What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

by Damon Young

I never feel more alive and closer to death than when I am pondering ways for whiteness to ruin my life.

I hate him because I let him off easy on the back of that bus. I actually possessed the perfect trump card, and the memory of his fucking face reminds me of a time I was too self-conscious to realize I could play it. He’s a proxy for the mélange of self-doubt and ceaseless self-deprecation that infested my psyche, and I hate him because he reminds me of when I didn’t love myself enough to be hateful toward him then.

For many black American families, the dogged and grim pursuit of upward mobility—of the American dream being actualized instead of aspirational—cultivates a dynamic where performative mobility replaces actual mobility.

The source of that invisible force and that unstoppable inertia that kept teasing them, that kept allowing them to break through for a stretch before tripping them up and pulling them back again, that would lay latent until it saw fit to remind them it was there, is obvious to me now. 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.

We were, and still are, soaked in it. We marinate in it and are pickled by it. It brutalizes us. And that brutalization brittles and breaks us. We spent, and still spend, so much effort, so much time, so many resources, trying to match or maybe just perform the hyper-rigid heterosexuality we were socialized to aspire to, for fear of being seen as soft. And we used, and still use, gay men as proxies instead of people; as adaptable poltergeists for our egos and personal political narratives.

Lying about what I didn’t do and hadn’t yet done had become such a reliable crutch that I’d genuinely surprise myself when I told the truth about a fact I assumed would be uncomfortable or unflattering.

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.

Even if doing this confirmed that I wasn’t as good of a person as I believed myself to be, I was willing to trade that self-righteousness for self-assurance. I’d be less of what I considered to be authentically good if it made me more of what I considered to be authentically black.

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.

How is this uncut loaf of ciabatta bread with eyes Velcroed to it . . . human? Wasn’t it just inside of Alecia? Are we sure it’s not just Alecia’s spleen?

😂