I'm Black, Therefore I Think I Am

A friend of mine, a scholar of media, said recently that the long-running protests around the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson that are currently coalesced around the grand jury non-indictment of his killer, Darren Wilson, have become almost operatic. What he means is that the protests that started out as familiar reactions to the procedural and political -- white cop shoots unarmed black man -- have now progressed to the existential. The anger, frustration and bewilderment of protesters no longer feels directed at Ferguson's civic structure or at Darren Wilson or at the federal government nominally led by a black president; it is directed at the chronic soul sickness that makes rallying cry like "Black Lives Matter" still necessary.

If we must still mount that argument -- and clearly we must -- then we have moved not an inch from 1968, when the striking black sanitation workers in Memphis had to argue the same thing with signs that famously declared, "I Am A Man." That assertion was the heart of that fight (Martin Luther King's last) for equal pay for black workers, just as it's at the heart of all the current calls for police reform, improved community relations, proportional racial representation of elected officials, and so on. Those things are fine, but they don't even begin to get at the entrenched existential crisis of being black in America that we keep insisting are merely crises of policy and procedure. Even a crisis of "race relations" doesn't cover it. I always thought that phrase sounded like blacks and whites had a falling out, a misunderstanding, and simply need to patch things up. The very word "relations" has the ring of family and friendship; it speaks to an ideal of democracy that, however much we as a nation continue to violate it, is still preferable as a reference point to the existential crisis of blackness that defies a clear shape and talking points, and for which our so-called democracy has no answer.

All this got me thinking about the crisis of blackness that black people, particularly black men, live every day. It's a crisis that can always culminate suddenly and tragically in getting shot and killed. But mostly it's a gray crisis of stagnation, of self-confidence, and lack of visibility that is at the same time a crisis of hyper-visibility.

Here are just a couple examples of what I mean. My neighbor around the block, Chris, is a self-taught mechanic, artist, and single father of four who also works as a plumber's assistant. He's home a lot, a reliable set of "good eyes" that all neighborhoods need in order to be stable and secure. He's helped me rescue dogs. One night I passed an Inglewood cop car that was pulled over the curb with its lights flashing; a black man sat out on the curb, his hands cuffed behind his back, his head bowed in a certain gesture of defeat. It was my neighbor. Against my will, I saw him in that moment not as Chris the good neighbor but as an unarmed black man apprehended by police. He felt lost to me, indistinct, already disappeared beyond a divide from which I understood he might not return. (He did, though I never asked him about that night. I prefer to keep him firmly on the good side of the divide).

I teach a class at Antioch that has a lot of young black men. I asked a couple of them about any negative encounters with the police, and they all nodded their heads. Of course they had. When I asked one of them, a poet and spoken-word artist, how he'd felt about one encounter in which a cop demanded ID for no apparent reason, he seemed surprised at the question. It didn't occur to him that his feelings about being targeted were of any importance or consequence. It was just something that happened in cycles, like rain in winter. A reality of life.

I know this lack of feeling and reflection reflects not a lack of concern, but a survival technique. Black people can't afford to be outraged at every incidence of injustice; we would have no outrage left, not to mention sanity. We have to absorb the blows and move forward in spite of. But this whole Ferguson crisis that has become existential has called this time-honored emotional strategy into question. The question before us now is not so much what white people or the government will do -- or more accurately, won't do -- it's what black people will do for ourselves. Not in the narrow, bootstraps way conservatives like to tout; I mean what we will do in order to finally make ourselves matter to ourselves. Whether we are working or not, whether we're walking on the sidewalk or sitting on the curb. This is reform of a different color.