Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

There’s a Nayyirah Waheed quote: “If someone does not want me, it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings.”

really want to tell you, from memory, the in-depth plot of the opera Windstorm in Bubbleland, because, honey, it will blow your wig back. But it would take too long because every single detail is essential. Put this book down right now and google it and then come back.

When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.” It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.

Everyone fell silent and then I burst into tears. Someone ran out of the room and got a teacher. My thoughts and prayers are with a teacher at a mostly white, very liberal bastion of progressive education who has a ten-year-old run up screaming, “Someone called Eric a nigger.” It sounds like a lot of paperwork at the very least.

Because of the incident at school, the principal decided she wanted to put me and Prentice in racial sensitivity training. Both of us? Honey! The two of us, together, learning about difference.

And besides, my parents didn’t sacrifice themselves, their time, their prospects, the clothes on their backs, for me to go to school, get called a nigger, and then take a class about it.

Maybe it’s like one of those “heartwarming” race movies where a white person with suspect ideas and a Black person become friends and they both learn a lesson about difference except nothing that’s learned is new to the Black person, who was just going about their Black business when this whole thing started.

I never saw any dead bodies, although once the movie Homicide needed a kid to play a corpse at a crime scene set a couple of doors up. They approached my mother and asked her if one of her sons wanted to earn money lying in the street. I was very excited about this; I thought that this would be my big break. She was like, “Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the front of that bus so that you could lie in a gutter and collect Equity points.”

Every once in a while during my high school years, I would hesitantly and cautiously type “gay” into a search bar in a card catalog. Just “gay,” as if more specificity would kill me right on the spot. Libraries were the only space I felt remotely comfortable even acknowledging the question—which didn’t yet even have words or language, just the faint outline of the punctuation.

When I started at Columbia, the president of the university was a guy named George Rupp. This was in 1999. I never met George Rupp and I actually had to look this information up because I am not a podcaster named Alex and, apparently, I didn’t pay enough attention to important things like knowing the name of the president when I was in college. Ah, well. You can’t learn everything. That’s going to be the motto of my college when I start one: Thomas University—you can’t learn everything! Anyway, George Rupp announced his retirement in March of 2001 and was succeeded, in 2002, by Lee Bollinger, who’d previously been the president of the University of Michigan.

I discovered that, as much as I’d try to stay away from the scourge of hard rock as a churchgoing youth, I’d already heard pretty much every song during car commercials. The highway to hell is chock-full of sport utility vehicles with impressive horsepower.

or in the case of one strange man in South Philadelphia, continuing to sit at a red light while I stood on a street corner and stared at him. He had pulled up in a truck, immediately rolled down the window, and started yelling at me about how I was a faggot. And also a nigger. This was an intersectional moment. I just sort of looked at him, mostly out of surprise. And then out of confusion; I was wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt. This guy must have been a professional faggot-spotter. It was almost impressive. After letting me know who and what I was, he then rolled his window back up and stared straight ahead, waiting for the light to change.

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one. I don’t know that I’ll ever be finished. I don’t know that I’ll ever be fully there. But I’ve learned I can’t be the first person out there calling myself a faggot just to get it out of the way. That’s not how one stays safe and that’s not how one creates community. That energy doesn’t go out into the world lightly or without cost.

For years, I thought that the way to keep from getting burned was to set myself on fire first or to snuff out my light.

If I don’t know what I want, how will I know if I’ve got it or if it’s lost forever?

I hadn’t been in any school before—save for a brief period in which my mother tried to homeschool me and we decided we were better as friends—so