Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(38)



Sometimes my father beat us something awful. It was ritual and tradition, of course, in so many of our communities. He got beat, and, therefore, he beat. It had long since passed into rite and folklore, long since been an artifact of the agonizing anthropology of complicated black domestic habits. It had now become part of the art of punishment and control—in part to keep us from being slaughtered in the white world. The logic is as simple as it is brutal: I will beat my kids so white folk won’t kill them.

That’s some black-on-black harm you never seem to take credit for. That’s some abuse rising from fear you never seem to take notice of, even a little responsibility for. You ever consider this, beloved? You ever have to apply the cane, or stick, or switch, or belt to your kid’s backside for that reason? You certainly took the high road when it came to football player Adrian Peterson brutally switching his son. But you have no idea of the history of corporal punishment among black folk and some of the reasons it exists. Do you see how this might enrage us against you even more? We are angry that fear leads us to hurt our kids. We are angry that even after beating our kids, sometimes with sadistic regard for your criminally intense need to monitor us, you still manage to find ways to kill the flesh of disciplined black people.

White folk created the world where black whipping was necessary. White folk also created the world where black parental punishment is seen as savage. Our disciplinary practices are used to argue our questionable moral and mental health. Some of that may even be true. But white folk hardly ever want to admit they have a hand in all of this; you never assume responsibility for making it so. When my father beat me, I wondered if he was really flailing at himself, at an idealized self that was reflected in my lighter body but always beyond his reach. Nigger didn’t just happen to us. It happened in us. Your continued acting on it and our internalization of it destroys us both.

As it did my younger brother.

Named after our father, Everett, a nutmeg brown, was a couple of shades lighter than him, but among the darkest of us boys. He adored our father. He loved whatever Daddy loved and wanted to do whatever Daddy did. My father loved cars, and when Everett was young, he built and raced go-carts. Competitive and bright by nature, he not only built the best go-carts, but brought them to victory more often than not. Once he was old enough, he traded go-carts for real cars and you could see him side by side with my father under a raised hood on a hot summer day, hands covered in motor oil, a rag hanging from the pocket of his faded blue denim overalls.

When Daddy died in 1981, none of us was ready. It deeply affected all of us. But Everett was the one who was broken by it. With our father gone, he seemed to lose his grounding. Like me, he had always been thoughtful and reflective, but where I read books, he read the streets. We both saw the corruption and injustice of the system we lived in, but while I sought to overcome it, he sought to beat it at its own corrupt game. He sold drugs. He thought he could outsmart the system. But in 1989, at the age of 27, he was tried and convicted—I believe wrongly—for murder, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He has lived behind prison walls ever since.

I cannot blame his imprisonment on skin color, but I can say that how he was treated before he got locked up put him in a prison of sorts too. Like our father, his dark skin marked him for special treatment of the kind no one wants. When we were young, like so many dark-skinned boys, he was often predesignated as the troublemaker. He didn’t finish high school, and got his diploma a few years later in prison. The bad nigger. It was assumed that he’d be more violent, more likely to do wrong, most likely to “catch a case” and commit an act of crime. If enough people, white and black, treat you like the nigger for long enough, you can start to see yourself that way. His life, like our father’s, was lived in reaction to that word.

I saw, too, the favor, sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring, that my yellow skin got me. I saw how the teachers warmed up to me while spurning darker children. I saw how foreboding racial mythologies haunted the classroom, stalked the social settings where black folk lived. The teachers didn’t give some of the darker kids the nod like they gave me; the darker kids didn’t get the benefit of the doubt of being smart. I saw how it ruined many a Negro. I saw how many dark-skinned kids weren’t encouraged in the larger society to believe that they had the skills they assumed I possessed just by glowing in the skin I had.

I also felt the resentment projected onto my light skin, a resentment of light privilege. It cuts both ways, for sure, but too many yellow Negroes deny light privilege the way many of you deny white privilege. We are as blind to our perks as you are to yours. Since I had a very dark father, I was forced to confront the ugly disputes over color that are often silently waged in our communities. But too many light folk just don’t admit what we all know to be the case. And I’m not speaking of light guilt, our color-struck version of white guilt. I mean owning up to the benefits and advantages of being light-skinned. We make up the same reasons why we should be spared reckoning with shade and tone as you give for not addressing whiteness and privilege.

Our being color-struck isn’t the only sign that we’ve imitated whiteness. We’ve also emulated and adopted your coarse reactions to class and sexual identity. Many of us have joined the unfortunate assault on gay folk. We see them as moral poison, or, more politely, we fault them for failing to cast aside a sinful lifestyle. Many black folk use the Bible to thunder down judgment on gay or lesbian folk. We trot out some of the same arguments that were used against black folk by white preachers: that God frowns on their sexual identity; that the Bible says their habits and desires lead right to hell; that their moral corruption is a blight on the community. We black folk have often said, just as you have, that we love the sinner but hate the sin. That questionable formulation proves to be even more ridiculous when applied to queer folk, whose sexual identity singles them out for judgment. For those of us who oppose gay marriage, our hypocrisy screams even more loudly. Although we deny it, the same kind of people who opposed interracial marriage oppose same-sex marriage too. And they are often armed with the same sorts of arguments. Black folk have blindly followed a path of prejudice that earlier ended with us as victims. Many of us find the abandonment of queer black folk a special breed of hypocrisy; failing, for the most part, to find a suitable social scapegoat for our distress, we realize there is no bottom rung that is not already occupied by another black person, and, therefore, we make new niggers of them. If, as Toni Morrison says, it is on the backs of blacks that America has been built, then surely blacks have built other forms of blackness, acceptable blackness, by offering nigger status to those we deem beneath us. As surely as fringe black figures like right-wing ideologue Rev. Jesse Peterson see the black poor as niggers, some religious blacks see queer folk the same way. We can’t seem to shake our hypocrisy, and thus end up mimicking the whiteness we claim to despise.

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