What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

by Damon Young

To be black in America is to exist in a ceaseless state of absurdity; a perpetual surreality that twists and contorts and transmutes equilibrium and homeostasis the way an extended stay in space alters human DNA.

Clothing had always been a way for me to both hide from the world and carve out some sort of prominence and status in it. I’d use clothes to shield me from whatever anxieties I possessed. Better you notice this rare and expensive-ass fucking shirt on my chest and these shoes on my feet than my face or my head or my teeth. Also I hoped that clothes would do such a great job concealing these imperfections that they’d effectively replace me—that people would be so enamored with and impressed by my clothes and my fashion sense and the money I must possess to be able to afford them that it would eventually allow them to forget that the person wearing them was, in fact, the person wearing them. And that they’d be so impressed by them that they’d eventually be impressed with me by association. I wanted my clothes to make me.

But I don’t invite them to my house because I just don’t want them in my house. I haven’t been possessed with the inclination to grant them that privilege, and I wouldn’t want my friends or my family or my wife to feel the need to redact themselves in one of the few spaces we’re able to freely regard white people with callousness and mundane and hilarious cruelty. These are not bad guys. But they are white, and whiteness already takes up too much space for me to volunteer my own.