What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

by Damon Young

I hope that every time he runs for a bus he misses it by seconds and is close enough to see both the bus pass by and the perfunctory shrug of feigned pity bus drivers tend to make when that happens.

ago. I want his relationship with fast food fried chicken to be star-crossed and overwrought. I want him to think of an extra-crispy two piece and a biscuit and get hives.

I’ve hated this man for twenty years, so much so that I wish for his perpetual comeuppance in the form of random chicken-related calamity—which is a terribly cruel thing to wish on a black man—but the story actually ended quite well for me.

I just wanted my life to be “normal.” And he just wanted to be “black.”

Dad taught me how to write. He’d revise and rewrite the take-home essays assigned to me in seventh and eighth grade. I’d—well, he’d—get A’s, and then I’d eventually attempt to mimic the stylistic choices he’d made and the flourish he’d peppered his sentences with. He taught me words like permeate, conniption, obtuse, and behoove, and I’d incorporate them at recess with moderate success (“I BEHOOVE YOU TO PASS ME THE BALL”). Mom

White supremacy is so gargantuan and mundane that sometimes its existence and its proficiency can’t be measured, addressed, or even seen without a stark change in perspective. It isn’t like gravity. It is gravity. It is a ceaseless pressure intended to keep blackness ground-bound and sick.

If you’re just black, America adds a decade of age, a vat of sass, and a coating of Kevlar to your skin because of course niggers don’t feel any pain. If you’re poor and black, America acts like you emerge from the womb twenty-seven years old, with four kids, five predicate felonies, and a lit Newport already between your lips. White people get to be babies. And they get to still be babies when they’re adults. Poor black people are born Avon Barksdale.

I overheard a girl ask another girl if I was a faggot. She replied, “‘Faggot’ is a bad word and you’re not supposed to say that.” Which, considering the place and context, was the awesomest thing I’d ever heard. I wanted to stop in my tracks and give that miniature Melissa Harris-Perry a high five and a free raspberry iced tea.

When sistas weren’t around, however, and that performative loyalty and veneration was no longer immediately beneficial, our allegiance was to this down-ass white boy. Who, although a white man, was still a man. Nick’s use of nigga offended our sensibilities. His facile misogyny matched them.