Definitely Not a Video Game Review
Who would’ve thought that I would prefer the Murder Hornet variety of existential crisis in 2020?
Wednesday night, my mother posed a question that—a full three days later—I still haven’t figured out how to answer. She posted the above photo, a cover from the May 11, 2015 edition of Time Magazine. The grayscale image is a modern one, though it could easily be mistaken for any number of moments from 1968. Mom’s question was simple on its face: “What has changed since I was born?”
I know what my grandmother told my mother and her siblings because she told me the same thing. Every black family I know has had a moment where they had to give their sons and daughters The Talk. The Talk goes something like this.
There are an infinite number of figures stretching throughout American history to serve as a reminder; my mother had Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black kid who was lynched in Mississippi after being accused of whistling at a white woman in 1955. That same woman would later admit on her deathbed that it was a false claim.
Michael Griffith, lynched just three years before I was born, was a 23 year-old who was beaten to death in 1986 near Queens because his car broke down in too nice of a neighborhood.
I honestly believed, for a time, that I didn’t need The Talk. I was valedictorian. I wore glasses. I “spoke well.”
But this week, two things really dawned on me, once when bird-watching, Harvard-graduating Christian Cooper was threatened with death by cop, and again when black CNN reporter Omar Jimenez was arrested on live TV (before, I might add, the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd).
The first thing I realized was that The Talk had FAR more influence on my life than I’d been willing to admit. Was it that I didn’t need The Talk because I made all of those choices? Or did I make all of those choices because I got The Talk? There are so many decisions I make on a daily basis—many of them on a subconscious level—to be perceived as less threatening. When walking or jogging near white women at night, I’ll often make some obvious noise to announce my presence before I get too close. I could go on and on.
The other thing I realized is that it does not matter if you are good. I have spent almost my entire life wearing the gilded armor of black exceptionalism. But this week I was forced to acknowledge that, for a not-insignificant (and increasingly bold) percentage of this country, I’ll never be nothing more to them than a nigger with a couple of diplomas.
It’s a tough thing to reconcile with, here in Seattle, surrounded by so many people who don’t look like me. Though, as a native Alabamian, I’ve had some practice at this. It was tough as a 10-year-old weighing your friendship with a classmate and the fact that they sported Confederate flags in their yards and on their T-shirts.
It was also tough playing football with so many white kids, so eager to say “nigga” to fit in with the black kids on our team, many of whom I would imagine are suspiciously quiet this week. So many who wore blackness like a varsity jacket, only they could take theirs off.
I don’t have much else to add to the larger ongoing debate; there’s no call to action here, except this, I guess: every black person in this country is grappling with knowing that, in the wrong circumstances, our lives are forfeit. There has been a lot of activity this week that I don’t condone, but I certainly understand where those emotions are coming from. So the next time you complain about some property damage without considering the circumstances that led to this unrest, maybe shut the hell up and listen instead.
