What You Knew

In a passage near the end of “Between The World and Me”, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls walking behind his newly-made white friend after being treated to a meal. He wanted to ensure his journey would end at an old historic building as promised and not in a dark side alley. He framed his fear, which seemed irrational in a place like Paris, with “my eyes were made in Baltimore”. I read that sentence over and over, because I knew what it meant, to have your eyes made. My eyes were made in New Jersey and dioxin orange sunsets, among yellow and Jewish-not-white people, from cicada shells on a high school parking lot. Not Baltimore, but they were still made. They were made when I agreed last semester with my mostly-white race class that race was a performance because Faulkner’s men put gloves on to hunt bears, but they were also made when I promised my roommate that her blackness and my yellowness coursed inside us like blood. They were made when my mother told me not to forget the kindness of this country, because it let her arrive with little and leave with a six figure salary, because it made me. They were also made when I saw Alton Sterling’s son weep. My eyes were made accepting. My eyes were made to see this country’s facets because I didn’t belong enough to any side to buy fully into its logic.

I’d originally approached this column with one question—how angry did I want this revolution—because I believed, like every other college student, that maybe one was going to happen, that maybe our generation was meant to flip the system. In February, Professor Michael R. Klein said at an IOP event that there was no more room in racial social justice for another Malcolm X or MLK and I agreed, but I still saw so much, maybe too much, anger. Whatever was so shocking about Maggie Lam’s column in UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian, whether it was calling her roommate a “white devil” or dry-humping a white boy to prevent a “Scott Pilgrim-esque romance”, I’d seen it before, that kind of rhetoric or action. I wanted to say that Professor Klein was right, that we didn’t need to be so angry. I wanted to point to the suicide rates. I wanted to say that we didn’t have to be so angry to dethrone whiteness, because one day, it was going to dethrone itself; because one day, this grand whiteness was going to fall with or without the help of people of color. It was going to fall because Egypt fell and Rome fell and even Europe fell, because privilege was necessarily self-destructive, and oh, it had to be so. Oh, power moved in cycles, didn’t it?

My conclusion was that coloredness was naturally more constructive than whiteness. The question of privilege—how to maintain it—was dangerous because its only answer lay directly in the devaluation of others, which could only happen if people fundamentally devalued themselves. On the other hand, the question of how to survive—which was the question of oppression—was about life, the sheer essence of it. We had to wait for all the forces to kick in.

But in all my confidence that privilege would fall, I had forgotten about blood, how it could leave a country in coma. My thoughts were abstracted because I was removed. I had the privilege of being racially impartial because of the yellowness of my skin. I had the privilege of being academic when I probably should not have been. I had the freedom to interpret and misinterpret. I had the privilege to argue until I was right, or until I could forget I was wrong.

When I first encountered the idea that whiteness was nothing without blackness in Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark”, what stuck to me was that whiteness was nothing, which meant that coloredness was substantive, and wasn’t that true? We danced hips first, and our food had spice. We had lingo, and our music had rhythm. Our hair was black, and our skin was gold, oil, obsidian. We were substantial and interesting and I wouldn’t have traded it for all the whiteness in the world. Color left me a sourceless, dreamy power.

What should have stuck to me instead, what I was supposed to hear in that sentence, what I had forgotten to think about, were the words “without blackness.” Whiteness was grand if it was rugged and heroic and optimistic and beautiful, like the Wild West and the American Dream. But that conception of whiteness was too good to be true on its own. It was only possible to claim ruggedness as romance if there was something else watching the dirt of it, to claim heroism if there were people, complicit or ignorant, to save. It was only possible to expect happy endings if someone else’s endings were expectedly sad, above average if there were others below average. How could you not claim beauty if there was a full body of otherness you were taught to label as ugly? How could you not feel powerful if you had this otherness breathing at gunpoint?

But I am not here to condemn whiteness. I am not here to show its illusions and falseness, the way it bends to avoid the shadow. I am not here to revel in its cowardice in claiming itself, its inability to confront its own actions. I am here to tell you what I forgot, because maybe someone else has forgotten it too.

I forgot about black people.

I forgot that you are so alive because you know what it means to be dead and still breathing. You are fighting because you know a stronger sweetness than the rest of us do, the taste of joy when it has been forbidden. You are so grounded because you have been made rootless, and you have had to construct your own roots. You carry history because you are history, but more, you know its weight. You love this country not because it deserves you, but because you have chosen to stay.

When I was younger, I’d only seen the glory of it, the aftermath of your trauma. I didn’t know that what I saw was related to hurt. Now I know it could only be made from it. I have always lived in books, in words. Your books, your words, made my eyes. I wanted to see as Alice Walker did. I wanted to see the purple in a hill and know that the earth had been kissed, blessed by God. I wanted to know, like Toni Morrison knew, that nuns went by as quiet as lust, a lust that was quiet, a nun that lusted; to say, like she said, “make me, remake me” one day like I meant it. To state, like Terrance Hayes stated, that I knew what real beauty was, that it hurt alright, that it ached like an open book, that it made it difficult to live. To know there was nuance to existence, and the nuance allowed you to live. That was what I wanted to know, and that was what you showed me.

You saw beauty I could never see because you needed to ask questions I never had to ask. Where was God? Not in a miracle that you were not entitled to. What you knew: you could wait a lifetime for a miracle that would never happen, or you could open your eyes. What made you human, if not the nametag or other people’s smiles, if not money or the shine of glass? What did you have but your heart, your eyes? What you knew: nuns could go by as quiet as lust because everyone had lust, everyone had life. If you, who had been devalued, dehumanized, had them, then everyone did. What you knew: you could choose beauty and love over what was in front of you. If everyone told you that you had to die, you could choose life. If everyone denied the fact you were meaningful, you could choose to feel.

You are so alive because you know what it means to be dead and still breathing. For that, we must fight for your life.