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I wasn’t trying to play the victim until the world taught me what a powerful grift it is. Believe it or not, all I wanted was to be successful.
If you don’t have the tragic story or the right skin color but you grew up in the right kind of place with the right kind of poverty, and have the right kind of people to back up that story for you, you might be able to work something out.
I wanted to ask how she knew so much about kissing, but I didn’t know how to say that correctly in Spanish. I was too afraid of making a grammatical mistake and exposing myself as a gringo. So I remained quiet.
He's a no sabo kid
He wrapped my hands around the handle just like dads on the Disney Channel did when they taught their kids how to hold a bat.
Comparing his life to middle class
For the first time, I realized my tragedy could translate into personal gain. A skirting of the rules. A perk.
“Stop the bullshit, Javi,” Mom told me. “Go to class.” Mom wasn’t the only person mystified by what I was doing. Gio was, too. He’d known me since we were both babies crawling around the legs of our teenage moms as they chain-smoked and talked about their man problems in each other’s apartments.
none of the words he’d used to describe me lined up with the words I would have used. Poor? Underserved? From a tough place?
I’d looked for sympathy after Pops died, but that was to get out of things, and to get the attention I wanted. Through high school, I’d mostly dropped that gambit because I quickly realized that the people whose attention I suddenly wanted most—girls—did not react how I’d hoped when I talked about my Pops. Which is to say, they did not find me attractive because of my trauma but rather odd, lonely, sad, and unfuckable.
her breasts were smashed together like people on a train fleeing the Bronx after a Yankees game.
“See, what you have here is a lot of raw emotion. It’s fine to start with. But for our purposes, we need more control. You only have five hundred words. You need to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. A story that hits certain notes the committee wants to hear. Does that make sense?” “Not really.” “You need to contextualize things. Make it about the true goal here, which is getting into college. Getting access to more opportunities. So yes, your friend is part of that, but more important, for our purposes, is why you didn’t end up like him. Where did your paths diverge?” “I thought
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You see, I do this here, at a school like this one, to work with kids like you, because it makes me feel like I’m able to give back.” Mr. Martin’s eyes became watery.
In fact, it was in one of my very first classes there—a required sociology class about race and ethnicity—that I learned something profound: I am a victim of systemic oppression. Or, I guess I should say, I was. Now I’m in some liminal space. Existing in some sort of reverse perjury. My immutable characteristics and “lived experience” no longer count for much. Never did I see that coming.
Some of the rich ones were from Puerto Rico, too, but when I tried to claim a shared heritage with them, and told them about the town my family was from and my childhood in New York, they quickly told me they were real Puerto Ricans and I was something different: a “Nuyorican.” All the different categories separating us were hard to grasp and keep track of. Before Donlon, everyone in my orbit was either from PR or DR. And to anyone else who wasn’t one of us, we were just “Spanish.”
Anais told me that her dad was half Puerto Rican and half Dominican. She looked at the wisps of hair on her forearm. She was the color of coffee with too much creamer. “He’s much darker than me,” she said, with authority. “I’m only light-skinned because my mom is white.” The last part came out like it was some grave sin.
Nikole Hannah-Jones
I described Anais and me going to see concerts on campus; walking around the nearby lake; attending lectures by writers, “thinkers,” and artists; or taking the bus to a small theater to watch the obscure independent movies Anais loved. “They’re like regular movies as far as I can tell, just slower, longer, and with a lot less guns and explosions.”
According to people at the LTC, the reason I got a C on my paper wasn’t because I couldn’t back up my thinking but simply because my professor was a racist. This felt comforting, just like when Diego offered to start a petition on Facebook to get my professor fired, or when Alexandra said there were reams of research about how white professors saw minority students as having inferior ideas.
It was only later, much later, that I realized it was in their best interest to take my column. That I had done them a favor. Nearly every other columnist at the paper was a white man—something that others had pointed out but that had only recently gained traction as a real problem worth taking seriously. In other words, my timing was impeccable—a fact that, fortunately, or unfortunately, held true for the rest of my brief career. I was on the rise during yet another period when diversity was a buzzword.
A third- or fourth-generation Latino who came from some money, at least relative to the rest of us, and who was using their time in college at the LTC to try to connect with their roots or something. To make up for some big, identity-shaped hole in their heart. That was the vibe I got from Anais, and one that I was fine with. Especially since it was clear that she was enamored with me and the way I’d grown up.
“Are you sure you’re going to be able to afford your half of the rent?” I asked Anais. She had yet to line up a job. And the titles she was interested in—community organizer, community leader, activist, person of the people, change agent—sounded nice, but they also sounded like some shit you don’t really get paid for. “Don’t worry,” she said. “My parents said they’d chip in until I get on my feet. My dad will probably even put in extra just because he’s so concerned about me living somewhere ‘safe.’ ” She continued scrolling through the description of the community garden, then followed their
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I saw a beautiful, expansive view of not only Brooklyn but the whole city. Down below it all, though, I noticed something nobody else seemed to see—the projects, the basketball court in the center, the boys standing around in strategic locations. I thought of Gio. The last time I’d heard from him was at the beginning of my senior year. After I became a columnist, the response time between letters grew longer and longer, until they eventually sputtered out and he never answered my last one. What would he say about this place, I wondered.
I knew there was no winning this sort of thing the way that Anais was used to winning things: through debates, spiels, and shaming. “Chill out,” I said to the guys.
The Rag, in comparison, had been going for decades and had launched the careers of some of the biggest American writers. In any era before mine, it would have been almost impossible to write for them. But thanks to the collapsing media industry, the reign of clicks, and the urgent need for “new” and “unheard” voices, I stood a chance.
Rebecca wanted me to write about teaching Black and brown teens during “this time.” By that she meant in the aftermath of yet another murder of a young man who looked like my students by police for reasons that were still unclear but were also unimportant. What was important to Rebecca, a dry white woman from Brooklyn who I sensed from her curt responses to my emails didn’t think very much of me, and other editors like her—as well as seemingly the entire media apparatus—was that the man who was killed was killed on video. What was important was that his name and picture had been trending all
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I refreshed my Twitter notifications like a cratering junkie scraping to pass the time.
I got a kick out of the thought of one man trying to write about the entirety of the minority experience in the United States. Trying to capture all there was to capture. While everyone else on staff, ostensibly, wrote about the experiences of white people. It was an inherently dumb job. But also, for me, a perfect one.
If I’m honest with myself—and that is the point of this book, isn’t it?—the only reason I kept the job as long as I did was because it gave me a degree of street cred. What I liked most about being a public school teacher in the Bronx was being able to tell others that I was a public school teacher in the Bronx and watch them sit back and think of me as such a good, noble person. But that had no place in my story.
I thought about how easy Mom had it. She didn’t have the sort of existential worries I had. She didn’t have a shrewd editor to deceive or Twitter followers to please. There was no leaderboard of hospital secretaries she was ranking herself against. No platform with metrics showing who answered phones better. She could just go through life. Clock in and clock out.
Buddhism: suffering comes from desire
“I don’t remember what I already told you, to be honest. But the letters might have sounded ‘weird’ to you because Donlon changed the way I think about the world. It taught me how to look at things in a new way and really understand them.” “Prison did the same for me. I lived with society’s butt crack. All the citizens of butt-crack land in one little space. People who’ve seen and done shit most people won’t ever have the balls to do.”
“I get that. But also, you do realize that what happened to you was by design, right? Don’t blame yourself too much. You got caught in the system,” I said. “You got trapped.” Gio rolled his eyes. “Here we go. See, this that shit you started spitting in your letters. About me being some poor victim.”
I’d listened to enough ex-cons babble nonsense on the bus and train. Their narrative bridge always crumbled because there wasn’t anything to sustain it. They didn’t have the good fortune of studying with the professors I’d studied with, reading the books and articles from academic journals that they assigned. Learning how to understand and use these big words and phrases—hegemony, structural, institutional, furthermore, all things considered, elucidate—to ensure that your arguments stood tall and sturdy like rich people’s houses, instead of slums built on mud.
But right now what is really in, what is selling like hotcakes, is the sort of stuff you’re writing. First person. Identity-driven. Descriptive. People eat it up. Especially when it comes from the right kind of person. And you seem to have a lot going for you in that department.” “Meaning?” Miles straightened one of the framed book covers on the wall. “Oh come now, Javier. You know. You’re young, good-looking, you’ve got a tough background, some street cred, if you will. The minority experience is hot, is all I’m saying. I hope you don’t take that the wrong way.” I liked Miles. He didn’t seem
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No matter what route I went, Miles explained, the most important thing was that the book be heavy on scenes, on imagery. “Just, whatever you do, don’t write one of these tomes trying to convince people of something with statistics and data. Nobody wants to be convinced of anything. They want a good ride. Paint the pictures they want to see, and don’t take too long doing it.”
The story is back in your hands. And you could take it in a lot of different directions. The right wing will love the revenge angle. They’ll buy the book just to give the finger to the left. Then there’s the repentance angle—you talk about the therapy, the nights you cried, the reflection, the agony. That plays really well with the lefties. You could probably even win an award or two.
All those retweets, likes, and mentions used to comfort me like a warm blanket. My community online, my army, seemingly ready to tweet for me until their thumbs bled, made me feel like a king. But they didn’t really have my back. None of you ever did. I was a star in your eyes until I wasn’t. A useful puppet saying all the right things until you realized I was no longer useful.
I wasn’t trying to be a victim until the world taught me how powerful victims are. Now I understand that my life circumstances just were what they were. The hand I was dealt, and so on.
