Floydian Slip
My eyes peel open and I embark on a mostly unpleasant journey that will persist until I muster sufficient mental velocity to propel myself out of bed.
I scroll through my phone as I sojourn in this desolate head space. I read articles. I peruse the memeosphere. I lament, often audibly, the Right’s sustained drive to reverse every step human civilization has taken toward justice.
This forenoon ritual is also a time for righteous self-flagellation. It’s critical, it seems, that I spend at least some time every morning, admonishing myself for a whole host of very real personal flaws. Flaws which, for some reason, are particularly noticeable as silhouetted against the backdrop of my recurrent A.M. debacle.
I hate getting out of bed in the morning.
My Skin is Brown
Pillow Talking
As I stagger through this sordid routine, Instagram serves up for me a segment from an episode of Late Night with Seth Myers.
Seth Myers is great. He’s funny, for sure, but he also seems like a pretty normal and pretty progressive guy. I think I’d enjoy spending time with him. He strikes me as casually familiar in a way that other late night TV hosts like, say, Jimmy Fallon, don’t.
In this particular segment, Seth asks his friend, Amber (who is black) to teach him about becoming a better white ally. A hilarious, multi-layered parody ensues.
The thrust of the segment is that black people are exhausted - emotionally and physically - after having navigated the race-premised tumult that’s characterized recent months. Many black people are quite uninterested in educating white folks about blackness, about whiteness, and about the extent to which the United States’ mythology is inconsistent with its actual history.
Confronting oneself is a recurrent pilgrimage that’s part of every ethical person’s life. One can, and I think should, seek support on that journey. But the unrelenting work of identifying, and ideally eliminating, the self-serving absurdities nestled in our belief systems is, in the end, a solo project.
So too, no one can confront our privilege on our behalf. That’s the case whether our privilege stems from our status as Americans, as able people, as white people, as men, as heterosexual, or as cisgender.
In any case, white folks should be circumspect in calling upon the exhausted black people in their lives to guide them through their transition from non-racist who doesn’t understand systemic racism, to anti-racist who makes justice their personal responsibility - or, at least, who can talk about race competently without sounding like a fucking Karen.
Black people didn’t create white supremacy. It’s not black people’s responsibility to dismantle it.
Upon Reflection
The Seth Myers segment continues to bounce around my mind, disturbing the rhythmic scrolling of my thumb against the screen. The segment is funny, and it’s honest. It’s obviously timely.
It also triggers a bout of self-reflection. I haven’t investigated, really, how Floyd’s murder impacted me. Not to mention the subsequent destabilization of America’s norms around blackness, whiteness, and racism.
So I reflect. And I begin to discover that my experience is, among other things:
Mostly unflattering.
Dynamic and difficult to map.
I don’t have a pen or paper on my nightstand. So I’ll use my skin.
My Skin is Thick
Being a socially aware black person in the United States, in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Era, would have required a kind of resilience that would exhaust the uninitiated.
Being a socially aware black person in the United States, in the 2020s, during the Civil Rights Era, requires a kind of resilience that would exhaust the uninitiated.
Certainly, black skin must be far thicker than any confederate, woodland camo wearing, Cracker Barrel consuming, AR-15 toting, (small) swinging dick packing, absurdly lifted pickup truck driving, trump supporting, self-proclaimed tough guy could ever hope to match.
A wearer of American blackness must achieve a remarkable, almost magical, psychological balance. She must be cognizant of, but also not paralyzed by, the evidence of present and historic injustice that’s plainly apparent. All around her, all the time. Any moment that she’s unable to perform this perceptual sleight-of-hand, she becomes that much less competitive in the American race. She becomes just another angry black woman instead.
Floyd’s murder seemed to me, at first, a run-of-the-mill indignity that my emotional Kevlar would absorb. Such state sponsored violence is commonplace after all, in an America that values white men’s “freedom to” above everyone else’s right to be “free from” everything ranging from 5.56 rounds to COVID-19-laden droplets.
So I said to myself, “Well of course a police officer murdered an unarmed, black suspect for no good reason. Next comes one week of media coverage. After that, yet another #justicefor______ will circulate mostly on black Twitter. White America will largely ignore the murder altogether.
And then all of America will go back to doing capitalism.
My Skin is Defensive
But that’s not what happened. That’s not at all what happened. I was wrong. America responded to Floyd’s murder. Full on and all out. That Minneapolis cop’s disinterested nonchalance, even as he was recorded slowly snuffing out a human life was, for some reason, the tipping point.
“Black Lives Matter!”
All of the sudden.
I greeted America’s newfound outrage with cynicism. “Where the fuck,” I screamed meaninglessly into the ether, “have you all been over the last 15 years while some of us were pointing out identical instances of state-sponsored violence against people of color?!”
My initial instinct thus was to make it about me and about my grievance.
I’m embarrassed to admit that that was my first instinct. But I’m also not surprised. I’m a human being, after all. Homo Sapien. I always see the world, first and foremost, through the lens of my personal, narrow self-interest.
You do, too.
That’s not a moral failing. That’s millions of years of evolution. We ought to be grateful for our powerful instincts for self-preservation and self-justification. They’re a lot of why the human animal has persisted even as its contemporaries passed quietly into obscurity.
Seeking out and confronting the ugly parts of ourselves - those thoughts and behaviors and pathologies we’d prefer that no one knew about - is a central feature of living an examined life. Not for the sake of self-admonishment. The goal, rather, is to get honest with ourselves, get compassionate with ourselves, and then convert that compassion into empathy for our similarly imperfect fellows.
Denying our flaws’ existence doesn’t mitigate their adverse impact in our lives. On the contrary, when we pretend our flaws don’t exist we ensure that they negatively affect us and the people we love. We can’t mitigate what we don’t acknowledge (see, e.g., The United States’ response to the 2019 novel Coronavirus/COVID-19).
My Skin is Offensive
Toward Passion
The Friday after Floyd’s murder, I asked my wife, Lindsay, to take some pictures of me in our backyard. I was on some Black Power shit that afternoon.
We completed the impromptu photo shoot. And we stepped out of the steamy, New Jersey humidity and back into our home. We welcomed the rush of cooled air that greeted us.
As we basked gratefully in the cold, Lindsay asked me, because she’s a thoughtful anti-racist, how I’d been coping with Floyd’s murder. I told her, sincerely, that I’d been heartened by Americans’ newly-found outrage, but that my connection to the murder felt cold - like our AC but without the revitalizing component. I felt strangely detached from the collective pain that murders like Floyd’s typically impart upon the black community.
I added, with more than a little trepidation, that while I was emotionally uncommitted at that moment, the real emotions were surely in the mail.
The Postman Delivers
On that same Friday, Lindsay and I hosted a Zoom video chat for our closest friends. We’ve done this almost every Friday evening since COVID-19 arm-twisted human civilization into taking it seriously. Starting at about 7 pm, and often continuing into the wee hours, our crew discusses everything ranging from strategies for coping with isolation, to the United States’ downward trajectory toward developing nation status.
With the exception of my brother, I’m always the only person on any of those calls with more than a hint of melanin in their skin.
On this particular Friday - the Friday after Floyd’s murder - I didn’t much feel like having a conversation about race on that Zoom call. Unsurprisingly though someone else brought up Floyd, and race, and police brutality - the whole thing. After all, Floyd’s murder, and the subsequent, nationwide undulation was well under weigh and on everyone’s mind.
The prevailing sentiment in the conversation, I surmised, was astonishment. Astonishment at the murder. Astonishment at the existence of systemic racism. Astonishment at America’s response to all of it.
Passionate and committed anti-racism was notably absent.
Chiming In
My moment to contribute to the conversation arrived. And I chimed. It was a sincere, but pretty detached, diatribe about the waves of unrest that were breaking all over the United States.
Then it collapsed. The psychological dam that had apparently been restraining a gathering torrent of emotions from inundating my psyche dissolved smoothly and inevitably like a sugar cube under hot water.
I was not happy.
Floyd’s murder saddened me, of course. I was disgusted by the boot-licking conservatism that allows America’s fundamentally discriminatory criminal justice system to persist.
I was incensed though by white silence. The silence from the folks on that call was deafening, yes. But I was far more concerned with the broad silence of the millions of white liberals across America. People who’d long parroted the argot of justice, but had been consistently unwilling to make justice their personal responsibility. Where the fuck was their skin, I wonder out (very) loud, and why the fuck wasn’t it in the game?
I realized on that Zoom call, in a flash, that white progressives’ collective ignorance of systemic racism, and its traumatic impact on people of color is, for me, an unhealed wound. It’s a wound whose scar is torn asunder each time America - including white liberals - treats white dominance as business as usual. It’s a burning and recurring indignity.
Having expressed myself, I dropped off the call. Abruptly.
I spent the ensuing minutes stalking around our house intently but without a destination. My body - my Skin - trembled with hot outrage. My shirt was damp where it met my spine and where it met my underarms.
But my mouth was chalky. Parched. And frustrated. Like a dehydrated frontiersman who finally reaches that distant stream bed only to find that it’s dry.
My Skin is Resolute
The prospect of returning to the Zoom call the following Friday, as though nothing had changed, felt like a dereliction of my duty as a black person. I wanted instead to hang around with anti-racists. Real anti-racists. People who are already familiar with the non-bullshit version of America’s history with race and racism.
I’d had it with watching white progressives respond to my discussion of blackness with visible discomfort, subtle defensiveness, or facepalm-level callowness.
I wanted a break from the emotionally heavy-lift of persuading (often fragile) white people that what they know as “American history” is littered with myths. Dangerous myths. Myths that obscure, deliberately, the role of white supremacy in the United States’ founding, and in the economic engine that propelled America to worldwide dominance.
The Zoom call occurred as scheduled the following Friday. But I wasn’t there.
The Voyage Home
I did make my way back to the call eventually. But the return path was neither simple nor obvious. Along the way, I stumbled, rather haplessly, through the incoherent wilderness Floyd’s murder revealed American race relations to be.
I connected, in thought and in spirit, with the roiling insurrection Floyd’s murder had triggered. I confronted the truth that my quarrel wasn’t really with my best friends on that Zoom call. My frustration was with those archetypal white moderates who’d consistently responded to systemic racism with an ineffectual and anemic shrug. The audacity of that same white moderate’s abrupt change in sentiment had stung me like a slap in the face.
I connected also, during that meander, with the emergence of an embryonic solidarity that differentiated the aftermath of Floyd’s murder from those previous. The faces of the millions of demonstrators worldwide - the men and women who braved the rattling teargas canisters, and the shiny black batons, and COVID-19’s spike proteins - were mostly white.
And so, the scales of cynicism that had been blinkering my eyes began to dissolve.
My optimism was further buoyed, and was later supercharged, as friends and acquaintances and people to whom I hadn’t spoken in years, reached out to me to express their support and their solidarity. They texted, they called, they direct messaged.
I was heartened. I was astonished. “Black Lives Matter!” echoed in corporate America’s boardrooms and around its water coolers. (Or, more appropriately for the COVID-19 era, “Black Lives Matter!” crackled through inadequate laptop speakers and occupied space on Zoom’s servers.)
I watched, in real time, and for the first time, masses of white people finally glimpse - just glimpse - the yawning chasm between existence as a black person in the United States and existence as a white person in the United States. I could see light of understanding flicker across America’s face as it realized, in bonafide astonishment, that those distinctions really fucking matter.
Zooming Out
I struggled, in aftermath of that Zoom call, with whether I’d done the right thing in calling folks out.
In retrospect, there is no debate. I was willing to sacrifice momentary personal comfort in favor of candor and long-term understanding. That was the right thing to do. Because I love each of the people who were on that call. It matters to me deeply that they each appreciate the gravity of the reckoning that’s begun to unfold in the United States - on the streets, in state houses and governors’ mansions, and in American minds.
Even more, it matters to me that the people on that call recognize me as more than merely their close friend, Christophe. I’ve demanded that they experience me as Christophe, the black man, who’s also their close friend. I’d never demanded that of them before. I’d not demanded that of much of anyone before.
But I demand it now. Of everyone.
Anti-racist activists have forced America to take substantive steps toward understanding the black experience. And they’ve imbued people like me with the courage to express that experience.
That’s a real step toward justice.
Back Out of Bed
Well those 20 minutes of self-reflection, and dreaming up unnecessary narrative devices to illustrate a fairly straight-forward point, were enriching. Weren’t they? But apparently, they weren’t motivating in a practical sense. Because I’m still in bed.
I hate getting out of bed in the morning.
But I owe Seth and Amber a debt of gratitude on this typically unpleasant morning. They’ve reminded me that I’ve spent a significant chunk of my life trying, mostly in discouraging vain, to get the white people in my orbit (and there are many) to take seriously blackness, whiteness, race, and racism.
And now they’re finally paying attention. Kinda.
What Now?
I roll over and go back to sleep. That’s my instinct, anyway. I’m really tired. We’re really tired.
We’ve been carrying these torches and banging these drums for a long time. Haughty resentment is an attractive respite after all of that carrying, and after all of that banging. It’s easy, in this moment - in my bed - to see demanding restitution from white America as a gratifying way forward. White America is surely, and near-hopelessly, in the red on the inter-citizen social debt balance sheet.
Still, black people will, once again, rise above the social, political, and personal responses that are reasonable under the circumstances.
We’re Black Americans
It takes a special kind of commitment to the American experiment to love a country that’s spent most of the last 557 years explicitly excluding you from the dream it peddles. That variety of patriotism drove black fighting men - from the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, to the Tuskegee Airmen, to the Buffalo Soldiers - to bleed and die defending the ideals that America had yet, and has yet, to realize fully.
2020’s activists stand on the broad, brown shoulder of those heroes. And even more so, on the brawny shoulders of icons like MLK, Rosa Parks, and John Lewis.
How dare I falter in my activism? My small-scale, privileged activism which doesn’t demand that I put my physical life or liberty on the line?
I mustn’t. I can’t. I won’t.
So I’ll have to rethink, comprehensively, my goals and my strategy. What’s the next way point on the route toward justice?
How do I, a very complicated, 39-year-old, black, male, heterosexual, cisgender, anti-racist attorney, operate in this New America?
How do I interact with the developing alliance among well-meaning, but largely ignorant, white folks and anti-racist activists?
I suppose I’ll have to get out of bed and figure it out.
Let’s go.
