A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

How can the world be so messed up that someone as far down the ladder of society as my uncle is completely convinced that he has to back the most toxic and ignorant presidential candidate in modern history just to bring about some sort of change?

“Black people have been suffering since we got to America, so we’re used to it. We learned to survive through the most obscene hardships one can imagine.

“Dick Gregory said it best,” Don continues. “The white man lives in the penthouse, which is why more white people commit suicide than blacks do. You know, if you already live in the basement, there’s nowhere to jump from.”

When I meet Don’s moist eyes, I think about how every human, from the time they’re born until the time they die, is a universe of memories, dreams, plans, sorrows, desires, and convictions.

In a brief interlude on the 1972 record Ghettos of the Mind, Bama the Village Poet expresses exactly this internalized oppression of the inhabitants of the ghetto. Maybe the ghetto lives in the hearts and souls of its residents. It becomes more than just a physical location made of asphalt, brick, and concrete. It becomes a mentality, a culture that keeps people in place, their heads bowed, with an invisible hand. In the end, resignation and oppression become part of their DNA.

“It’s not every day my son actually understands the sacrifices I’ve made so we could live the lives we have in this country.”

“The incredible thing about your grandpa,” Dad said, “was that when I did come home to him, he wouldn’t turn off the radio or the TV. He always wanted baseball on. So he sat there in his chair, absorbed in the commentary.

My internal system of checks borders on paranoia, and sometimes, an almost self-fulfilling sense of inferiority. It can also make me stuck-up, arrogant, and self-pitying to a destructive degree.

many of my most painful childhood memories are related to not being accepted for who I am.

The majority of people on this planet are not white. But many people still observe, analyze, and explain the world and themselves through the lens of whiteness.

Grandpa bore his skin as best he could, and Grandma was driven by her blackness to make decisions that conflicted with her motherhood. I don’t know how to explain what my skin color feels like; it’s omnipotent. Beautiful. It encompasses everything.

For most of my life, I have proclaimed myself half American, half Swedish, half white, half black. But now I choose to say I’m both white and black, both Swedish and American. German, French, Slovak, African, Cherokee. All these identities belong to me. I’ve gone from being half to double, and in that seemingly tiny semantic shift lies one of my greatest strides of identity. Doubleness is infinitely better than halfness.

that thought is too sad for me to bear. That I should have to wipe out the melanin in their genes to spare future generations the complex, brutal obstacle course of racism.