the blueshift journal

In the In-Between

 

†

 

Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour . . . They seem to require less sleep . . . They are at least brave and more adventuresome. But this may proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present . . . Their griefs are transient . . .

—Thomas Jefferson

 

I am an oblivious 7-year-old sitting with my papaw in the TV room, watching our Kentucky Wildcats win the 1996 NCAA basketball championship. As Antoine Walker, Derek Anderson, and Jamaal Magloire run up the hardwood floor on screen, my papaw leans over to impart a bit of racist lore. “You know,” he offers, “colored people have an odor to them when they sweat.”

 

A year later, I discover a picture of my father hidden within a shoebox in my mother’s closet and learn I am colored.

 

†

 

Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains . . . to an openly racist historical profession—and a white history-reading, history-thinking public obsessed with all kinds of race control—the white South’s desire to whitewash slavery in the past, and maintain segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people

—Edward E. Baptist, Professor of History, Cornell University

 

When I first read Query XIV of Jefferson’s infamous Notes on the State of Virginia, I was struck with how familiar it sounded. I had heard some of these very ideas, verbatim, from the mouth of the man who was my only caretaker during the early years of my childhood.

 

In addition to his fallacious commentary on the alleged bodily processes and hygiene of Black people, my grandfather thought it best to keep from me the pivotal detail of my Blackness. The conditions presented to my mother for seeking refuge in his house after she parted ways with my father was 1) she was not to allow my father on the property or in my presence and 2) she was, under no circumstances, to reveal my true ethnicity to me, no matter the level of severity my adolescent line of questioning reached.

 

Once I was elementary age, I began coming home from school full of inquiry as to why the other children, and in some cases even my teachers, were asking if I was mixed. It had now been brought to my attention that I was a different color than my mother, and in the summer I noticed I was several shades darker than my papaw. The collective response I got from them was, oh honey, you just have a little Indun in yeh.

 

While a seemingly-peculiar strategy in retrospect, since it seems white colonizers and their descendants have had little more regard for the lives of Native Americans, I’m sure this hierarchical ranking of ethnicity has its root, again, in the seminal document of white supremacy in America,

 

                            The Indians, with no advantages of this kind . . . They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as                                                         prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black                                                     had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.

 

To be black was to be the worst thing you could be. And as the granddaughter of Robert E. Bruner, I was not allowed to be that. However, as a result, and most likely not the intended one, I became the ultimate 6-year-old fan of Pocahontas. I had the costume, the nightgown, the movie, and of course the bed set. I braided my hair in a single braid down my back, albeit a curly, frizzy one that refused to lay down straight like Pocahontas’ in the cartoon, and my mother watched me parade around like that, in my misplaced joy, with a closed mouth.

 

†

 

It feels like America is playing one big trick on us.

—Unknown

 

 

I don’t remember who said this; most likely, a tweet that came across my feed on Twitter one night after The No Indictment. But what accuracy of feeling.

 

It is precisely this sensation of irony I feel every day in the world. Unless I hide. Unless I lock myself inside and refuse to turn on the TV. Unless I play ghost.   

 

It’s how I feel when my own mother says I deserve a white man, asks why I settle for less. When I realize for the first time, even she is racist.

 

            Alright. Stop playin! You can come out now.

                        Seriously, it’s over. Joke’s up.

 

It’s how I felt when Zimmerman was exonerated,

 

            Yo, seriously? Ha, you gotta be kidding me?

                        This is a joke right? Did y’all see the same thing as me?

 

But that’s it: White Americans aren’t seeing the same thing. In a recent interview, the poet Saeed Jones said, “You have a better view when standing at the margin of your community.” He was responding to a question as to why an outsider would have a special vantage into the workings of the larger culture. He was speaking about isolation, aloneness. “The problem is,” he follows, “is that no one else may be around to hear what you have learned. The greater white community in this country actively refuses to engage Black people in a way that allows them to exchange with us, hear what we have learned, see our experiences and who we truly are.

 

My mother refuses to see me as Black, because from her view I am an extension of her and her circumstances, and therefore my experience as a Black woman does not exist for her. My grandfather refused to see a Black girl when he looked at me; he most surely subscribed to the belief that the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.

 

White Americans are not seeing Black children dying at the hands of adults who’ve been designated to protect. They’re not seeing Black children dying. They’re not seeing Black children. They’re seeing what, to them, is already a ghost; an unfamiliar thing that moves about on the perimeter of White life. They’re seeing what decades of historically-inaccurate, white supremacist propaganda has claimed Black people are.

 

They’re not seeing the devaluing of Black lives in jury decisions and media narratives. They’re seeing a Black life that hasn’t had value since it was governed with whips and chains.

 

†

 

Education is indoctrination if you’re white—subjugation if you’re black.

—James Baldwin

 

 

During the era of President Woodrow Wilson, who was a southern professor of history himself, historians began to inseminate a particular narrative of slavery and the trajectory of Black people here into the American consciousness—propaganda that worked to remedy the major contradiction of America as a nation founded on the principles of liberty and self-determination, yet one that held millions of people in bondage. As a result, over the years, the truth—the brutalization of Black people all across the Atlantic, our humanity and innovations, creativity and culture, language, ancestry, and who we were as people—was kept not only from us, but has also been made invisible to the American white. We became invisible in this place.

 

In the place of who we really [were/are] one [could/can] only find a manufactured, manipulated caricature in the mainstream.  Now it [was/is] easier to deny we built the country physically, economically, and culturally, and to maintain the idea that we [weren’t/aren’t] people like whites [were/are] people. One [could/can] naturally withhold concern about what [happened/happens] to Black people who, although released from bondage on a superficial level, [were/are] relegated to the lowest caste in society as whites’ servants, pets, secret offspring, and great irritant. 

 

The entire American public became indoctrinated into white supremacy—an economic doctrine passed down alongside white wealth and property, generation after generation, and one that made it all the way to the living room of my childhood, through my grandfather’s mouth.

 

He was indoctrinating me. Unknowingly, I was a student of the ideas of America’s founding father Thomas Jefferson: that blacks were inferior in beauty, hygiene, art, culture, spiritual practice, intellectual capacity, pain, love and in the qualification of humanity. But, unlike the great majority of white children who undergo this devastating process, I would eventually find the truth when I found myself, my father, and my Black family. Until then I am a ghost in my grandfather’s house.

 

He decided he loved me too much to allow me to exist as who I, in fact, was—a black girl. As the master of my adolescent life, he couldn’t bear allowing me my identity and, as a byproduct, my family—the thing white men have traditionally erased as a tool of dehumanization. I was his property, an extension of his legacy, a representation of his status, a thing he made decisions for.

 

†

 

You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested . . .

—Claudia Rankine, Citizen

 

~

it’s like the scene in one of those movies

about a ghost who does not know

she is a ghost: your world is busy

with people you have known before

but are meeting for the first time; someone

draws your attention to it; an object flies

through your abdomen or hand & you see

yourself, finally: no more a tangible thing;

on your face a horror, then a mouth-sized slit

of hope: you recognize an evil trick played:

are you not really real, alive, trained in the art

of subversion: observe the young woman.

those young men who came before her:

haunts working on their verisimilitude

~

 

 

With thanks to Frank X Walker & the Watering Hole writing collective...

 

Sources:

 

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Citizen, Claudia Rankine

Thrall, Natasha Trethewey

Saeed Jones: On His New Poetry Collection ‘Prelude to Bruise,’ Art vs. Rhetoric, and Camp

          Aesthetics, Lambda Literary