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This hypercognizance of both my blackness and what the possession of blackness in America is supposed to mean has created a nigga neurosis—a state of being where Did that happen because I’m black? and If this is happening because I’m black, how am I supposed to react as a Professional Black Person? are never not pertinent questions.
stories of Vivienne Young (my mom) and Wilbur Young (my dad). I want people to know them. Because to know them—even just the sliver of them that I was able to capture here—is to know how blackness doesn’t just find space but conjures beauty in a country specifically constructed to crush them.
I was only called a nigger that day because I happened to be the one standing at that bus stop. It wasn’t about me. Or how black I happened to be or assumed I wasn’t. I just existed as a convenient proxy for all black people. Which, I surmised, was likely the case for most uses of nigger.
Dad used to joke that he hooked Mom with roses and a batch of New Castle hot dog chili, but I think they both just needed a reliable Spades partner.
(In this dramatization, of course, they definitely wouldn’t notice that the only reason my posture seemed so correct was because that dumb-ass buckle poked my stomach each time I relaxed, reached into my pockets, or just fucking exhaled. I think that belt lacerated my spleen.)
They were expected to fuck up and forced to exist in a universe where fucking up had disproportionately dire consequences. Because of the harshness of their environments, they had to etch and chisel and bite out space to still be young.
High school classrooms are basically Internet comment threads with acne.
No one would dare challenge that my SAT score was one hundred points lower than I said it was, because who the fuck would bother making the effort to create, share, and continue such an insignificant falsehood? I’d defy logic by bending reality so slightly that you couldn’t see a crease.
Apparently, the students assumed we teachers stopped existing when they exited our classrooms. Like motion sensor lights with sentience and homework assignments.)
Like perhaps Jesus had given us the keys to His condo while He spent a weekend in Myrtle Beach, and just hoped we didn’t set His kitchen on fire. Christianity was a reasonably priced Airbnb.
This is one of the things that rape culture does. It places the wants and feelings and desires and fears of men on a pedestal, where the thoughts of men are the only thoughts worthy of consideration, and the thoughts of women are only to be considered if men are kind enough to grant them some space, and we construct our interactions on that imbalance. This is why rape culture is a misnomer, because culture doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just a culture, it’s an atmosphere.
you escape the hood bullet-wound-and-criminal-charge-free by learning how to look like you can fight;
I’m at the darker end of the color spectrum. And everyone—even other black people—assumes that the darker-skinned you happen to be, the tougher you are;
Admittedly, this sounds quite a bit like racism. And perhaps it would be, if black people could be racist toward whites. (We can’t, btw. We can be prejudiced, but actual racism is bias plus power.
She will be taught that whiteness needs blackness—the nigger, specifically—in order to possess and retain its value. She will learn that whiteness requires something it can point to and claim itself to be better than. She will know that it needs that whipping boy
She will be told that the man who was elected president in 2016 was anointed because of whiteness’s urgent desire to preserve its supremacy and be elevated above the nigger, even if that elevation is self-destructive.
