There wasn’t, and isn’t, a wide spectrum of ways a black man could express himself—his beauty, his pride, his love for his own being—in the spaces I passed through. This came from centuries-old external pressures on him, namely the presumption that he was a savage and therefore not actually a man at all. Having a strict understanding of how a black man operated in the world kept us safe. As someone whose deviations from that model were always clocked by others, I understood that.
