DEAR NIGGAS (letter for the black man)
“Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can’t stay away from another a whole day. So. It look to me like you the envy of the world.”
-Toni Morrison, Sula
A few months ago, I was invited to an after-class outing with my NYU MFA classmates to a bar in Greenwich Village. Our class ends at 9 PM, so it was pretty late and I pretty much hadn’t eaten the whole day. The only thing on my mind was rushing back uptown to my Harlem apartment and making dinner. I’m usually quick to retreat back to my small isolated world but today, I was wrapped up in a conversation with my classmates and I found it a little harder to just decline the invitation and go home. I’ll just walk with them to the bar and go home. It’s on the way to the train station anyway.
We walk in a large group to the bar, I linger towards the back, having three conversations at once. I am the only black man present, but this is a common occurrence at NYU. We are separated at a crosslight and most of the group arrives at the bar before the other stragglers and I. The stragglers included myself, two black women, and a brown woman. Upon arrival, my other classmates are sitting in the outdoor dining area of the bar. Their table was full, no space for us. My decision to go home had been made a little bit easier. The bouncer from inside the bar yelled across the sidewalk to tell the late arriving that photo ID was required to sit down.
One of the black women asked what he said, he mocked her, then he repeated his demand. She and the others rummaged through their belongings to find ID while I perused the menu to make my final decision on whether or not to go home. I continued at least two of my three conversations while doing so. Ultimately, I decided to go home. But before I could say my final goodbyes, the bouncer came out and asked to see ID for all of the stragglers. The bouncer was a middle-aged, average height fat guy, not white but certainly not black either. The other three produced their proof but I stood there with my hands in my pockets. I carry my fat ass Vivian Westwood wallet in my backpack whenever I go to class and I hadn’t taken it off my shoulders yet.
“I haven’t taken it out yet,” I said when he asked to see my ID.
“Oh well, you get the fuck out of here if you don’t want to show ID,” the bouncer said.
“I have ID, I just haven’t taken it out yet,” I said slowly and slightly confused.
The bouncer barely waited a second again before responding again, at a larger volume.
“I said, if you don’t want to show me ID, you can get the fuck out of here!”
I was about to leave anyway, but the aggression in his voice triggered my fight or FIGHT response so I had more to say. I took a few moments to gather myself and looked the bouncer up and down. All eyes were on me, the bouncer took a few steps to advance in my direction.
“My nigga, relax,” I said. I said it in a low tone and without much inflection. I thought this might make the bouncer a bit less aggressive but it did the opposite. It set him off. He went on a tirade about how he wasn’t my nigger (hard R) and how he could kick my ass and how I’m a taller Sisqo and the such. I said my fair share back and I stood on the sidewalk eager for him to hit me, so I could hit him. But he didn’t.
He stuck his finger in my face for a split second and we exchanged profane language. No one said anything, no one had my back. They quietly filed out of their seats and began to walk away from the bar. I paused for a moment before deciding to leave with them. As the space between the bouncer and I grew, I grew more embarrassed and as a result, I grew angrier. One of my black woman classmates began to look for the bar’s name to report them for racial discrimination. I apologized to the group for my actions even though they maintained it wasn’t my fault. Most of them were avoidant and wouldn’t even look at me. Only one of my white classmates said anything directly to me. She asked if I was okay, because I was the victim and I had been called nigger.
I said yes, of course I’m okay. And I am. But more than anything, the only thing on my mind was going back to the bar and killing him. I felt like a pussy (a bitch, a sissy, a coon, soft) for choosing peace and freedom and for considering the consequences of my actions and for being a rational thinker. I didn’t want to go back and fight him. I wanted to put him in the dirt. And it wasn’t because he called me nigger. I call myself a nigga so many times in a day, the word almost didn’t register when he said it. Instead, I was angry because he felt he had the license to try me and to disrespect me. And this, my mind had concluded, was worthy of his death. In the face of my anger, I was disappointed that I didn’t let it engulf me.
We ended up going to a Thai restaurant in Greenwich Village that I frequented. Most of the conversation shifted to other things and I pretended to have let the emotions from the encounter go somewhere else, but it was with me, more than anything else. Me, the black man of the group, was the angry one.
I told my mother about my “racist” run-in and she concluded that I did the right thing but even today while writing this, I am not so sure. Being a black man is a weight, most of it is from within. I felt like the expectation of how I would act in that moment was so built-in to my psyche and the fact that I acted otherwise filled me with regret. I took this challenge to my masculinity as an affront to my whole being. And I know I’m no bitch. I’ve reacted violently (or accordingly) to many instances of disrespect over the years, many times when I had much less to lose.
I’ve had guns in my face. I’ve been outnumbered. My temperament usually allowed me to get out of those situations with my pride intact. And while I don’t think I did anything cowardly in this situation, the lack of a violent eruption left me disappointed rather than relieved.
It took me a few days of contemplation to realize that my disappointment, anger, and discontentment lied with where I was in life rather than with the bouncer, regardless of how much he disrespected me. For the first time in my life, him calling me a nigger felt like an apt description. And that’s because I had spent the past year beating myself up because I wasn’t happy with where I was and what I had accomplished.
Money struggles made me feel like a broke nigga. Creative struggles made me feel like a dumb nigga. Romantic struggles made me feel like an expendable nigga or even worse, the nigga in the wrong all the damn time. There always seemed to be a disconnect between how I viewed myself and how the world viewed me. It’s hard to not feel like shit when it feels like most of the world treats you like shit all the time. Before long, I began to believe them rather than myself. I’ve been angry. And that’s a difficult emotion for me. I don’t carry it well.
And that’s where my thirst for violence came from. I needed an outlet. And I denied myself that outlet. Since then, I’ve been ashamed of both my thirst and my decision to not quench it.
I don’t consider myself a very masculine person. Of course I lean heavier that way, but I was one of those cringe black boys who were putting flowers on their ears and smiling big as hell between each of them. #blackboyjoy. I get manicures and I bleach my hair and I like “feminine” music just as much as the misogynistic music and I cry a lot in the movies (sometimes in general) and I wear flamboyant clothes sometimes and I generally carry myself in a way that invites questions of my sexuality. I feel comfortable embracing the parts of myself that desire to be more feminine and I feel like there is a lot of power in that. There are energies inside all of us but they aren’t at war. They’re dancing with each other. I am not afraid to be soft. But I’m hard.
Most of the time, I keep my emotions to myself and it’s hard for me to express myself to others. I think a lot of black men can relate to this. Depression, mental health, and constant pressure from all sides to be on top of everything creates a strange desire to handle it all or your own. And I am definitely a victim of this phenomenon. I hate going to anyone for help in any capacity, no matter how much I need it. No matter how much I am implored to open up, I simply cannot.
The patriarchy, a false sense of what masculinity should be, a lack of resources, and a failure of education (both mentally and emotionally) create a whirlwind that leads to black death far too often. The suicide rate of black men is through the roof compared to other demographics and the homicide rates not looking much better. Black men do carry an anger and it’s the same anger I have. It’s the same anger that Bigger Thomas has in Richard Wright’s Native Son (shoutout James Baldwin). The same anger I even see in our superheroes, like Black Panther. And it’s real. We recognize it in each other and no one else can see it. No one else even necessarily understands it. Everything that happens, and I mean everything, is done in an effort to reconcile that anger.
We’re all Jody (from Baby Boy). We’re all Malcolm X. We’re all OJ Simpson. We’re all Omar (from The Wire). We’re all Virgil Abloh. We’re all Doctor Umar. We’re all LeBron James. We’re all Trayvon Martin. We’re all Jussie Smollet. We’re all Okonkwo (from Things Fall Apart). We’re all Takeoff. We’re all Barack Obama. We’re all Tyler Perry. We’re all Kanye West. We’re all even that black guy we hate more than anything else in the world. We’re all each other. For better or worse. The anger is a universal, communal anger that we feed together and it has the power to destroy us all. It’s time we find more creative, less destructive ways of communicating our anger.
I don’t mean that in a corny, “you don’t have to play basketball or rap kinda way.” Black men are caught at an intersection of race and gender that allows us to be the oppressed and the oppressor. We are men and we get a good amount of the benefits that come with that, but at the same time we are seen at a lower state as a result of being black. And this causes confusion in many black men about where our rivers should flow, “up” to being a man with white men or “down” to being black with black women. And no river flows up.
As Malcolm X famously hypothesized, the black woman is the most unprotected person in the world. They lie unprotected as a result of our anger and our yearning. Even worse, they have been a victim of that anger far too many times. Toni Morrison once asked of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, “invisible to whom?”
Black women see us and they’ve been with us for so long. They’ve been our mules, carrying the weight of our anger, so much so that they barely have enough room for their own. Black men pay them back with misogyny and patriarchal thinking. Black men wish to ascend and we use the same thought processes as our oppressors to do so. A lot black men don’t hate oppressive thinking but they hate that the oppressive thinking is being used against them. We are what we’re in conversation with. And recently, black men have been in conversation with a lot of piss poor shit in attempts to get away from our anger.
Whether that be antisemitism, misogyny, colorism, homophobia, transphobia, or white supremacy; we’ve lost the plot. Because we have the capacity to be the victim, we resist any idea of us being the abuser as well. Black men are not solely responsible of course, but a lot of black men cannot sit and take a talking to.
The problem, or at least the root of it is that hypermasculinity does not encourage empathy or sympathy. Hypermasculinity is an expectation of black men and until we unpack that, we cannot empathize with the plight of black women. Because many black men do not look at black women and see themselves, they don’t desire to understand black women. But I am black women just as much as a I am any of those niggas I named earlier. In fact, because I know black women are unprotected, I make an extra effort to put them ahead of where I put myself. The constant bouncing between nonexistence and hypervisibility makes it hard. But we are hard. And we can do better.
As far as dealing with our anger, black men need to hear a few things. The first thing, on a serious level, we cannot let go of our anger until we confront patriarchal masculinity and the ways it has been imposed on us. bell hooks writes in We Real Cool, “Wounded black men can heal. The healing process requires that they break through denial, feel what they feel, and tell the truth.” But on a more personal level, we need someone to tell us that it’s okay. Our anger. It’s okay. It’s earned. It’s valid. But we can release it. We don’t need it to be together. We are a community without it.
A lot of black male youth are looking for answers on how to deal with their anger they’re turning to the wrong places. I looked in some of those same places when I was angry about growing up in poverty and having a part-time father and having arthritis and feeling ugly and undesirable and so much other shit. But none of them stuck. I found some of the answers I was looking for in writing, reading, free expression, creative thinking, and music. But mostly, I found a home in black women. I was raised by two black women, my mother and my older sister, so they always had my utmost respect. But by looking to black women and shutting the fuck up and listening and loving them, I have become a better black man.
However, finding answers without learning and unlearning is useless. Here’s a good and short reading list for challenging our anger: Heavy by Kiese Laymon, We Real Cool by bell hooks, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Sula by Toni Morrison, Coming of Age In Mississippi by Anne Moody, To Float In The Space Between by Terrance Hayes, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi, and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
Black men, I love you because you are me. I will love myself better and in new and innovative ways. We are whole. We are niggas. You aren’t heavy, you’re my brother.
I WAS NOT MEANT TO BE ALONE AND WITHOUT YOU WHO UNDERSTAND
