*
Beloved, we know the word finds greater currency and menace in white circles than you are willing to say. The ban on its use by white people is an attempt to arrest its murderous spread. The white folk who claim that the call to stop using the word is to cave in to political correctness ignore history and black humanity. They are the kind of whites who pose as “honest.”
We have, most of us, anyway, rejected your imagining and defaming of us as nigger. We have done everything humanly possible to prove that we are not who you say we are. I am from a generation far more willing to make the effort than the one freshly on the scene. Black Millennials have little use for respectability politics; they see no need to prove their humanity before you treat them with decency. They discern the fatal lapse in your logic: Why should black folk ever have to prove our humanity to white folk who enslaved and raped us, castrated and murdered us for kicks?
Your white humanity is forever at stake with such young folk. And you know what, beloved? They have a point. Black folk my age and older have a direct memory of what it means for white folk to be blind and deaf to us even when we stood by the thousands in the streets and screamed our names for the world to hear. “I Am a Man,” we blared through a bullhorn, amplifying both our desperate desire to be recognized and our unknowing sexism. While pleading that the world not be blind to us, we couldn’t see the women by our side. “I Am Somebody,” we insisted, even when it was more aspiration than belief. All of that was our way of saying—in reality, our way of preparing to proclaim—that “Black Lives Matter.”
Beloved, there is something black folk fear, whether you can see it or not, whether some of us black folk will say it or not. Our fear is that you believe, that you insist—finally, tragically, without hesitation, with violent repercussions in tow—that, in all sorts of ways, we are still your nigger.
It is a belief you hold on to all these centuries later. It is a belief that has survived all of the marches, and bullhorns, and protests, and politeness, and good behavior, and forgiveness, and Kumbaya, and nice Negro smiles. It has survived our dancing to a song playing nowhere except in our heads. It is a song that we hoped would quiet your insistence that we disappear or die. It is a belief that has survived all our trying, trying, trying to make you see that most of us will never do you any harm. And you’ve shown a brutal consistency through the centuries by not hesitating to kill a nigger on sight.
It’s painful when black folk have so easily, sometimes unknowingly, perhaps invisibly, bought into the logic of the nigger and let it rule our minds. I saw this in my own family.
When I got into Cranbrook—a prestigious prep school outside of Detroit in Bloomfield Hills, one of the wealthiest suburbs in America—my parents and I took a tour of the school’s prosperous geography. As a white student guided us around campus, we weathered a light drizzle and came upon a puddle. The white kid stepped around it, and I stepped right through it since it wasn’t deep.
“See Ivory, the white boy is a genius, and Michael ain’t,” my father said to my mother, thinking I hadn’t heard him, or, perhaps, he didn’t care whether I heard or not.
A great grief engulfed me. It was at that instant that I completely, unforgettably, understood what Baldwin meant when he wrote of his own father that “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” I felt the same about my father. He was a barely literate man who likely had to drop out of school in Georgia in the eighth grade. He was a man whose industry and muscles got him work in a factory. He was proud of my desire to get more education, yet he lived in a prison of disbelief in his own worth. Therefore he doubted mine too. That he could believe that a white kid was smarter than me because he stepped over a puddle proved how little he believed in black intelligence and how much he bought the lie of white superiority.
I flashed back to when I was eight years old and I mimicked his pronunciation of the number four. He pronounced it “foe.” I followed suit, but he stopped me in my tracks.
“Don’t you go to school, boy?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Don’t you know how to say that right?”
“Yes.”
“Then do that from now on. That’s why you go to school.”
I could feel his self-doubt mingled with his deep desire for his son to do better than he had. But at Cranbrook that day his self-doubt led him to take refuge in caustic judgment. He projected his limitations onto me even as he wanted me to have more opportunity. This is the racial catch-22 that too many of us face. This is what whiteness does to the black mind.
*
I saw what being thought of as a nigger did to my father. I also see what it does to millions of my people who struggle every day to be recognized as human beings.
But I’m different, right? You may think you know me. That I’m a middle-aged man with a PhD, a minister, a public intellectual, a media personality. That I am an exception to your idea of blackness.
I am burdened and privileged by this idea of me, your idea of me. It is a fiction that traffics in long-held beliefs about race. My privilege rests on the idea that I am special, that I am different, that I’m not like “them.” That difference is partly why I get to address you directly, beloved. Why I am considered more capable of speaking to the problem of race, more articulate than “regular” black folks.
But I am not this fiction. I am like every other black American, a person caught between two perceptions. A Jekyll and Hyde of race. Dr. Jekyll is the professor that many of my people, and many of you, love. Mr. Hyde is the black man who grew up on the streets of Detroit, who needs do little more than return home to see a fate that could have become my fate in the face of my brother Everett, locked behind bars for more than a quarter century now.