Tears We Cannot Stop

by Michael Eric Dyson

  That’s some black-on-black harm you never seem to take credit for. That’s some abuse rising from fear you never seem to take notice of, even a little responsibility for. You ever consider this, beloved? You ever have to apply the cane, or stick, or switch, or belt to your kid’s backside for that reason? You certainly took the high road when it came to football player Adrian Peterson brutally switching his son. But you have no idea of the history of corporal punishment among black folk and some of the reasons it exists. Do you see how this might enrage us against you even more? We are angry that fear leads us to hurt our kids. We are angry that even after beating our kids, sometimes with sadistic regard for your criminally intense need to monitor us, you still manage to find ways to kill the flesh of disciplined black people.

  White folk created the world where black whipping was necessary. White folk also created the world where black parental punishment is seen as savage. Our disciplinary practices are used to argue our questionable moral and mental health. Some of that may even be true. But white folk hardly ever want to admit they have a hand in all of this; you never assume responsibility for making it so. When my father beat me, I wondered if he was really flailing at himself, at an idealized self that was reflected in my lighter body but always beyond his reach. Nigger didn’t just happen to us. It happened in us. Your continued acting on it and our internalization of it destroys us both.

  As it did my younger brother.

  Named after our father, Everett, a nutmeg brown, was a couple of shades lighter than him, but among the darkest of us boys. He adored our father. He loved whatever Daddy loved and wanted to do whatever Daddy did. My father loved cars, and when Everett was young, he built and raced go-carts. Competitive and bright by nature, he not only built the best go-carts, but brought them to victory more often than not. Once he was old enough, he traded go-carts for real cars and you could see him side by side with my father under a raised hood on a hot summer day, hands covered in motor oil, a rag hanging from the pocket of his faded blue denim overalls.

  When Daddy died in 1981, none of us was ready. It deeply affected all of us. But Everett was the one who was broken by it. With our father gone, he seemed to lose his grounding. Like me, he had always been thoughtful and reflective, but where I read books, he read the streets. We both saw the corruption and injustice of the system we lived in, but while I sought to overcome it, he sought to beat it at its own corrupt game. He sold drugs. He thought he could outsmart the system. But in 1989, at the age of 27, he was tried and convicted—I believe wrongly—for murder, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He has lived behind prison walls ever since.

  I cannot blame his imprisonment on skin color, but I can say that how he was treated before he got locked up put him in a prison of sorts too. Like our father, his dark skin marked him for special treatment of the kind no one wants. When we were young, like so many dark-skinned boys, he was often predesignated as the troublemaker. He didn’t finish high school, and got his diploma a few years later in prison. The bad nigger. It was assumed that he’d be more violent, more likely to do wrong, most likely to “catch a case” and commit an act of crime. If enough people, white and black, treat you like the nigger for long enough, you can start to see yourself that way. His life, like our father’s, was lived in reaction to that word.

  I saw, too, the favor, sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring, that my yellow skin got me. I saw how the teachers warmed up to me while spurning darker children. I saw how foreboding racial mythologies haunted the classroom, stalked the social settings where black folk lived. The teachers didn’t give some of the darker kids the nod like they gave me; the darker kids didn’t get the benefit of the doubt of being smart. I saw how it ruined many a Negro. I saw how many dark-skinned kids weren’t encouraged in the larger society to believe that they had the skills they assumed I possessed just by glowing in the skin I had.

  I also felt the resentment projected onto my light skin, a resentment of light privilege. It cuts both ways, for sure, but too many yellow Negroes deny light privilege the way many of you deny white privilege. We are as blind to our perks as you are to yours. Since I had a very dark father, I was forced to confront the ugly disputes over color that are often silently waged in our communities. But too many light folk just don’t admit what we all know to be the case. And I’m not speaking of light guilt, our color-struck version of white guilt. I mean owning up to the benefits and advantages of being light-skinned. We make up the same reasons why we should be spared reckoning with shade and tone as you give for not addressing whiteness and privilege.

  Our being color-struck isn’t the only sign that we’ve imitated whiteness. We’ve also emulated and adopted your coarse reactions to class and sexual identity. Many of us have joined the unfortunate assault on gay folk. We see them as moral poison, or, more politely, we fault them for failing to cast aside a sinful lifestyle. Many black folk use the Bible to thunder down judgment on gay or lesbian folk. We trot out some of the same arguments that were used against black folk by white preachers: that God frowns on their sexual identity; that the Bible says their habits and desires lead right to hell; that their moral corruption is a blight on the community. We black folk have often said, just as you have, that we love the sinner but hate the sin. That questionable formulation proves to be even more ridiculous when applied to queer folk, whose sexual identity singles them out for judgment. For those of us who oppose gay marriage, our hypocrisy screams even more loudly. Although we deny it, the same kind of people who opposed interracial marriage oppose same-sex marriage too. And they are often armed with the same sorts of arguments. Black folk have blindly followed a path of prejudice that earlier ended with us as victims. Many of us find the abandonment of queer black folk a special breed of hypocrisy; failing, for the most part, to find a suitable social scapegoat for our distress, we realize there is no bottom rung that is not already occupied by another black person, and, therefore, we make new niggers of them. If, as Toni Morrison says, it is on the backs of blacks that America has been built, then surely blacks have built other forms of blackness, acceptable blackness, by offering nigger status to those we deem beneath us. As surely as fringe black figures like right-wing ideologue Rev. Jesse Peterson see the black poor as niggers, some religious blacks see queer folk the same way. We can’t seem to shake our hypocrisy, and thus end up mimicking the whiteness we claim to despise.

  * * *

  The use of nigger has been eerily consistent in the culture, especially with the presidency of Barack Obama stoking resurgent white panic and the emergence of Donald Trump amplifying white paranoia and racial belligerence. But black folk haven’t stood by passively. A great many of us have tried to rob the word of its essential viciousness by reappropriating it, though, to many black folk, the effort smacks of internalized racist self-hate. They feel the effort is futile, and tips our caps too eagerly to a word that should be banished from the culture. A nigger is a nigger, or a nigga, they say.

  Beloved, many of you don’t understand why black folk ambushed the word nigger and made something strangely beautiful of it. What’s more, you often appear upset that we appropriate this term while denying you the pleasure of helping us to reshape its use. We strictly forbid you the privilege of participating in our fierce disputes about the word. As for the attempt to make the word palatable in our arenas, you don’t have to know a lot of social theory to know that powerless people often fight power with their words.

  Black people have been lying in wait to murder nigger from the start. (Except for those who seek to become the nigger you feared in their rebellious or wayward existence, but that is something to explore another time.) We quietly fumed at the way the word caricatures our humanity. For a long time we couldn’t make you stop using it so we gave it a go ourselves. Jay Z explains in one of his songs the mechanics of how the word went from nigger to nigga. Jay warned on the song “Ignorant Shit” that artists often use exagger
ation to make their meaning clear. He boasts we “shoot niggas straight through the E.R.” That is, he lopped off the “er” at the end of nigger and replaced it with the “ga” to make it nigga. Thus an offensive word became to many black folk an affectionate one.

  Nigger is the white man’s invention; the gender is deliberate here, since this was a white male creation even as white women shared the culture of derision too. Nigga is the black man’s response since black men were most easily seen as nigger. But black women bore an even greater burden with a double portion of slander when they were called “nigger bitch.” Nigger taps into how darkness is linked to hate. Nigga reflects self-love and a chosen identity. Nigga does far more than challenge the white imagination. Nigga also captures class and spatial tensions in black America. Nigga is grounded in the ghetto; it frowns on bourgeois ideals and spits in the face of respectability politics. That’s why an incident in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency resonated so widely.

  “Yo, Barry. You did it, my nigga.”

  Larry Wilmore fired a rhetorical shot across the bow of blackness with these words at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The Nightly Show comic made an appearance before the group to tell jokes following President Obama’s final standup routine. Referring to the president by his youthful nickname was one thing. Referring to him with a vernacular offshoot of nigger was something altogether different. Letting that be his last word about Obama at a gathering the world paid attention to was beyond the pale.

  The fallout in black America was swift and heated. Black social media was atwitter with Wilmore’s comments, supporting or lambasting him with equal passion. Black journalists and civil rights leaders chastised Wilmore for breaking black code and saying nigga in mixed company. They believed that Wilmore should have observed the informal rule that you don’t say that word around white folk. But that rule was from before rap albums gave the term currency far beyond the hood. Wilmore’s black critics reprimanded him for his poor choice of words and for insulting the most powerful man in the world. They also blasted him for disrespecting the black journalists in attendance. Others saw the debacle from both sides. Obama was unfazed by Wilmore’s utterance. The smile on the president’s face said that he enjoyed this spontaneous moment of racial intimacy. Obama returned Wilmore’s “peace out” double fist pump to the chest and embraced him after his performance.

  On the surface, the Wilmore controversy appeared to be little more than a skirmish between black elites over the use of politically incorrect language. In truth we got a glimpse of something far older, far bigger, and far more intense: the fierce battle to define black identity—indeed blackness itself—that has raged in black quarters since black folk set foot in the New World. The word nigga captures that tension.

  Nigga often sounds organic and sensual in the mouths of black folk. Its meaning is shaped by the circumstance in which it’s said. It is a term that works best when spiced with humor and slang. It is a greeting. “What up nigga?” It is a direct object noun. “You my nigga if you don’t get no bigga.” It is meant to emphasize or celebrate. The set up: “Hey man, I just got into Harvard.” The celebration: “Nigga!” It is an imperative suggested by a change in tone. “Hey, bro, my doctor just called and said I’ve got to get some blood work.” The speaker is urged to comply with the doctor’s wish in a responding voice that slightly stretches the first syllable: “Nigga!” It is laughter. “These girls never give me any play and I drive a Mercedes, as in Mercy ‘deez payments killin’ me!” The humorous response, with hand over mouth: “Nigga!” It is a sign of approval: “My nigga!” It is a sign of disapproval, said sternly with squinting eyes: “Nigga.” It is an expression of disbelief spiked with a smirk: “Nigga, please!” It expresses self-hate, much like nigger does, with a scalding, scolding tone: “Niggas.” And it signifies a love for one’s folk even as one acknowledges their flaws, largely in a light-hearted vein: “These niggas.”

  If more of you understood that nigger is a world apart from nigga, and if you understood how the different spelling and pronunciation—and the race of the user—changes its meaning, then some of you might not insist that you should be able to say it too.

  Beloved, feel free to admit it. Most of you thought that black folk were saying nigger. You thought that you had been banned from using it because it was a horrible word, only to discover, to your surprise, that black folk were saying it too, which meant that it was once again safe to say. But many of you felt disappointed. You felt it your duty to admonish black people that they should know better since the word supports the bigotry of some whites. Too many whites believe that it is easier to warn black folk not to use the word nigga—to tone down their lyrics and eliminate a troubling word—than it is to keep white folk from using a racist epithet that still echoes in white quarters. Some of you may even feel a bit of anger since you had done so much to keep your family and friends from using the word. You think it is hard to tell white folk not to use the word when black folk simply won’t stop.

  My friends, white privilege screams in many of these reactions. The fact that too many white folk don’t know the difference between nigger and nigga is more than a lack of curiosity; it is a refusal to learn about black life and culture.

  Of course, it cannot be denied that some black folk also think there’s no difference between nigger and nigga. But even though that’s true, the stakes are different. Many whites draw equivalence between the terms as a way to establish fair rules about what blacks and whites should be able to say to each other. Many of you believe that the ban is universal and means nobody should use the word. Many blacks agree. Their aim is largely pragmatic. They want to keep white folk from believing they have a right to say the word in public. If the best way to do that is to keep black folk from saying it too, then so be it. That history sets some black folk’s teeth on edge. They think the term’s mutation to nigga offers scant relief from the hateful charm of nigger. They think that many of you won’t be smart enough to tell the difference between the two. This may be where black conflict merges with white privilege. I refuse, and I hope you do too, to turn white Americans into infants. Older members of your communities know, or can easily learn, that there’s a difference in the two terms.

  Is it reasonable to say that younger whites who hear the relentless thump of nigga on their favorite rap tunes are ignorant of the history of violence against black folk that nigger suggests? Is it possible that those same black artists are poor historians too? That may be true. Yet those same kids, indeed those same artists, can’t be let off the hook for refusing, as my father used to say, to “get their lesson.” We don’t excuse young people their ignorance of American history; we teach them, even as we chide their bluster and their pride in not knowing.

  I had to testify in the 1990s before a state legislature about the effects of rap music on our nation’s youth. I had to answer in part the claim that a white boy had been encouraged to use the “N word” because he heard it in his favorite music. I asked the legislators, rhetorically, if that same boy, who had been introduced, perhaps, to the “B word” too—which is repeated, arguably, as much as the “N word” in rap music—had refrained from using the term against, or around, his mother. I supposed out loud that he had no doubt learned how and when and with whom to use the epithet, or even one of its offshoots like “beyotch” or “biotch.” Thus he learned not to use the B word in certain contexts, and should understand that he cannot use the N word either. The same is true for other white boys. Even as they hear the word nigga constantly looped they should know better than to abscond with the privileges of blackness tucked into their oversize clothing. I’m sure you realize the hypocrisy of urging folk to be responsible and yet making excuses for white America.

  You may have heard some black folk argue that using nigga is a sign of black self-hate. That is black folk denying their own history, denying their own savvy, their ability to code-switch a
nd to make distinctions between words and the histories those words carry. There are many signs of black self-hate to combat, but using nigga isn’t one of them. Martin Luther King, Jr., the greatest black man ever, and arguably the greatest American too, used nigger. The night before he was murdered, King had a pillow fight with his lieutenant Andrew Young and his closest friend Ralph Abernathy. King and his compatriots often let off steam with such antics as they confronted the heart of American darkness. During the pillow fight, King playfully reprimanded Young, asking, “Lil nigger, where you been?” It is not that King is beyond the possibility of self-hate; a compelling argument for that resides in his little-known yet tragic disdain for dark-skinned black women. But self-hate certainly could not be ascribed to King for humorously using nigger as he was about to sacrifice his life for black freedom.

  * * *

  Beloved, you’ve got to face the fact that accusing black folk of perpetuating the legacy of inequality by using nigga is a vicious ruse. It is yet another way of refusing to accept responsibility, of wanting everyone else but white folk to practice the accountability you preach. All of this is a calculation to avoid a bigger issue, and that is how black folk are, after all of our efforts to be accepted as fully American, still seen as the other.

  6.

  Coptopia

  Beloved, some of you seem genuinely surprised that most black folk fear the police. You are sometimes shocked that we think of them as a brutalizing force. You cringe when we say they are out to do everything but serve and protect us. You think we are manufacturing stories about our bad encounters with police. You think that we must have done something wrong to provoke such remorseless cruelty. And yet we have exhausted ourselves telling you how they mistreat us so routinely that it is accepted as the way things are and will always be.