What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

by Damon Young

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.

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.

It is perfectly sane, for instance, to be black and to allow outrage to conquer you. It is natural to be aware of our status and the extreme measures taken to expand and extend our subjugation and for this information to make you goddamn fucking furious. It is, all things considered, as predictable to be that if you’re black as it is to bleed when decapitated.

I am forever grateful that I was indoctrinated with New Castle hot dog chili when I was a toddler and too naive to be skeptical. Because while it tastes amazing, it looks like refried regret

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Dad had a baseball bat with him. It had been sitting in the trunk of our car. My dad is black beatnik John Wick.

My John Shaft–with-an-NPR-membership dad

Mom grabs a jar of olives—again, this apparently was the randomest deli of all time; I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were a jar of live frogs—and chucks it through the window and into the street, sending shards of racist glass and chunks of bigoted salad olives onto the sidewalk.

Pittsburgh, a city so historically, hilariously, and hopelessly white that Rick James once tried to snort it.

From the time my parents moved there when I was nine until the summer before my seventeenth birthday, I lived in East Liberty. Which used to be predominantly black before gentrifiers and colonizers transformed and rebranded it into the “Portlandia but with Pierogies” it is today.

The black kids and the white kids generally got along, united in a collective love of $1.04 Whoppers from the Burger King on Frankstown Road and a collective hate of Woodland Hills High School and Silkk the Shocker.

After two months of Dad trying and failing to find a way to get me back into Linton, he enrolled me in Peabody High School, which was three blocks up the street from our home and tried very hard to mirror the first fifteen minutes of Lean on Me. My first day there, I saw two fights and somehow neither involved actual students.

How masculine, how straight, how authentically black and authentically male we wished to be considered existed in concert with how we regarded homosexuality.

as with other inner-city schools in similar neighborhoods performing at similar levels, Wilkinsburg’s reputation cultivated unfavorable presumptions about the type of kids who went there. It was assumed that they were a bit rougher and a bit less inhibited and a bit more adult than the average kid. Which is a presumption that exists for black kids, and black people, in general. And the poorer the person, the stronger the presumption.

Despite growing up broke and black in East Lib, I fell victim to those presumptions, allowing America’s dehumanizations to be contagious. My first few weeks there, I’d walk into that building bracing myself for violence and being just as violent toward my students as I waited for them to be with me.

"That building" is Wilkinsburg Junior/Senior High, where he was a substitute teacher.

For many of the kids there, the school was a respite from the rest of the world. It’s where they knew they’d be warm. It’s where they knew they’d get two hot meals. It’s where they knew they’d have structure and routine, even if some of them fought against it. It’s where they knew they’d be (relatively) safe for eight hours a day. It’s the only place some of them would encounter adults equipped with the energy and resources to help them. And me knowing this and still seeing them how America saw them and wanted me to see them was an act of violence.

"There" is Wilkinsburg Junior/Senior High, where he was a substitute teacher.

being called a name didn’t bother me too much. While a teacher, I’d been a “bitch-ass nigga,” a “smarty-arty nigga,” a “straight bitch yo,” a “bitch-ass bitch,” a “meanie,” a “boogerface,” a “motherfucker,” an “ugly motherfucker,” a “fuck boy,” and a “republican.” High school classrooms are basically Internet comment threads with acne.

the Wilkinsburg Junior/Senior High School narrative eventually shifted from “Mr. Young might be gay” to “Mr. Young got bitches, yo.” Which was still inaccurate. I hadn’t reached or even particularly desired plural-bitches status yet. One girlfriend was enough.

I stood up and shook his hand. It was large and soft and pale yet surprisingly firm, like a sheet of Marriott Rewards continental breakfast biscuits before the complimentary sausage gravy.

because he’s my best friend, he will receive an advance copy of this book before it’s sold, and he will read this chapter. And he will discover, for the first time, that the reason Dad called his dad in 1995 to ask to speak to him, so that Dad could ask Brian to return the gaggle of pornography he stole from PA Video with my family’s membership card, was because I told him that Brian might have.

She saw me and greeted me the exact same way every single student would when they’d happen to see me outside of school. “Mr. Young! I didn’t know you shopped at Gabe’s!” (For the record, I’d also, at various points during my teaching career, heard the following: “Mr. Young! I didn’t know you went to church!” “Mr. Young! I didn’t know you got haircuts!” “Mr. Young! I didn’t know you went to Kennywood!” Once, while at Giant Eagle, I even heard “Mr. Young! I didn’t know you ate food!” Apparently, the students assumed we teachers stopped existing when they exited our classrooms. Like motion sensor lights with sentience and homework assignments.)

Being comfortable enough around black people to not call the cops when surrounded by us is a primary characteristic of the down-ass white boy. (The bar for down white people is pretty low, unfortunately.)

When pressed about her feelings, Oprah explained, “I always think of the millions of people who heard that as their last word as they were hanging from a tree,” which is an emotionally resonant and seemingly unassailable defense of her beliefs.

the entire crew drove to the twenty-four-hour Eat’n Park in Squirrel Hill, where the midnight breakfast buffet is a popular and crucial sobering agent for Friday- and Saturday-night club-hoppers in Pittsburgh.

The buffet’s food—while hot and plentiful—was usually terrible. The bacon was flaccid and annoyed, the eggs despondent, the pancakes in need of a spa day and a therapy session, the French toast sticks trapezoidal and impenetrable, the fruit fishy, the fish fruity, and the sausage gravy looked too much like spunk to even try. You’d see it and you’d wonder how many East End sperm banks were missing samples.

(Eat'n Park in Squirrel Hill)

When drunk, I usually eat how rabbits fuck—angry, sweaty, and looking over my shoulder for falcons.

The girl with the locs at Ava Lounge, the one who danced with me for two songs and then forgot about me for three years, is now my wife. We have a daughter now too. She was born on November 30, 2015, and her name is Zoe Vivienne, after Mom. She is sublime and surreal. She exists now and didn’t exist before and only exists now because of us, and that’s still fucking insane. I’ve literally told her, more than once, as I hold her in my arms in disbelief, that she is fucking insane, and I say this to my baby daughter because I am possibly a bad father. And she stares confused, and then asks me to turn on Elmo’s World.

A University of Virginia study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that doctors, in two thousand fucking sixteen, still believed black people possess a supernatural tolerance for pain. Our pain just doesn’t matter as much because our humanity doesn’t either. The privilege of experiencing pain—and the privilege of that pain mattering—is exclusive to whiteness.

I think about how praise of black women reads like a word association game where someone just placed strength in a thesaurus and found the synonyms. Black women are stout. Black women are unyielding. Black women are stable. Black women are durable. Black women are stalwart. Black women are firm. Black women are poised. Black women are reliable. Black women have grace too. But grace is just another way of praising them for being strong for everyone else while also juggling and then ignoring the urge to firebomb the entire fucking planet.

I had a bald fade with a half inch of hair sprouting from the top of my head. The type of hair that communicated I had a Jansport filled with Trapper Keepers and lunchboxes stocked with cups of deliciously syrupy fruit cocktail and ham sandwiches made with love. It was the Honda Civic of hair.

If she likes it, it’s going in her mouth on the third touch. And if something happens while it’s in her mouth that she doesn’t agree with—maybe it’s a bit spicier or mushier than she expected—she’ll spit it out. But politely, as if to say, “I appreciate your efforts to expose me to Indian cuisine. Perhaps, if I were so inclined, I’d complete the eating experience. But alas, my palate is discerning and you will instead find the remaining contents of the samosa on the floor beside your right foot. Namaste.”

On introducing new foods to their two-year-old daughter.