My Government Means to Kill Me

by Rasheed Newson

Affection never outlasted need. This was the first lesson the city taught me the hard way. The vast majority of us are merely pawns in someone else’s game. Don’t get defensive over this point. Embrace it. Once you do, you can begin to manipulate the board. Positioned correctly, pawns can checkmate kings.

These men were petrified but longed for a release they couldn’t get in the regular lives they claimed to hold dear. They had lied to their wives to sneak away, and they had come to this run-down bathhouse in Harlem, risking ruin if caught. And they were searching for me. They needed me.

Only in that run-down bathhouse was there a group of people who I could count on to care enough about me to get involved, to come to my defense. It felt liberating to know that I could warrant that kind of protection.

Don’t reject the space you gravitate toward just because the windows aren’t stained glass and the congregation isn’t saved.

We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe. Yet the limits placed on our appetites, talents, and potential are implanted in us when we are children—too young to recognize the prisons built with words. We could blame it all on our families, but then we’d never find the keys to unlock our cells. The awful genius of our confinement is that we are both the prisoner and the warden. We tell ourselves daily that we aren’t free to do this or that because we are that or this. To escape such limited thinking, we don’t have to look far. The keys are in our pocket.

“You think the Black family was destroyed by vice, and that’s a good play for an elderly white man because it’s safer than looking in a mirror. What wrecked the Black family was white oppression, white political choices, white violence, white men. The likes of you did more damage to us than crack rocks. I think the Black community actually deserves credit for not being driven into total madness. We have survived your attempted genocide.”

If we never meet our despicable adversaries, we’d never be forced to find out how brave, resilient, and cunning we can be.

The theory goes that governmental agencies don’t accidently make accessing information or resources difficult. They do this shit on purpose. The forms are confusing, and the record keeping is ass-backward because it reflects a policy choice. A decision has been made to repel the average citizen from gaining certain knowledge or opportunities.

Robber barons, political overlords, and other powerful devils can reign with impunity for decades, and the terror they inflict on those of us beneath them can feel eternal. Yet there is one stone that will slay them all: time. Devils grow old, and the world around them eventually exceeds their understanding and control. Never forget that. Never let them forget it.

Winning rarely changes how people perceive us and almost never soothes our insecurities. Winning, as most of us conceive it, is external and public. I didn’t yet know that the most rewarding activities of my life would be those done in secret.

See, even during a pandemic, racism never fails to insert itself into the equation.

“You been looking right through women—all women!—your entire life! You don’t stop to consider what’s going on inside of us. No, not at all! Why do that, shit for brains? What would be in it for you? That’s why you didn’t bother to notice lesbians have been helping make your world go round since before you discovered you had a cock and what it was for!”

“Wrong! I don’t enjoy being useful. I don’t enjoy a second of this. See, this is the problem. This is one of the widest gaps between men and women. The concept is foreign to you, but I’ll say it plain as possible. Women fill a need because they see a need. We don’t necessarily get pleasure from it. We don’t expect a reward. We don’t expect shit.”

You can’t protect your interests if you don’t have an accurate understanding of everyone else’s.

You must remember that your victory comes from unmasking the senseless brutality that the government chooses to sanction against you, a collection of nonviolent demonstrators. The point is to let your bruised and bloodied bodies serve as evidence that the government means to kill you, if you so much as protest its bigoted policies.”

“You were too gay to stand next to Dr. King, but not too gay to pull together one of the greatest political events ever?”