug gangs and a spiking crime rate. I feared that night becoming one of its casualties.
“Sir, we don’t have any money,” I said. “I literally have a dollar thirty-five cents to my name.”
The man had on a pair of dark sunglasses. I couldn’t see his eyes to gauge his demeanor. All I knew is that I didn’t want my fiancée and I to die that ni
ght. She was scared speechless. I feared that any sudden move might cause him to shoot and kill us.
The Spirit urged me to talk to him. We’d just come from church. Why not call on faith to see us through?
“Man, you don’t look like the type of brother that would be doin’ something like this,” I offered, praying it struck a chord of humanity, and, at least, racial intimacy.
Thank God it did.
“I wouldn’t be doin’ this, man,” he said, his voice trembling, his body language suggesting a growing regret about his action. “But I got a wife and three kids, and we ain’t got nothin’ to eat.”
It would be another year before my son was born into poverty and I’d know the desperation a father faces when he can’t provide for his own child. Both his mother and I would be unemployed by the time he arrived. I’d have to stand in the WIC line to collect free food offerings. But for now I was focused on getting to that future.
Then our would-be robber delivered a real shock. He revealed the vicious cycle of carnage that makes some people victims and then pushes them to make others its victims, as well.
“Besides, last week, somebody did the same thing to me that I’m doin’ to you.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “We just came from choir rehearsal. And if you’ll let me reach into my back pocket, I can give you my church bulletin. It has a number you can call to get some help.”
He took the bulletin and briefly glanced at it. He looked stumped, perhaps half in disbelief at my desperation, perhaps half believing that I really wanted to help him. I made my final offer.
“Look, I only have a dollar thirty-five cents, but I want to give it to you.”
“No, man, you need that yourself.”
Tears We Cannot Stop Page 11
