Mrs. Engel had a big house. I had never seen a Volvo or a garage before. I walked into a house with three bathrooms for the first time. I saw a backyard for the first time. Then I met Mrs. Engel’s son Billy. Billy was three years older than me, was 5 ’10, and weighed 220 pounds. He only spoke English when I couldn’t even spell my own name (a new, pronounceable American name that my dad made up on spot and told me over the phone that night – and which I wrote down as Daveid). He had a CD collection of 400, with every Zeppelin and Beatles album, handed down from his dad. At the time, I thought Madonna was an actress and Nirvana was a mental state.

Billy was determined to teach me how to “be American.” He taught me how to ride a bike, what clothing brands I should wear, and what TV shows were cool. He took me to a movie theater for the first time (to watch Ice Age), showed me my first PlayStation game (Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge), bought me my first album (Good Charlotte’s The Young and the Hopeless), showed me my first nude picture (a fake Britney Spears one), and taught me the “seven bad words” in order of intensity (ass-1, fuck-7). He then taught me my first Asian jokes.

At Desert Christian, Billy and I were the only Asians in our classes. There were less than sixty kids in each grade and only about five of us were kids of colors. Billy was the funny Asian guy in his class and when I became fluent in English, I took his character to my class. We could make these jokes, because, essentially, we didn’t see ourselves as the Asians we were putting down. We weren’t small, squinty-eyed, dog-eating, glass-wearing, afraid-of-family-dishonoring Asians. We spoke without accents or bad grammar mistakes, had white friends and girlfriends, went to a conservative Baptist church in a suit and tie, and could parallel park on our first try. Or at least within three tries. We attributed racial identity to characteristics and behaviors instead of our background and heritage.

But the jokes worked. When we said them, there was always a response. Kids cracked up. We knew they wanted to hear them, but just didn’t feel appropriate to say it themselves. So we brought the jokes into our everyday conversation. Eventually, we made it okay, not only for ourselves, but also for our friends to say any derogatory and offensive thing about Asians or any other races, and be ok with it. We invited them in to share our language. Soon, Clayton, the only black guy in my class, started a series of black jokes. He also started referring to himself as “the only black guy in this class.” Solomon started doing it with Hispanics, and Stephanie, a shy Chinese girl who came to Desert Christian in fifth grade, started doing it too. We made race our foremost attribute and identifier, because we felt, in this environment, it was the most apparent. No one in this school would refer to us as “that nice guy” or “that tall guy” before saying “that Asian/black/Mexican guy.” In a way, it was our desperate attempt of not letting race wholly define us. We tried to distance ourselves as far as we could from the common stereotypes by speaking adversely of them on a casual basis. We behaved as if it didn’t offend us, because we weren’t them. Even if we were secretly offended, we hid under more offensive language and slur in the fear of being that sensitive guy who couldn’t take a joke. We couldn’t afford to be seen as the Asians, blacks or Mexicans we were degrading.

One day, in Mrs. Blanchard’s English class, we had an in-class spelling bee. In the first round, Jimmy, my best friend at the time, had to spell “restaurant.”

“R-E-S-T-I-don’t know,” he said. I laughed at him.

My turn.

“Spell sycamore,” said Mrs.B.

“S-I-C-A-M-O-R-E, sica-more,” I said it without any pauses between letters to show I was extra-confident. I looked at Jimmy and gave him a smirk.

“Wrong. S-Y, not S-I,” said Mrs.B.

“Ha! Ha!! Stupid Asian!” said Jimmy. Those of us used to this language – Jimmy, me, and the kids around us – all laughed.

But not Mrs. B.

Instead, she ordered Jimmy to go to Mr. Roseborough’s office. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Roseborough, our principal, called me in as well. When I walked in, Jimmy sat with a pink half-sheet of paper in his hand, meaning that he got a referral and at least a lunch detention. “Sorry, you know I didn’t mean it like that,” I remember Jimmy saying to me.

I felt bad for Jimmy. I felt something here was my fault and I needed to get him out of it. “I don’t even care Mr. Roseborough. . . It’s just a joke. Why do you care when I don’t?” I asked him.

“It’s not just you,” said Mr. Roseborough.  “It’s the language.”

On our way back to class, we made as many bad comments about Mr. Roseborough as we could in our three minute walk. We talked about his high-pitched voice, his ever-seriousness, his “right guys? mmhm?s” and labeled him with words 1 through 7.

But later that day, Jimmy apologized for the second and third time.

Few months later, in an unrelated incident, I got a call from mom telling me to come back home. She told me that she and dad have been thinking about me and that they missed me. “If you go to college, get a job, and get married in the states, we might never live together,” she said. She was right. It’s been four years since I lived with my family and I missed living with them too. I agreed to move back and she told me I could go to an international school in Seoul. And if I wanted, I could go back later. So I got on the plane to Seoul in 2006 and I never saw Billy, Jimmy, Mrs. B or Mr. Rosebourgh again.

Fast forward two years.

It is now 2008 and I’ve moved again, this time from Seoul to Texas. I’m with a new family, with new friends, and in a big public high school with a large Hispanic population. It’s been two years and counting since I told an Asian joke and a year since Kanye dropped Graduation. I’ve been slowly getting into hip-hop, one song at a time, one album at a time. One day, while browsing through YouTube, I found Wale’s “Kramer” that started off with the following voice clip:

“Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass! You can talk, you can talk, you’re brave now, motherfucker. He’s a nigger! A nigger, look there’s a nigger!”

After hearing that, I refused to believe it was a real voice clip from a real person. I refused to believe it, because I refused to believe that we still live in a racist society. But I had a bad feeling it was real.

And it was.

I watched Michael Richards, better known as Kramer from Seinfeld, apologize on Letterman for the remarks he made to black hecklers in a comedy club. Appearing clearly distraught, he said “I’m not a racist, that’s what’s so insane about this. And yet, it’s said. It comes through, it fires out of me.” I believed him, but I wasn’t sure if I was even offended in the first place. I wasn’t sure if I was receiving an apology or if I should be giving an apology. I didn’t think I was the group he tried to offend nor did I think I was the guy who was being racist. I never even considered that I could be both.

Fast forward three more years to 2011. It’s been almost ten years since I decided that I didn’t like hip-hop (after listening to “In da Club”) and ten years since I secretly liked hip-hop (since “Lose Yourself.”) Since then, I went from listening to songs to listening to albums, albums to artists, and in some cases, even artists to labels. But after finally admitting that I loved hip-hop, I realized that I had to defend it from other friends who didn’t love it. Unlike any other genre, hip-hop needed to be defended. I had to defend why it was music, why it was art, and why it isn’t all that misogynistic and violent. So I would mention “Renegade,” “99 Problems,” and “The Kramer.” But in the midst of that, I became too defensive and stopped questioning it myself. I somehow just accepted that that was hip-hop. I accepted it as “just entertainment” and shrugged off any accusations against hip-hop as “people being too sensitive.”

When I saw “Hip-hop and Critical Citizenship” in the Vassar College course catalog, I decided to take it before reading the course description. I read that the aim was to get students to accept hip-hop and its culture not as “a cool art form” but as “a meaningful American text, complete with . . . signifiers of class, race, gender, citizenship, and identity.” I wasn’t convinced. Instead, I thought about how the description of this course was at least four times longer than any other course descriptions. I wondered if that length and detail was what hip-hop and this class needed to be considered as a serious and meaningful American text and art to those who didn’t love hip-hop.

The first full album we listened for the class was Ice Cube’s Death Certificate. When we discussed “Horny Little Devil” in class, there was a discussion about who Ice Cube was addressing and if we thought he was addressing us as well. No one in the class thought they were being addressed by Ice Cube, because they weren’t “barbaric, uncontrollable, obstinate beast” mentioned in the song. But when I heard that song, I tuned out as soon as I heard “she don’t like white men.” I listened to the song as an audience, never even doubting I could be the victim or the aggressor. I treated most of the songs on the album with a similar attitude until I heard the forty-six second long Black Korea. I didn’t see myself as the Asian store owner in the song, but I felt like I was addressed. It was the first song that forced me to acknowledge, refute, and be a participant. It had me thinking. It had me thinking about my place in hip-hop and hip-hop’s place in my life. With seventeen other people who loved hip-hop in the class, I didn’t have to defend it anymore. We did more attacking than defending and asked questions we formerly answered with “that’s hip-hop.” I thought about race, gender, class, language, and relationships through hip-hop. But more than anything, I thought about me, what I really believe, and what I value.

So when Rick Ross released “You the Boss” and “I Love My Bitches,” I felt good about myself for not being able to sit through either of the songs. I listened to Nicki Minaj whisper “I’ll do anything you say cus you the boss,” and repeat “you the boss” for the seventh, eighth, and the ninth time. Each repetition became more disturbing than the last, because it just seemed to confirm and ruthlessly reconfirm the helpless compliance. Then I moved on to “I Love My Bitches,” in which the chorus repeats “Aww man, I love my bitches.” After the chorus, I turned the song off. I treated it as if my immunization to misogyny had worn off. I treated it as if I had reached a new moral and intellectual ground, sensitive and responsive to the degrading language. I smirked the way Bush did under the “Mission Accomplished” banner. I counted it as a small moral victory and a Critical-Citizenship-mission accomplished.

Then Drake released Take Care.

I was on my way to New York City to meet friends in NYU. On the train to Grand Central, I listened to Take Care for the first time. After my first run-through, I thought about Rihanna’s voice that seems to be on every recent release. Then I thought about André 3000’s that I have heard so little of recently. I got off at Grand Central and as I walked towards the subway, I thought of the verses “Bitch I’m the man” and “Fuck that nigga that you love so bad, I know you still think about the times we had.” By the time I got off at Union Square, I identified the songs with these lines and started singing along to it.

I thought about lines that bothered me: “Fame on my mind, girl on my nerves,” in Underground Kings, unmistakably patronizing “I’m so, I’m so, I’m so proud of you” in Make Me Proud, and “All those other men were practices” in Practice. I felt good about myself for recognizing them and then I remembered lines like “Girl I can’t lie, I miss you. You and the music were the only things that I’d commit to.” I remembered those Star Wars-y lines like “may the trouble neglect you, angels protect you.”

I think it’s good, then I think it’s fucked up, then I think it’s great.

Two days later, I left NYC and headed back to Poughkeepsie. When I arrived at Poughkeepsie Station, I realized that I didn’t have a ride, didn’t know a cab number, and that the buses stopped running. Just then, a cab appeared from the opposite corner of the street and stopped in front of me. “Did you call a cab?” the cab driver asked.

I saw some people standing around down the street so I assumed that they called the cap. “No,” I replied as I pointed down the street. “They probably did.”

“Ok. Get in,” the cab driver replied.

I wasn’t sure if he just heard me wrong, but I needed to go back to campus so I just got in. As I tried to figure out what had just happened, the cab driver, a big white dude in his forties or fifties, told me that it would be seven dollars flat.

When the cab entered through the gates and drove up to the parking lot, we passed by a group of Vassar students walking on the road. “Man, when I was in school, I stayed in school. I didn’t wander around,” the cab driver said. “I swear I’m not a racist but. . .”

At this point, I was prepared for some racist comment about Asians, because I know that any sentence that starts with “I swear I’m not a racist but. . .” will be a racist one.

“But I swear it’s the blacks,” he said. “It’s because they don’t know what the fuck they wanna do with life.”

I handed him his seven dollars and cowardly stepped out without saying a word. I walked up to my room and replayed the conversation in my head over and over again. ‘Why did he think it was okay to say that me?’ ‘Why didn’t I say anything back?’ ‘And what the fuck is he doing with his life?’

‘But should I care if he’s not insulting me?’ ‘What if he was Asian or what if he said that about Asians?’

Then I thought of Jimmy. I thought of Kramer. I thought of Ice Cube.

I thought of Imani Perry who said that our twenty-first century conversations of race are “episodic responses to celebrity episodes.” She was right. Such conversations lay dormant and only explode in responses to individual episodes. I needed Jimmy, Kramer, Ice Cube, and this cab driver to confront racism. I needed shit to be right in my face to be able to confront them. Perry was also right when she said that such discourses also “prompt accusations the subjects of racist language are “too sensitive” or “can’t take a joke” because, after all, we aren’t really a racist society anymore.” According to Perry, such moments “leave us simply confused, angry, or self-satisfied (because we’re not like “that.”)” But we are. The worst in us are. And I am.

I thought about Drake. In “Shot for Me,” Drake tells his ex-lovers: “Bitch I’m the man, don’t you forget it.” Then he says that he made them what they are, from the way they walk and talk, to the way they dress. “First I made you who you are then I made it,” says Drake. I felt good about myself for not liking Rick Ross’s “You the Boss” and “I Love My Bitches” or Kanye West’s “Blame Game,” but I just couldn’t hate this song. I couldn’t even dislike it. Though I want to say that I’m not like “that,” the worst in me just wants to say “Bitch I’m the man. Don’t you forget it.”

I react to the sensual – Rihanna’s and Andre 3000’s voice, “Bitch I’m the man,” and “fuck that nigga that you love so bad” – before I even recognized the content. And even when I do, I allow some half-decent, nice-guy-sounding lines like “Girl I can’t lie, I miss you,” to justify and compromise with myself. Even when I recognize that, I still allow myself to say “its okay because you’re not that guy” or “don’t be so fucking lame.” When we discussed Kanye’s “Runaway” in Hip-Hop and Critical Citizenship class, I remember Meg saying that Pusha-T’s verse “killed the song” for her, because of its misogynistic content. But I couldn’t hate the song, for the same reasons that I can’t hate “Shot for me.”

Freddy loafers. Versace sofas. Young, rich, and tasteless. They just sounded too right. Too good.

It took Jimmy, Mrs. B, Kramer, Hip-Hop and Critical Citizenship, and that cab driver to even make me recognize it, but it took two songs to break it all down. I remembered Joe Biden describing Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” I’d like to think our society is equal for all races and genders and I’d like to think that we’re sometimes just being too sensitive. Like Kramer, I say I’m not a racist. I say I’m not misogynistic.

But sometimes it “fires out of me” as well. It constantly wants to. The racial and misogynistic narrative that we made acceptable in our conversations and songs is a part of us and is a part of me.

“Gettin’ brain from a bitch and thinkin’ “god damn, what’s her name?”Sometimes I just shake my head and tell myself this is a shame and then my other side kick in like, “bitch, don’t be so fuckin’ lame”-J. Cole, “Dollar and A Dream III”

It’s a part of me that just lies dormant and, even as I write this, makes that J. Cole line sound good. It’s too easy to say “bitch, don’t be so fuckin’ lame” and too hard to say no when it sounds so good.

I have to beat and force myself just to think about it. And I need reminders – constant reminders. I need hip-hop to force me to be a critical citizen.

“But in the meantime. . . It’s lights please.”

Actually. . . no. I need to not end this essay with another J. Cole line …

David Lee is a first-year student at Vassar College. 

Way back in the day, when Obama rocked the Willis Jackson and Twitter was a bootleg reindeer name, David Rozier invented farting during Mass. A few minutes before we marveled at the six Catholics at Holy Family Catholic School sip out of that one gold goblet, and right after Father Joe suggested we offer each other “a sign of peace,” David Rozier tapped me on my shoulder, swung his right arm around his back and farted in his hand.  Father Joe rolled his eyes from the pulpit as David commenced to shake the hands of Ms. Bockman, Ms. Raphael and all the other 6^th and 7^th graders on our row.

Twice.

Side by side, David Rozier and I must have looked as different as two Mississippi black boys could. David was crazy wiry with the teeniest head you’d ever seen in your life. He had these curious clear eyes, a voice that was plenty octaves deeper than you’d expect and elephant ears that Angela Williams plucked on field trips. David wasn’t the flyest dresser in our tiny class, but he — like our boy Lerthon — came to school fabric-softener-fresh with a whiff of fried eggs and government cheese.

I, on the other hand, was quite husky and stank of stale sweat slash off-brand dish washing soap. Like David, though, I was loved by my Grandma, and we both knew far more about the bruising brutality of abuse, addiction and “the worst of white folks” than our Mamas ever wanted us to.

Anyway, before David invented sharing the gift of fart in mass, I got a bit of shine from my 4.5 inventions at Holy Family Catholic School:

Invention #1 — Owning your silent farts in homeroom.

Invention #2 — Shamelessly paying for lunch with loose penny rolls on the same day Lerthon invented bringing Louisiana Hot Sauce to Chicken Nugget Fridays.

Invention #3 — Combining our saved and stolen lunch money to buy rap tapes on Tuesdays.

Invention #4 — Asking girls if you could feel on the top of their booties at the water fountain and …

Invention #4.5 — … being too scared to feel on the tops of girls’ booties at the water fountain if they said, “You can feel on my booty. Can I feel on yours?”

With the exception of sharing that fart in Mass, David Rozier didn’t really invent anything by himself, but that little joker could damn sure in-no-vate. For example, even though I invented farting in homeroom, since David could fart on command, he would innovate during the pregnant pauses of the slightly illiterate kids. David even created a fart game where he would fart every time Henry Wallace mispronounced “str” sounding words like “strong” and “street” and made them sound like “skrong” and “skreet.”

The day that David shared the gift of fart in Mass, Ms. Bockman — who actually thought David was finally being uber respectful of Catholic tradition — went off on me for laughing. When I wouldn’t tell her what I was laughing at, she walked me into the hallway.

 “Alright,” she said when she realized I wouldn’t stop laughing. “Kiese, you’re really not giving me any choice. Let’s go.” Ms. Bockman pointed down the hall which meant I was going to the Principal’s office. “Move it!”

Constructed as a white middle class parish in 1957, by the mid 80′s, Holy Family’s student body was entirely black except for Lori Bakutis. Holy Family was also one of the few schools in Mississippi where neither the teachers nor the Principal could beat your ass. The downside was that as soon as you went into the Principal’s office, your Mama was called. And my real innovation, other than reading aloud like a dusty black thespian, was that I mastered getting kicked out of school and coming back the next day wearing welts like new skin without being embarrassed.

Even the kids at Holy Family who seemed to have the most impeccable hometraining like Hasanati Nutall, Kareem Hill, Henry Wallace, Tim Brown, Baraka Whittington and Madra Crump, knew that the worst asswhupping you could get, next to the talking-back-in-public asswhupping or the getting-bad-grades asswhupping, was the Principal-Called-Your Mama-While-She-At-Work asswhupping.

So, as soon as Ms. Bockman pointed to the office, I knew what was up. Plus, it was nearing the middle of the month, which meant Mama was a long way from getting paid and that always increased the licks, the quality of leather and intensity of the beating.

As I walked down the hall to the Principal’s office, our homeroom door opened. “Hold up!” It was David Rozier smiling ear to ear. “Kiese ain’t do nothing,” he told Ms. Bockman.  ”I’m responsible.”

I looked at David and waited for something more, something familiar.

I got nothing.

David Rozier and I spent everyday of our lives together calling and responding, daring each other to revise the rules of juvenile delinquency. We were the Run-DMC of bad behavior at Holy Family and Lerthon was our Jam Master Jay. But in that second, I was a spectator, just another wide-eyed member of the Holy Family cipher. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t understand the movement, language and work of responsibility, especially from David Rozier.

“I made Kiese laugh in Mass,” David told Ms. Bockman.

“But you didn’t laugh in Mass,” she said.

“I passed gas in my hand and I spread it,” I remember David saying with a straight face. “Kiese wouldn’t be laughing without me.”

…

While we sat outside the Principal’s office waiting for the secretary to call our Mamas, we joked about the styles of our eventual beatings and claimed we both saw Ms. Bockman smell her hand after David copped to passing the fart in Mass. After a minute or two of fake-yawning to break the silence, I asked David why he accepted responsibility for my laughing.

“I don’t even know,” I remember him saying. “My Grandmama told me to start acting responsible. I said I would. So when I remembered, I did. You woulda done it.”

David was wrong.

David and I got kicked out of our rickety black Catholic school that day. Later that evening, in our black neighborhoods, we got our black backs, elbows, knees, necks and thighs destroyed by our young single black Mamas. We knew it was their desperate way of keeping us out of black prisons, black clinics and black cemeteries. We knew it was their way of reckoning with black female responsibility.

My licks, during this whupping at least, were in sync with every syllable out of Mama’s mouth. At least 25 syllables. At least 25 licks. Near the second half of the whupping, Mama — who was a usually reckless whupper  – channeled the precision of Grandma and dropped eight licks to the syllables, “don’t … you … know … white … folks … want … you … dead …”

Even as a juvenile delinquent, I understood that when Mama said and meant “white folks” she should have said and meant the “worst of white folks.” I knew literally because there were so many different types of white folks on television and the only white folks I personally knew at the time — Ms. Bockman, Ms. Raphael and Lori Bakutis —  were complicated caring Mississippians who didn’t want me dead. But even as a 7th grader in Jackson, Mississippi, you didn’t have to know white folks personally to understand and feel what the worst of white folks were capable of.

The worst of white folks, I understood even then, wasn’t some small percentage of white folks with rifles draped in scary hoods. The worst of white folks was a pathetic powerful “it” that often wanted us to say, “We forgive you. Everything will be all right.” It wanted absolution, yet if other black, brown and poor folks gained access to a fraction of its healthy choices, it became pouty, resentful and destructive. It wanted us to know, and feel that anywhere it wanted to call home, it could. It consistently demanded responsibility from black folks for problems it created and had a peculiar thirst for black death. It conveniently forgot that it came to this country on a boat then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggest it share. It wanted my Mama and Grandma to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of the pie and then kiss its white ass because it allowed them to eat. It took absolutely no responsibility for its amazing arrogance or for how it destroyed and often dictated the insides of colorful homes, schools, families, psychologies and nations. It was at once crazy-making and quick to discipline you for being crazy. The worst of white folks bathed itself in a sudsy innocence and occasionally dried itself in a damp quilt of guilt. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would make sure it never wholly defined them.

I didn’t know a lot in the 7th grade and I had far fewer words to describe what I actually knew, but the “worst of white folks” I knew far too well. We all did. It passed through blood.

So after my beating, Mama called my Grandma not just to explain what I’d done, but to admit to Grandma that she couldn’t raise a child in Mississippi who refused to behave and teach hundreds of kids at Jackson State and pay bills on time and continue to fight for the dignity of black folks in Mississippi and miss her ex-husband and tend to a love life runneth over with trifling-ass niggas.

I was curled up on the floor of the kitchen, eavesdropping on the other line when I heard Mama say, ”It’s just too much, Mama. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Grandma’s response was quick, “I know, baby. I know” and caring “Send Kie to stay with me for a while,” and brutal, “I did it, Mary. You really ain’t got no choice, do you?”

Grandma was so wrong.

“... a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors can still be guided home to port…”   Assata Shakur

The spectacular tenth anniversary of September 11th, the spectacular unveiling of the Martin Luther King monument in D.C., the spectacular lynching of James Craig Anderson,
the spectacular success of The Help, the country’s spectacular insistence that Obama is to blame for the nation’s rot, my own spectacular failure and this boy shuttled me back to David Rozier. Today, my memories of David inform everything I know and feel about, not simply the language but also the work of responsibility, and our incessantly twisted reliance on convenient American spectacle.

A few months ago, my first cousin got off probation. Gene did close to fifteen years for manslaughter and spent the last few years on probation in Chicago. The lifting of his probation meant that he could finally leave the Illinois. After exchanging a few texts, Gene texted, “Hey Cuz I just want to be somewhere else where I have some healthy choices. You can help?” I told Gene then that I’d do whatever it took to get him to New York so he and his little girls could work and breathe somewhere different than Chicago. I meant it when I said, too.

That was four months ago.

I know how hard it is for formerly incarcerated brothers to get a fair shake at turning their lives around. I also know how hard it is for brothers who have never been incarcerated to turn their lives around. But even with this knowledge, and the fact that I have no kids, paid off all my student loans, don’t owe nobody shit, just earned tenure with distinction at a so-called elite college that could double as a lush state park,  I still haven’t sent for Gene.

I don’t need to look to the Tea Party for proof that American evil lurks.

Because more often than not, my wants trump other people’s needs, and my moral arc continues to easily bend towards fear, desperation, self-protection and selfishness, even while I’m critiquing the President for not making the wealthy share more, not pushing back against the Tea Party and not doing enough to specifically help black America.

The worst of me —  I understood this summer after interacting with Gene – has less power than the worst of white folks but is morally no better.  The worst of me is at once tired and despicable because, see,  I want to be told by Gene and you, “I forgive you. Thank you for even caring. Everything will be all right.” The worst of me wants absolute absolution whether it’s earned or not, and when I’m not granted absolution, the worst of me becomes pouty and destructive. The worst of me is at once crazy, crazy-making and quick to dismiss you as crazy if you don’t do what I want. The worst of me usually wants it both ways. All the time. The worst of me, like maybe the worst of you, bathes daily in a sudsy innocence and occasionally dries myself off in a spectacular quilt of convenient guilt.

The difference between the worst of me and the worst of white folks is that I’m not white, and this difference means everything nationally, globally and absolutely nothing personally or morally.

The sad thing is that my failure with Gene is easier to address and reckon with than other failures in my recent life where I’ve looked providence right in the mouth, held its hand and cowardly turned away. “Only a fool gives up a blessing,” my Grandma taught me when I was a child on parole.

…

A few years after David Rozier took responsibility for my laughing in Mass at Holy Family, he was dead. Henry Wallace,  the boy who pronounced “street” like “skreet” passed away around the same time. I’m writing this essay knowing that half the black boys in that Holy Family 7th grade classroom have died before reaching 35 years of age. And without talking to the rest of the surviving men and women in that class, I know that one of the reasons many more of us aren’t in prison or dead or homeless is because of the relationships we had with our Grandmas. They can’t and haven’t saved us, but they all tried. They are responsible.

Though I agree with Assata Shakur that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port, I also know that tired, seasick American sailors and their families have absolutely no chance at health and dignified lives, unless we all first accept responsibility, and work to calm the bruising brutality of the sea.

We are responsible for making sure no more black children on born on parole.

A few weeks ago, Vassar’s Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee (FASC) recused itself from my tenure case.  As rumors of my “bullying President Hill to get FASC off of my tenure case” limp around campus, I figured I should make it clear what my responses to FASC have been.

In February, FASC (The Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee) made the unprecedented request of asking for “documentation” on one of my unredacted book contracts, though they had proof of a contract. After giving them the contract, I wrote the following email:

Dear FASC,

I’ve talked to a number of folks on campus about your request for “documentation” of my contract and Chair’s ——– assertion that s/he would indeed “redact personal information” on that book contract. My initial anger, sadness and dismay came from the fact that the entire contract is indeed personal information, which is why I included the signed document by my agency stating the that the contract with my publisher had been fully executed on September 19 2007. This documentation of contract has been more than okay in my other reviews.

It is beyond unprofessional and unethical for FASC to request and/or offer to “redact personal information” on my contract. No one on FASC, or in my department has any right to know how much my advance was, the insurance policy on the book, whether or not I own foreign rights, what I’ll be paid if I win awards, etc.

Your request for “documentation” of my contract was beyond troubling; it was insidiously disrespectful and sad. I submitted my contract to you out of fear and a desire to shut up anyone on FASC who didn’t believe the contract existed.

Chair ——’s initial request that I further document my contract suggests that FASC thought I was lying about the existence of a contract. I’m still curious why you needed to see the contract. What did it prove? Is this general tenure review procedure? What did you get from the contract that I didn’t explain in my portfolio and/or that my agency’s letter didn’t convey.

Most importantly, why did Chair ——- suggest that s/he, not I, redact “personal” information from the contract?  The burden of proof here seems incredibly
invasive, but the request by the Chair of FASC to edit out what s/he deems as “personal information” is more than infantilizing.

Though I am your junior colleague, I am not a child.

I’ve been through two major reviews at Vassar College. In my last review, I was granted the highest honor of distinction. In that review, I supplied my department
with the same “proof” of secure contract that I did in this review. I’ve signed two major publishing deals since I’ve been at Vassar … and  I literally explained and creatively explored this relationship (to my publisher) in my tenure portfolio. If my outside reviewers and my department deem the work mediocre, so be it. My instinct and
literary history tell me that that both sets of reviewers may actually speak to the wonder and possibilities in my work.

I love Vassar College and have worked generously to make it a better, most daring, compassionate and excellent institution, but please know that I choose to be here.
I’m not crawling to the finish line; nor am I crossing my fingers for tenure. I never thought of FASC as celestial gate-keepers who can ask for whatever they want from potential candidates.

Perhaps I was wrong.

Many of us junior people here have been offered jobs at other institutions but we choose to stay, frankly, because of our students, some of our colleagues and the institutional commitment to innovation and social justice. But make no mistake about it, Vassar is lucky to have us, and you as a committee are elected and granted the privilege of ethically reviewing our materials.

Vassar deserves better.

If any of you would like to speak, I look forward to it,

Kiese

After meeting with President Cappy Hill, who understood all my concerns and actually disagreed with the unprecedented request for unredacted contract, I met with a senior member of FASC. This senior member of FASC expressed that some members of FASC were upset with letter I’d written and that their asking for an unredacted contract, though unprecedented to his/her knowledge, was “not an abuse of power.”

A few weeks after my meeting with this senior committee member, my four anonymous outside review letters came in. All four overwhelmingly supported my candidacy for tenure. Similarly, Africana Studies submitted a letter recommending promotion with distinction and the English department voted 15-1 in favor of my promotion to tenured professor. 29 reviewers other than FASC reviewed my file and 28 of those folks reviewed me favorably. None of the other 29 reviewers asked for more personal financial information. After FASC got all of the outside review letters,  I found out that this same senior member of FASC who I met with earlier sent a link to the rest of other members of FASC questioning my graduation date from Graduate School. I found out after s/he mistakenly emailed one of my colleagues in the English department who was also up for tenure. After reading the “mistaken” correspondence, and knowing that my reviews inside and outside Vassar were on point, I wrote the following email to FASC:

To Whom it May Concern,

My colleague inadvertently received this email from —– —— today. I have no clue why you’re sending around a profile of me from Indiana University, but I can’t assume your intentions are good.

I’m going to ask you kindly one more time to please stop fucking with me. I mean that with sincerity and kindness.

Either you are incompetent or inconsiderate. Either way, you should think about stopping whatever you’re doing.

If you have a question, ask it. If it can’t be asked with grace and professionalism, maybe it shouldn’t be asked. My colleague should not be privy to the silly investigating reportage of FASC.

I’m not going to ask you again. Please stop fucking with me.

Kiese

Again, the President and Dean were supportive and understanding that something monumentally wrong had happen in this tenure process. Later that night, I received a perfunctory apology from the senior committee member who sent the suspect correspondence.

I responded with the following email,

“You’re a funny guy, ——. When the game is over, it’s okay to go home.”

A week or so later, I received an email from FASC that said,

“Dear Kiese,

FASC has decided to recuse itself in the case of Kiese Laymon.

Sincerely,”

This isn’t an essay. It’s simply an account of what I’ve said and done in response to what feels like a committee/country’s obsession with delegitimating extremely competent candidates and contributors of color.  I don’t know whether FASC recused themselves on their own or if they were forced to recuse themselves. I do know that this isn’t about me. It’s partially about the maniacal anxiety that bubbles up when awkward absolute power is no longer revered or accepted. Due diligence does not give anyone or any committee the right to invade privacy and/or consistently thwart procedure laid out by governance. Powerful, hard working committees like FASC can not be allowed to workout their “private investigatory skills” at our expense, especially when our files are excellent.

Though we love Vassar and we have become central to the college’s mission, Vassar didn’t save us and we subsequently don’t feel lucky to be here. We know Vassar is lucky to have us and if we are to make this place one of our homes, we must excellently engage in some institutional renovation.  Imani Perry writes, “The stress of feeling constantly called into question, constantly under surveillance, has emotional and physical consequences for us.”

Us.

Of course, Imani Perry is right. And of course, we’re tired of fighting for institutional renovation and communal integrity when there are so many bigger problems in the world. But we have to accept — especially when we perform with excellence — that this is ours. We are responsible to, and, for it. These are our institutions. We have to open these institutions to more of us and part of that opening means that we have to be excellent, public and persistent when we lay claim to dignity in spite of stress, depression, sadness, fear, physical, spirtitual and mental deterioration.

These public claims to dignity aren’t panaceas, but they are reminders to those in front and behind us that we are worthy, colorfully human and potentially beautiful practioners in the messy art of being human. Our public claims to dignity are prickly proof that this, in all its malignant wonder, is ours. It must be shared, changed and brilliantly loved

Ether.

From across the room, Lester’s fingers, which were closer to thick raggedy cigars than regular human digits, cupped both sides of the throne as Grandma called us to the kitchen to pray. “Look at Les over there,” My Aunt Sue said with a grin. “He sleep. Get up, Les. Time to eat. Wake him up, Kie.”

The sweat had me worried.

The night before, on Christmas Eve, I joined Les outside in his Runaway spot. Les runs away to this chair outside the house no matter the time of day. Really, unless he’s drunk, his Runaway spot is the only place my Grandma allows Les to do the two things he’s actually magnificent at … telling loud lies and smoking the tar outta some Newports. As quiet as it’s kept, Les is the world’s most magnificent teller of loud lies you’ve ever heard in your life, and I’ve yet to see an’ nigga on earth swag-surf with a square dangling from their lips better than him.

As far as lying goes, I’m convinced Les tells so many lies, not because he’s deceptive but because he’s blessed with the voice of a country God. It’s not nearly as bombastic as that teethy goof with the golden voice, but it’s way more flexible. When Les is lying about being a 39th degree Mason, his voice sounds like flat tires rolling over jagged gravel. When he’s lying about what he did to the dog of “the white man” his voice sounds like burning bubble wrap. No matter what he’s lying about, all of his voices have that acidic slow drip to them and privately all the voices carry stories about what “the black man” deserves.

This Christmas Eve, I wanted Les’s opinion. See, Les is not your run of the mill liar. He’s actually lightweight brilliant, thoughtful and eerily quiet until you ask him a question. Then the lies begin.

“Les, you know who Kanye West is, right?” I asked him.

“Kanye!” he said. “Say do I know Kanye?” Les stood up like he did whenever he told all his stories in his Runaway spot. When he stood up and you stayed seated, Les could look down and say one of his favorite lying phrases –“Look up here, man” – with more umph.

“Look up here, man,” he said. “I been known Kanye. His Mama come over the Public Museum when I was working in Milwaukee. I been told her Kanye was gon’ be prophet. On one hand,” Les slang out his right palm, “you got Kanye telling the white man the truth about what the black man deserve, see?” Then he slang out his other paw. “On the other hand, look up here, you got Obama deciding who deserve to get what in America. They the same though, son.” He tapped me on my knee. “40 years ago, white man woulda hung both them niggas over yonder and went right on ’bout his business. Yes he would, too.”

It wasn’t until Les asked the of question of “Kanye sang songs?” that I knew for sure that Kanye West had never created a note of music, never sung a hook, never rapped a bar in the mind of Halester “Les” Myers. Les had never heard of Taylor Swift. Didn’t know Kanye’s mother passed and definitely didn’t know that My Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye’s most acclaimed album, had just been released four weeks ago.

To Les, Kanye West simply was the young black boy who told the world that black folks boiling in poisonous water deserved more from the President of our country. Kanye was the only black boy in his “83 years of living who had gone on network TV” and told the truth.

“The white man give him that the mic ‘cause they ain’t think there was no way he tell the truth,” Les said. “After all them Afghanese that Bush killed, now he claim Kanye the worst thing that happen to him. White man’ll say anything,” Les said. “Look up here, man. He believe everything he say, too. Just like Brett Favre …”

Les started going off on Bret Favre, and at this point, even though it was cold for Mississippi, he began to sweat. I knew I was supposed to ask him another question about Brett Favre but I didn’t wanna hear how he supposedly washed Favre’s car when he was playing for the Packers or how he saw all kind pictures of his wee-wee thrown around the back seat.

Plus, the sweat had me worried.

Les pulled a rag out of his overalls and went on the side of the house and started smoking. I walked over behind him and watched his profile.

“Back in the day,” I asked him, “you think the white man woulda hung a black woman for saying the same thing Kanye said?”

Les looked up at me, took a few more puffs. “Naw,” he said in this voice that was both formal and afraid. “I don’t reckon he would. I ain’t one for guessing what a female gon’ do.” He blew the smoke towards his feet. “Expect the unexpected with females, son. They like cats. Care for em like you care for a cat. Don’t never trust nan one if you can help it. If you do, that’s the end of you. Wooo …”

I walked back to the chair next to his Runaway spot and I sat down. Deep within his musings about females, cats, and trust, I couldn’t tell if Les was using his voice to lie or create truth or something in between.

I wanted to tell Les a story about the day Kanye’s album came out, a story that carried way more questions than answers, framed by way more reckoning than realization.

***

I’m headed to Columbia Law School to give a talk on black literary imagination for Kimberle Crenshaw’s class, “Colorblindness and the Law” the day that Kanye and Nicki’s  albums come out. I had the bootleg two weeks before the actual album but I look forward to seeing what, if anything, is different. On my way to the station in Poughkeepsie, I play the first minute of the real album. Then I replay it. Again. I play the last minute of the album in the parking lot of the station. And I replay it. Again. I wonder why Kanye begins the album with four “Can we get much higher’s” and ends the album with four “Who will survive in America’s.”

Every superhero need his/her theme music, but as I make my way through the station I’m convinced that every superhero also definitely needs a question or two they’re willing to live, die and change for. I love that Kanye West, the international asshole, not only frames his album with the questions “Can we get much higher” and “Who will survive in America” but also borders his dark twisted fantasy with the faux British voice of Nicki Minaj and grainy revolutionary voice of Gil Scott Heron. Within the frame, all the guest verses and distorted vocals, it’s obvious that Kanye believes that lots of voices, other than his own, also deserve to be explored in his dark twisted fantasy.

When I step on the Metro North, folks are in their usual pre-New York state of mind. Heads are nearly down. Fists aren’t fully clenched. Purses, backpacks and pleather briefcases are almost firmly pressed against puffy coats.

Unusually though, lots of downward turned heads bob as familiar static came from headphones. Different tracks from Kanye’s dark twisted fantasy compete for space and time on that train. For the woman in front of me, it’s Runaway. For the man two seats behind me, it’s Gorgeous. For a kid I know who got on in Beacon, it’s Power.

I get into dollar cab at 125^th and I’m shocked that the driver looks like he could be one of my students named Jacob or Seth. I’m even more shocked that fake JacobSeth is bumping “Blame Game.”

“This Kanye shit is unreal,” JacobSeth says.

“Yeah,” I tell him, weirded out that JacobSeth is driving a dollar cab. “It is kinda crazy.”

By the time I get to the Law School, Chris Rock is asking the voice formerly known as that of a real woman, “Who reupholstered your pussy?”

I get out of the cab, Yeezy reupholstered my pussy behind me, wondering if this is really still Harlem and thankful that I’m from Jackson, Mississippi. I make my way upstairs in the Law School Building.

Kim’s class is beyond incredible. We talk. We break. We listen. We build. We wonder. I bounce.

On the way out, Kim asks two of her students, one an Korean American woman and one an Iranian American man to hail a taxi for me. It’s a loving, pragmatic gesture, she assures me, ‘cause cabs ain’t got no love black men going up town.

Once we’re out on 116^th street, they decide they’d be more effective if each goes to either side of the street. I ask the woman what side I should go to. I wonder if she thinks I’m the shit and/or if she thinks I’m too fat for my age. She tells me to stay on this side with her. I look across at the Iranian cat, then look down at her and decide I should cross so she won’t think I’m trying to mack.

Across the street, we wait. And they pass. And we wait. And I act like it doesn’t all hurt and feel so good at the same time.

Finally, I’m headed back to 125^th and ultimately back to Poughkeepsie wondering how to explore with colorful profundity the absurd privilege and policing that exists around the contorted shadows of grown American black boys. It wouldn’t be until the next day in front of a computer screen, that I realize intentionally and unintentionally just maybe, Kanye has done that and so much more with his dark twisted fantasy. And it wasn’t until Les tells me to treat “females” like cats that I really understand that realizing ain’t near ’bout enough. Reckoning, even in art, is harder and a gazillion times scarier.

Instead of saying all that to Les that night, I had an imaginary conversation with him. I told him that if you really listen to Kanye West, you’re gonna feel like he wants people and art to get what they deserve.

Poor black folks from New Orleans deserved more so Kanye said, “George doesn’t care about black people.”

Beyonce deserved more so Kanye said, “Taylor, I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the greatest videos of all time.”

Queer brothers deserved more so Kanye said, “I’ve been discriminating against gays … and I wanna come on TV and tell my rappers, just tell my friends, Yo, stop it.’”

Black kids in Chicago deserved more so Kanye said, “Man, killing some wack shit.”

And listeners of pop music deserved more than the “watered down version” of music we’d been getting, so Kanye offered us his dark twisted fantasy.

Kanye West doesn’t just make music; he delivers offerings. Kanye manages to collapse, carve and distort different, disparate forms of sound, color and voices into songs one can’t escape. His work does more than challenge conventional composition; it dares. Within a single song, sound #1 dares sound #2 to show its ass and fit in and sound #2 does the same to sound #3 and on down the line. Each odd shaped sound, like those heard in the last 2:50 of Runaway, whispers and bellows, I wish a nigga would try and not listen to me over and over and over. Then before you know it, some crazy shit, like a human voice morphing into guitar chords, happens … and it doesn’t feel forced. Decisions like that one or the way he brings in Rick Ross after long ass guitar solo to finish up Devil in a New Dress should make, even haters of Kanye West, admit that he’s one of the few artists in the world we treat like the best of television. We wonder what’s gonna happen next with the character, plot and style of whatever Kanye West delivers this season and we all show up in front of our screen for next season’s premiere.

Real must recognize real, and as such, I think every harsh critic of Kanye West, with the exception of maybe Obama, should begin their criticism with the following sentence, “Kanye West, that box-jawed American virtuoso, is eons better at his job than I am at mine, but …”

So, Kanye West, that box-jawed American virtuoso, is eons better at his job than I am at mine, but …

… when it comes to exploring women (you know “females” “cats” “bitches” “hoes” “pussy” “Kelly Rowlands” “hood rats” “good girls” “sluts” “light skinned girls”) and/or consistently delving into what they deserve, well, I’m pretty sure he ain’t using his voice right.

This would actually make him the same as almost every other virtuoso American male artist, leader, professor and politician I’ve read, watched and heard. Kanye’s better than those jokers, though.  He’s good enough, brave enough, conceptually genius enough, compassionate enough and rich enough to use his voice to explore with prickly honesty what women actually create, how women actually fail and what women actually deserve. And maybe even more importantly, he’s honest enough to explore the ways he’s encouraged to obsessively dismember, destroy and diss the fuck out of women in order to feel like a man.

HAM!?

And if he’s not going to explore this faulty obsession, I think he’s too good to exploit it as he does on My Dark Twisted Fantasy. For example, if Kanye’s Runaway was as musically deft defying as it currently is, and instead of asking scorned women to run away, he asked the male douche bags and assholes to run away, reckon and reconsider our reliance on reducing women to accessorized pussy, would it matter? If every voice on Blame Game didn’t ultimately ridicule the “woman” whose “pussy game has come up,” who Yeezy “taught” so well, and somehow the question of “Who taught you to be so gotdamn selfish and emotionally insecure?” was answered by the hook “Yeezy taught me” would we care? I don’t know. I do know that what I’m asking is hard.

Pause.

Please know that this isn’t one of those essays trying to convince straight black men to that we indeed must treat “lost, victimized” black women like the “African queens they are.” Nor is this some goofy diatribe where I prove to the world that I’m that “together brother” who can spot and spell femiphobia, misogyny and heterosexism. Too often, many of us “together brothers” use that ability to spot and spell words like “femiphobia” as bait to be just as destructive and manipulative as ig’nant niggas who think “misogyny” is the newest Italian soup. It’s true. Realization never has been, nor will it ever be reckoning.

I’m saying, I think, that those of us who really love black cultural production and black cultural products need to reckon with why and how we encourage/accept our greatest producers constant reduction of women to pussy, heartless manipulators and dick suckers. What in us makes that okay? Of course, some women chomp on hearts. And of course, there are women out there who chronically suck and seek dick. Yay for all of them if they’re healthy and honest. The question is why do we have to focus on that part of those particular women do so much in our music and our conversations with each other. And in focusing on that particular part of those women, what parts of ourselves and those women aren’t we focusing on? And why is it all so lucrative and easy?

What, for instance, does it mean that Nicki Minaj drops the same week that Kanye drops, and on every single song on the Pink Friday, where she’s accompanied by a male emcee (Em, Drake and Kanye), the emcee rhymes about “making hoes drop to their knees” or “fuckin bad bitches” or sluts who are told to “wipe the smiles off their faces”? Right in front of Nicki … and right in front of us … and literally, no one who loves the work of Nicki or Kanye seems to care. Do you?

At what point does listening to emcees encourage consequenceless sex with women doubling as accessorized pussy become not just destructive, but boring? And when do we take responsibility for how destructive and boring it is? Worse than being dishonest, I’m amazed that not caring about women isn’t played out yet. It means something wholly despicable that Kanye, “the international asshole,” is never an asshole for what he says about — not to — women. I mean black women. I mean What up, Taylor? I mean What up Ta-Nehisi?

I don’t know, yall. I ain’t lying. I don’t even know.  This is some of what I was thinking, not just after Halester “Les” Myers made his comment about “females” that night, but also the following day on Christmas when Les sat across the room from me in that pink throne and wouldn’t wake up.

***

We poured water on Les’s face, put ice down his back and on his lips. It didn’t matter. Grandma looked up at me with a fear I’d never seen in her eyes as I rubbed more ice on his head, his mouth, his neck while Mama called an ambulance. Right before the medics got there, he moved his mouth a little. He wasn’t dead at least. When the two white medics entered the room, I thought about how it was the first time more than one white person has ever been in my Grandma’s house.

In the back of the ambulance, Les’s eyes didn’t open but he lay on that stretcher crying that kind of cry that comes from way deeper than just hurt. He cried all the way to the hospital in Forest, too.  After we were at the hospital a while, the doctors made it clear that Les had nearly drank himself to death. When Grandma went in the room, she told him that she had a strap in her purse and she was gonna whup his ass if he ever scared her like that. Les was still drunk as skunk and talking crazy as hell. After a while, I went in there and touched his hands.

He mumbled something about a 7 and started clutching the front of his overalls that were drooping around his waist after his chest x-ray.

“You gotta pee?” I asked him.

“Three-fif sheh-bilm,” he said.

“357?”

I touched the pocket on the front of his overall and I felt it. There was a loaded .357 in the front pocket of his overalls. He wanted me to take it so he wouldn’t get arrested. I took the gun, put it in my pocket and just said, “Les, gotdamn. You gotta do better, man.”

“I know,” he mumbled in the smallest, most terrifying voice I’d ever heard him use. “I know.” Then he pulled me closer and whispered in my ear, “I’m shorry, man, for what I shed.”

I pulled away from Les and just looked at him. He wasn’t in his right mind, but even his wrong mind I hoped he knew that the shit he said the day before about females being like cats was wrong. Actually, I didn’t hope for that at all. What Les said about other women was oceans away from what he said about my Grandma. And for what he said about my Grandma and only what he said about my Grandma, I wanted to bust Les’s head to the whitest meat.

The next night my Grandma, the complicated, hard-headed woman responsible for the teeny amount of integrity I have, fell into a diabetic coma. The same white medics came to the house, took her off and placed her one room down from where Les was the night before.

When Grandma finally regained consciousness, I lied to Les and told him that she wanted to see him.

I peeked around the corner as Les went in and watched him grab her hand.

“Doctor say you ain’t doing what you supposed to do,” he told her.

“I did what I was supposed to do,” Grandma said with weak twitching eyes.

“Okay, okay. Just telling you what he said to me,” Les told her. “That ain’t my voice. That’s the doctor.”

And with that, Les stood there in those same stanky overalls, shamefully looking down in the eyes of my Grandma, a supposed cat, an untrustworthy female, a blamed bitch, a ho who should runaway. Les stood, not saying a word, knowing right there that my Grandma deserved every bit of whatever care he had left and every ounce of what he’d yet to imagine. I should have asked him if he was holding the hand of Catherine Coleman, a human being he loved, a human being who loved him better than anyone on earth.

I should have asked him if he or I deserved to have our hands held by a woman.

Alone, you sit on the floor of your apartment thinking about evil, honesty, malignant growth, the second person and stretch marks.  You’re wearing an XXL t-shirt you plan on wearing around campus the day after you’re granted or denied tenure. The front of the t-shirt reads, “Fuck you” and on the back “Pay me!” In tiny loopy cursive around the collar are the words, “And I made myself so easy to love.” With a forced smile on your face and a scary pain in your hip, you open your computer and read an email from Brenda, your editor for 5 years.

“The success of your book will be wholly dependent upon librarians who have a different sensibility than your intended audience,” she writes. “As I mentioned, the Spell Off section of the book feels forced for the purpose of discussing racial politics and as a result it doesn’t feel organic.”

You begin typing a response, “Brenda, this is my 14^th thorough revision for you in 5 years. I know I’m not changing your mind and that’s fine. The book is about, among other things, the way ‘racial politics’ are enacted on the bodies and messy imaginations of black and jewish southern teenagers in 1964, 1985 and 2011. If anything, I can take out some of what the narrator says to the South Asian kids, but I’m not cutting the Spell Off section from this book.”

You push send on the email before opening up the word.doc you just defended. You jump to Chapter 9. Thirty minutes later, the Spell Off section that “discusses racial politics” is cut.

You call your editor names that hurt, muddied misogynist words you pride yourself on never calling any woman, before typing the first few letters of her name in the “To” section of a new email. “Dear Brenda,” you write. “I hear what you’re saying about librarians. I actually think some of them would love both of my books. But I also heard what you said when you signed the book. ‘You won’t have to change much at all for this market.’ Remember? I appreciate your care and would like to say again that this is a southern black teenage book that will hopefully also reverberate with folks who aren’t southern, teenagers or black.”

You pause and look out the tall window of your apartment in Poughkeepsie, New York. A barefoot white boy with a red and black lumberjack is outside sitting under an oak tree. He’s doing that walkie-talkie thing on his phone that you fucking hate. You can tell he’s telling the truth and lying at the same time.

“You hurt me more than anyone in my whole life … I couldn’t hate you … I just don’t trust you … You’re the one who said you tell the truth  … you said doing wrong can have painful consequence …  What! You told me that. This is your consequence … You made me sick … You started this. You’re worse than I ever imagined.” The dude is scratching his nut-sack with the thumb of left hand and using his big toe to make designs in the dirt in front of him while he’s lying and telling the truth at the same time. “You ruined my life and hurt me way more than I hurt you. You did.”

You think about the second person on the end of the phone. You know too well why a first or third person could self-righteously claim innocence in matters of love and loss but you can’t figure out why he is scratching his sack with his thumb.

You look down at the browning “s” key on your keyboard and you think more bad thoughts about your editor. These thoughts distract you from the pain in  your leg. For five years, Brenda Farley has had you waiting. You remember the sound in your Grandma’s voice when you told her you’d sold your first book. You’d just signed a two-book deal with the most lucrative African American Imprint in the country and she’d just come out of her second diabetic coma.

“We love you, baby,” Grandma whispered over the phone from Forest, Mississippi. “I done hurt folks I ain’t have no reason hurting. And they done hurt me, too. That’s what folks do. Just remember that God give you 5 senses and whatever health you got for a reason. When they gone, they gone, but if you don’t use them best you can while you got them, ain’t a bigger fool in the world than that fool in the mirror. Everybody is somebody else fool. That book, though, that’s proof that you ain’t the white man’s fool. You told the truth, didn’t you?”

A year before the initial publication date of June 2007, you no longer heard from Brenda Farley. She didn’t answer your calls or respond to emails. You called the publisher. “Oh, Brenda didn’t tell you?” Brenda’s boss said. “She’s no longer with us, but your book has been picked up by Nathalie. She’ll call you in a few days.” Your heart slipped into the heels of your feet and you trudged your fat ass to the International House of Pancakes.

Three hours later, you found a way to reach Brenda Farley at home. She apologized for not telling you that she wasn’t seeing eye-to-eye with her boss. But she promised you that Nathalie was a friend of hers who would do right by your work.

A week later, you got a call from Nathalie. “It’s a hard sell for black literary fiction these days,” she told you, “but I like what you’re doing. It’s a big messy book with big messy ideas and we’ve got to work hard and fast. But I’d love for you to let me take this book to publication. Brenda and I have a similar sensibility and she believed in this book. I do, too. Let’s do it.”

You felt a comfort with Nathalie but you didn’t want to be impulsive as you were with Brenda. “Can I have a few days to think about it?” you asked her. “Just to make sure.”

A few days passed and you planned on calling Nathalie at 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday. At 3:00 p.m., you got a call from a 212 number. Before you had a book deal, 212 numbers were like slimming mirrors; they made you think Damn, you ain’t disgusting. On the other end of a 212 number were agents, editors or your ex telling you she missed how you made her feel.

“Hello,” you answered, trying to sound busy and country at the same time.

“Hi,” said the voice on the other end.

It was Brenda Farley.

After a few minutes of spin where Brenda Farley showed you how much she remembered about your book and how happy she was to be the new senior editor of young adult fiction at a well-respected Penquick imprint, she said, “… all that to say we want your book.”

“Word?”

“Word!” she laughed and called you sweetie. This was the 3^rd time she called you “sweetie” and you wondered if she thought you were cute. “I can actually pay you more for one book here than the other publisher paid you for two. You want that kind of flexibility.”

“Are you serious?” you asked, sounding young and dumb as you were. “As a young adult book,” you said, “I’m a little worried about changing the integrity and focus of the book.”

“You’d be surprised at the possibilities in young adult fiction,” she told you. “You won’t have to make many changes at all and we can get a pub date for January 2008.”

“But what about Nathalie?” you asked.

“It’s business,” she said, sounding like a hungry Hip Hop mogul, “never personal. You’ll have to get out of that contract over there. And I’ve got the perfect agent for you. He’s this wonderful gay agent over at Chatham Ward & Associates named Bobby Winslow. Look him up. Bobby’ll take care of everything if you decide to go with us.”

Later that night, Bobby, the perfect agent, called and asked you to send him the other pieces you were working on. You sent him the book Brenda wanted and two other projects at 8:00 p.m. By 3:00 a.m., he emailed you and said, “I’m really excited about the new projects you’re working on. If you sign with Chatham Ward, we’ll have our lawyers get you out of the deal with Nathalie in the next week or so and Brenda says she can get us at least twenty grand for the first book in a week or two. I’ll be in touch.”

You never contacted Nathalie, but Bobby, the perfect agent did. “She’s pissed,” he said, “but all’s fair in love, war and business.” As you wonder whether this is love, war or business, you and your perfect agent wait and wait and wait for Brenda to deliver on her part of the deal.

Six months later, Brenda offered you 10K less than she promised and a publication date 9 months later than she verbally agreed to.

“I’m so sorry it happen this way. Pardon me for saying this,” your perfect agent said over the phone, “but Brenda Farley is a bonafide bitch. She’s just not professional. She brought you to me! I’m never working with her again. Never. Never.” This was the first time your perfect agent wasn’t so perfect and his imperfection made you feel incredible.

You got your first edit letter from Brenda Farley in July, the same month you were contacted by a producer interested in purchasing the film rights to the novel. In addition to talking about the characterization and pacing of the work, Brenda wrote, “There’s way too much racial politics in the piece. The kids are mouthpieces.” You wondered out loud who and what the kids are mouthpieces for before you got to the next line. “We need this book to come down from 284 pages to 150,” she said. “We’re gonna have to push the pub date back, too. Remember,” she told you, “It’s business. Never personal. I think you should start from scratch. The Percy Jackson demographic,” she said. “That’s the audience for this book.”

When you found out Percy Jackson wasn’t the name of a young conflicted black boy from Birmingham, but a white boy who saved the gods of Mount Olympus, you were already broken. You started writing essays because you were tired of listening to characters, scenes, situations that would never breathe in real life. Your body no longer felt like your body and you doubted whether your Grandma would ever see your fiction before one of you died. You were a fool.

Two years after the pub date for your first book, questions fell like dominoes. Why would she buy the book, you kept asking yourself. Why would she get you out of a contract for a book she didn’t want, your perfect agent asked you. Why’d you promise stuff you couldn’t deliver, you asked Brenda on the phone. “The book doesn’t just have Penquick’s name on it,” you tell her. “My name is on that shit, too. That means, on some level, it ain’t business. I feel like you want me to lie. I read and write for a living. I see the shit that’s out there. I’ve read your other books. I see your goofy book covers looking like greasy children’s menus at Apple Bees. I ain’t putting my name on a menu. I’m not. Don’t front like it’s about quality. Ya’ll don’t think you can sell this book because you don’t believe my audience reads.”

After a long pause where you could hear Brenda telling her assistant to get her a special eclair from Jacques, she said, “Reading your work has been painstaking.”

The next morning you got an email from Brenda with the following message,

“Hey Aaron, I finished the revision this afternoon.  It totally kicks ass.  Congrats.  I’ve sent back a few line edits, but it’s all there.  It’s brilliant.  I’m so proud of you.  Always darkest before the dawn, eh. Hugs sweetie, Brenda.”

Your name was not, and never will be Aaron.

You opened up facebook to the News Feed page and found that Brenda had posted the covers of recently published and forthcoming books she’d edited. Most of the covers did actually look like greasy children’s menus at Apple Bees, but seeing the menus all there without yours broke you. Your eyes watered as you googled the published authors Brenda had signed 3 years after you. You wanted a menu, too.

Even though you were fatter than you’d ever been and the joints in your left leg got rustier everyday, parts of you were/are Tupac Amaru Shakur. Yeah, Brenda bombed first, you thought, but right there, you felt determined to write another novel just so you could thank her in the acknowledgments,

“… And a special thanks to that shape-shifting cowardly lioness, ol’ lying ass Brenda Farley, the untrustworthy editing-‘cause-she-can’t-write-a-lick ass bitch who’d sell out her mama for a gotdamn éclair as long as the éclair had been half eaten by a white librarian named Jacques. Thanks for all the hate. Can you see me now? Goooood. Congrats, Sweetie. ”

Instead you wrote, “Not sure why you sent that email, Brenda. I hope we both appreciate the distinction between what’s marketable and what’s possible. Glad you’re having success with some of your authors. I think you should give my books a chance to breathe, too. Thanks for the inspiration.”

Brenda never responded to your email.

Outside of your writing life, you’d fully become a liar unafraid to say I love you and too willing to say I’m sorry which meant you were a living, breathing, gobbler of heartmeat. You’d gobbled your heart out and hadn’t summoned the courage or literally the heart to ask for and accept help.

One Tuesday night, you couldn’t move your left leg or feel your toes and you’d been sweating through your mattress for a month … You knew there was something terribly wrong long before your furry-fingered doctor, with tiny hands and eyebrows to die for used the words “malignant growth.” While sitting on the table, your sore leg dangling, you hoped the doctor wouldn’t say “malignant growth” or another word again.

“It won’t be easy, but we can fight it. Frankly, I’m worried about you,” the doctor said. “You seem like you’re holding something in. Fear is okay, you know? You can cry.”

You watched the doctor’s eyebrows wiggle and sway like black wheat. They looked like a hyper four-year old had gone buckwild with a fistful of black crayons. “I like your eyebrows,” you told the doctor.

“I’d actually like to recommend therapy in addition to the treatment,” the doctor told you before you left.

For the next few months, you took treatment he gave you and skipped the therapy. You told no one about the malignant growth in your left leg, not even the person whose heart you were eating. You accepted, on a ride through Connecticut, that you were only honest in your writing. You also accepted you’d given up on living with dignity. You’d stopped doing the hard work of being the human you wanted to be and you thought about all the ways folks had done you wrong.

One Sunday, while hating life, you heard goofy twinkles that made you remember sleeping and waking as a child. When a box-head boy, 98x sexier than you, crooned the lyrics, “…one day you won’t remember me/your face will be the reason I smile …” you made the decision to stop writing essays and listen to the voices and scenes in your head. Before you had the beginning, middle or end of the story, you had a sliver of a scene and an odd adjective-happy voice. “The whole time I’d been in those woods,” you wrote, “I’d never stopped and looked up. The tops of the pine trees swayed in tiny circles like a bunch of skinny green index fingers. Behind those fingers, the sky was changing from faded blue jean blue to new Levi’s blue and drunk-looking lightning bugs were starting to get their wink on.”

You spent the next 4 months of your life skipping treatments for your malignant growth and getting a first draft of the new novel done. You took a train to Oakland and you completed a draft of a new book. You’d created a series. In this latest book, the most basic book in the series, you didn’t dumb down the story for Brenda, but instead of writing a book you hoped would trickle down to younger teenagers, you wrote an honest book to younger teenagers in the hope that it would float up to older teens, parents and grandparents.

You sent the book to your editor and told her you’d taken her suggestions to start from scratch and create a lean book filled with adventure. “It’s a book I’m proud of,” you wrote in the letter attached to the manuscript. “It’s a book I wished I could have read in high school or middle school. Freedom Summer, anti-semitism, Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Obama backlash loom large in the book but they don’t overpower the narrative or the mysterious relationships between the kids. I’ve sent the book to other editors and writers and they think we’ve got something special in this book and the series.”

Your editor responded that she would check it out over the weekend and get back to you with her thoughts.

8 months later, she finally sent an email, “Ultimately, the same problems exist in this draft that were in the other drafts.” Brenda ended the email, “We need more traditional adventure. We need to know less about the relationships between the characters and more about the adventure and the science fiction. This is still painstaking.”

For the next two months, you revised the manuscript and Brenda Farley wrote variations of the same email. Still too ashamed to own your disease and too cowardly to own your decisions, you stretched your legs out on the floor of your living room. After crying, laughing and wondering, you grabbed a pad and scribbled, “Alone, you sit on the floor…”

You wonder why you start the piece with “Alone, you …” You think about “point of view” and “second person,” two concepts that mean so much more than you admit. You are the “I” to no one in the world, not even yourself. To you, you’re who you need to be to make it through your day, your marriage, your essay, your break-up, your make up, your surgery, your life. You’re looking for language to corroborate your experience. You’ve eviscerated people who loved you when they made you the second person in their lives, when they put the relationship’s needs ahead of your wants. And you’ve been eviscerated for the same thing. You’re not a monster. You’re not innocent.

You look down at the browning “s” key on your keyboard. You don’t know how long you’ll live. No one does. You just don’t want to hurt the few folks in your life who will always love you no matter how you fail them. You know that it’s time to stop letting your anger towards Brenda be more important than the art of being human and healthy. You know it’s time to admit to yourself, your writing and folks who love you that you’re the second person.

“Sorry your reads have been so painstaking, Brenda,” you start typing. “I want to get healthy. That means not only that I need to be honest; it also means I’ve got to take my life back and move to place where I no longer blame you for failure. I’ve thought and said some terrible things about you. I’ve thought some of those things because you lied and manipulated me for so long and I’ve thought others because you’re a woman who lied and manipulated me. I’ve blamed you for my writerly failures, the breaking of my body and my breaking of hearts. Thanks for signing me up back in the day. Somehow, some way, there was something in my work, something in me that resonated with your work and something in you. We are connected … I’m not sure what happens next. No young writer leaves an iconic press before their first book comes, right?  Whatever. I will not put my name on the book that you want written and it apparent that you won’t put Penquick’s name on the book I want read. We tried, Brenda, but life is long and short. God gave me senses and a little bit of health. It’s time for me to use them the best that I can. Good luck.”

You look up …

The week you were born, I hid behind a Raggedy Ann and Andy toy box and waited for your Mama to bring you home. I didn’t hide simply because I was sad that you were taking my place as the baby of the family; nor did I hide because I, as a 7 year old child, had never seen a new born.I hid because I was scared of what you would demand of me. With you in the world, I had the responsibility of not only aimlessly living life; I had the responsibility of saying yes to life. Yours and mine.

When Mama carried you in the door of that house on Queen Eleanor Rd, I jumped from behind that toy box. I couldn’t help it. I ran into the living room and slowly, sheepishly peeked at you, the three-day-old Catherine Nichole Coleman. My first cousin.

Like our Grandma, you had still piercing eyes that somehow caught and cradled everything in the room. Even then, your tiny balled up fists punched at what seemed like hundreds of invisible ghosts as I knelt and made goofy faces hoping to make you laugh.

In a way, we’d spend the rest of our lives that way … punching the unnamed blues away and desperately trying to make each other laugh. Deep down, though, we knew.

As years went on, we both dealt with the unfair weight of life and love. Those invisible ghosts, those shapeless blues, began to take shape. They got heavier, meaner, more persistent. We knew what we were fighting and though we rarely spoke to each other about the contours of our pain caused and the pain withstood, we could see the toll taken in our voice, our fiery temperament and our ever-changing health.

Yet we still wanted to make each other proud from thousands of miles away. I prayed this year, Nicole, to transfer the pain of your heart, your body and your baby to me.

In my immediate absence you’ve were blessed through your absolutely amazing Mother, your generous Aunt Linda, your receptive Aunt Mary, your indomitable namesake, Grandma Catherine Coleman, your wonderful friends and, thankfully, Mr. Ashanti Smith.

In one day of seeing you and Ashanti together, I’ve seen a peculiar, particular grace simply in the way you look to each other, smiling across a crowded room, saying “I got you,” without  actually saying a word.

As you and Ashanti walk away from this ceremony, husband and wife, take the best of what you’ve seen and learned from all of your family. But please remember, as James Baldwin says, Love does not begin and end the way we often think it does. Love is a battle; a passionate war reliant on honesty, acceptance, fairness, will and imagination; Love is the product of lovely decisions. Love is courageously growing up.

You and Ashanti are the sturdy bridge between two proud families but you two are also the architects of your own love. Create shapes we’ve yet to see. Paint your love with colors we’ve yet to imagine. Most importantly, walk together with God … face to face at times, back to back when necessary, but always hand in hand, always graceful, tenaciously remembering from whence you came and affirmatively saying yes to life. Together. No matter what.

Thank you for letting us love you as best we can, Nichole. Thank you for life.

Your cousin, Kiese

Our Grandmas used to beat us to remind us that there was a massive price to pay for being black, free and imperfect. Years later, we’re still paying that price and we have yet to accept the probability that, all things considered, not one black man in this country really deserves the positive or policed attention we get in the classroom, in prison, on Main Street, in the bedroom, on the playing field, in Jena, on the page, in the White House or on the porches of our own homes.

Last Thursday, Henry Louis Gates was policed for being the nigger.  We all know that the nigger is the American icon, the most infamous, characterless “it” in American history. It is at once a real mirage and a real object like those translucent, two-dimensional prizes at the bottom of sugary red, white and blue cereal. Because of it, real fleshy black men like you, me and Henry Louis Gates wade waist deep in abundant amounts of unearned attention as Geraldine Ferraro stated about a year ago but we also drown in unwarranted discipline and state-sanctioned policing, often regardless of class or geography. There’s not a grown black man alive who has not been shown this over and over again, right?

Then why do we act surprised when we find out that Henry Louis Gates, one of the most decorated scholars in the country, was arrested outside of his home last Thursday. Why are we shocked that police were called when a neighbor reported “two black males with backpacks” on the porch and one of the men, according to the neighbor, was attempting to “wedge his shoulder in the door, as if he was forcing entry.”

Gates supposedly snapped on the white officer called to his residence, calling the officer racist and asking “Do you know who I am?” And of course, the arresting officer’s claim that Gates continued to call him racist in a loud, disturbing and “tumultuous” way will persuade millions of folk that Gates, a supposed uppity race man, got what he deserved.

Most of the folks I love tend to laugh or sugar shake off the the idea of anything post racial yet we’ll gasp at Gate’s arrest, saying to ourselves or other folk, “I can’t believe it” or “Racism is alive and well” and “If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.”

Yep, and water is wet. 

We know that police will stop targeting us somewhere around the time when middle aged black men stop abusing blue tooth technologies and white folks stop jogging. Our question has never been, “Will cops unfairly target us because we’re black men?” That’s the vaporous stuff of synthetic op-eds, 24 hour news channels and crappy town hall meetings. 

In real space and time, it’s simple, absolutely binary. Do we snap on the cops when they unfairly test us or do we play it cool as Grandma and them taught us?

That’s it.

Though the later runs through our mind, almost all of us choose the former almost all the time because well, we like life and fear jail. Whatever we do, we try to survive with dignity. But that dignified survival has many faces and even more consequences.

Right now, I’m wondering and wandering beyond simply how we should react when we’re unfairly policed. I wonder what happens when we go beyond being the stars and narrators of American racist spectacle. On days like this, I’m tempted to say that my discovery of what it means to be a young black professor begins and ends with Professor Henry Louis Gates getting arrested outside his own house. But I could only utter that corniness if I really believed in post-racial/post-racist anything.

2.

Realistically, the discovery begins, ends and begins again with my arrival on Raymond Avenue in Poughkeepsie, New York after a fourteen-hour drive from Bloomington, Indiana. I drove directly to the Main gates of Vassar College and instead of going through what I knew would be the hassle of security, I u-turned and found my way to the Alumnae House, the college hotel.

The Alumnae House was the first hotel I’d ever been in that had no televisions in the room. What Alumnae House lacked in televisions, it made up for in spooky pictures of little beady-eyed white children. All through the Alumnae House, I found myself being looked at by the hollow eyes of little Brody, Chad and Hannah. I called Grandma from the room and told her that Vassar didn’t feel like home, that I didn’t like the way the little kids were looking at me and that I didn’t like how Vassar looked like a guarded castle. Grandma said that Northern white folks loved to put ghost-looking pictures of white children on walls and that I didn’t drive fourteen hours to, “ … find no home or judge no white folks’ pictures. You have a home. You up there to get a job,” she told me. “So get it!”

I got it.

My first day as an actual professor at Vassar, I was asked by a white student in flip-flops and a crooked smile if I could sell him some weed. I told the boy that I worked here and that I was not the dope man. He just looked at me and nodded up and down, still waiting for his weed. When I told him that I taught English, he brought his brow together, looked at me, said “Word?” and jogged off.

Later that year, a white woman student came to my Spring office hours in a string bikini beneath her trench coat. That was followed by a white senior professor telling me how “lucky” I was to be at Vassar and how he wished “he was me” because of all the attention he believed a young black guy could get from female students at Vassar. At the end of that first year, security twice entered my office demanding to see my identification despite pictures of my family and me on my desk.

My first year on tenure track, a senior white member of my department stole a draft of a recommendation from our departmental printer and showed it to the Dean of Faculty, highlighting the typos and the possible disservice I was doing to Vassar students as a writing teacher.

After I got my first book deal, I was told by another senior white member of my department that I was “special” and it was “alright” if I speak to him “in ebonics.” This cat continued to consistently confront me with claims that he is fighting for me and other black American faculty without ever asking me, and maybe other black American faculty, the simple question of who we are, how we are doing and what he should be fighting for. That was before he threatened to take me to court for calling him out.

Last summer, four security guards stopped me for walking past the President’s house at night with no identification. When I asked one of the officers,  ”How do you not know me? I sold you a fucking car a few years ago,” they said I was threatening them.

Last semester, a volunteer coach at Vassar called me “a visitor, a guest” while I was playing ball with some of my boys. After I cussed him the fuck out, the old jogger persued a personal investigation into my character and went to the Dean and the Office of Affirmative Action with the claim that I harassed him and hence had no place at Vassar.

Blah, racism, blah, evil white folks, blah, blah, the weight of white folks, blah, bluesy blah blah …

3.

When I talk to white folks about my Vassar beginning, I often talk about the dope man experience, the experience of staying in the Alumnae House under the gaze of little white ghosts. Or I talk about security policing me in my own office, the presumptuous woman in the string bikini and my obliviousness to departmental politics. When sharing these narratives, I long for that particular group of people to understand the shape and origin of my identity at Vassar by understanding the shape and origin of white racism’s oppressive relationship with bodies like mine (i.e., I want those white folks to drown in guilt while my black ass wants to wade in innocence, or vice versa).

But in more ways that I want to admit, telling these kind of origin narratives is a dishonest act of desperation, a clumsy conflation of policed struggle and whole experience. Investment or indulgence these dishonest acts could really make discovery and acceptance of what it means to be a black human being who reads, writes, acts and acts up for a living impossible.

As true as all racist spectacles are, dangling them out there as defining narratives of my Vassar tenure is dishonest primarily because I have reckoned with these experiences. Similarly, reckon or not, it’s dishonest to crystalize all that it means to be black man or a black male professor or a black man in America in the Gate’s policing. The retelling of these racist spectacles is often mediated through a desperate desire for particular listeners to see that we’ve been recognized and policed as the nigger from our beginning. And if that white listener, reader, watcher and I invest in this desperation narrative, I don’t have to do the hard work of accepting my nuanced relationship with sexuality, gender, home, whiteness, entitlement, anger and ironically the other Niggas I love.

Desperation blots out our ability to accept our multiple identities and the paradoxical people in our own origin narratives and our own lives. Often, those are the people who make us feel most loved, most vulnerable and most challenged. If I am going to honestly engage with the discovery of what it means to be young black professor or in 2009, I don’t need to statically indulge in versions of “If it can happen to Gates, it can happen to all of us.”

I’m more interested in how the love of people close and far leads me to tell every security officer asking for my ID to show me their ID. And sure, I experienced a white female student disrespectfully, and expectedly coming into my office in a bikini but in a twisted way, I often tell that story to my boys in the hopes that they’ll think I, you know,  just got it like that. And I deal with racist ass colleagues who call me lucky to be at Vassar by being better than them and telling them to their face, in front of my department, that they are racist ass colleagues. Then I brace myself for their definite but unpredictable retaliation. I’m imperfect and fucked up and longingforbelonging just like you,  just like Gates and — though I hate to admit it — just like the trifling up cops who arrest us for peddling crack when throwing peace signs out a window or stealing a computer when typing outside our apartments.

I’m interested in how Henry Louis Gates would describe his feelings when walking into a faculty meeting filled with men and women who would never be arrested in front of their own homes. How would that feeling differ from what he’d feel when walking into a room filled with mostly black men who could never say to a cop, “Do you know who I am?” I’m also interested in what Henry Louis Gates would have said differently if the arresting officer were a white woman, a South Asian woman, a black person, and not a white man. But more than that, I can’t front; I want to know what Professor Gates ate for dinner when he came back from jail. Did he drink Faygo Peach with crushed ice? Did he watch Tracy Jordan’s belly play hide and seek on 30 Rock? Did the cops confiscate his cane? Did he look in the mirror, wipe his eyes and cry when he got home. When the cameras came, was he happy he had a nice shape-up? Does being one of the most incredible academics in the world make being treated like a nigger less painful? 

I’m still discovering what it means to be a young black professor, but the dimensions of that discovery, at least today, are not dictated by the racist spectacle itself.  They’re dictated by the details of my messily drawn character. Our Grandmas beat us so we would understand that there was a price to pay for publically acting like we were real characters with real character. We pay the price and we don’t want to get beat no more.  We are real characters with real character, not stars and narrators of racist spectacle. We are real characters with real character, not stars and narrators of racist spectacle. We are real characters, not stars …

Ether.

The air down here feels even hotter with you gone. 

In the Spring of 95, after I was suspended from Millsaps College, I went to Jackson State University. You destroyed us that year, 52-34 while completing a freakish 29 of 34 passes for 533 yards and 5 touchdowns … but don’t front! You know that the Sonic Boom of the South eviscerated Alcorn’s band.

Air, I guess I should get on to saying what I need to say to you. See, you were one of the best football players to ever play, but I just don’t think you were as tough as you needed to be. The sickest thing about it is that I didn’t really care. I always assumed that you, like Baldwin, Ali, King, Jim Brown and almost every other black man I know needed drugs, manipulative sex and/or spectacle for security.

When I look around the walls of my living room, I see a picture of James Baldwin with the words, “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” To the left of that picture is a life-size picture of Muhammad Ali. Across the room from that is a Zimbabwean sand-painting of a young woman with fruit on her back, a baby in one arm and a shield in the other. Across from that is the top half of a life-size picture of you that cuts off at the waist. The bottom half of your body is pasted across the door of my office on campus and it’s been that way for years.

You’re up on my wall with Ali and Baldwin because, among other things, I trust your toughness. In your death, though, I see what I should have seen a long time ago. Toughness ain’t survival or cunning. Meaningful toughness entails willing yourself, no matter the costs, to make healthy imaginative decisions for your family, your team, your people, yourself. For example, your meaningful toughness saved hundreds of lives during Katrina, while my spineless ass stayed up here safely wiring money to Mama and them.

I’m still a fan, Air, and you’re still the hero you were when we met in high school. A few years after our second meeting Mama and I watched the draft of 95 with absolute pride as you were the first black Mississippi quarterback to really be given a chance to lead an NFL team. Folks from other states watched and heard the announcers talk about how you “made it despite humble beginnings.”  But Mississippi black boys and girls knew the contours and sounds of those beginnings. We knew that you went to Alcorn partially because none of the bigger, whiter schools trusted your black All-American ass to play quarterback.

When you walked across that stage, we knew what you knew. You knew that Walter, the greatest running back ever, came from Mississippi and went to Jackson State University. You knew that Jerry, the greatest receiver of all time came from Mississippi and went to Mississippi Valley State.  You knew when you crossed that stage that Mississippi and the SWAC had already produced the greatest college quarterback to never get drafted in Willie Totten. You remembered 1984 when Willie threw for 58 touchdowns, 28 of them to Jerry Rice.

We were barely 9 and 11 years old when the NFL disrespected Willie.  We learned then that quarterbacking was different than running or catching that ball. The quarterback’s decision-making and toughness mattered more than anyone on the field. The Bears and the 49ers didn’t draft Walter and Jerry to lead their teams to the Super Bowl, though they both did. They drafted them to help get their teams to the Super Bowl.

Warren Moon would later work his way into the league as a black quarterback from Canada Football League and his success with The Oilers made their drafting you in 1995 more likely, just as your eventual success made Vince Young’s drafting in 2006 a reality.

If you were alive, I’d bet you a cold drank that Vince won’t make the same mistake you made. I don’t just mean the mistake of falling asleep on a couch in the presence of an angry woman. I mean, Vince will no doubt really think about how to transition from NFL star to retired quarterback when he leaves the game. He’ll be more aware of the destructive possibilities implicit in emotional and physical insecurity.

Here’s where it gets tricky though. Your murder is an opportunity for Vince and all of us to reckon (though far too many of us will see your death as simply as a femiphobic warning to black men to stop cheating on our wives with young reckless women).

The warped thing about all of this is that we’re acting like your murder should be more eye-opening than our STD rate, more tell-tale than our HIV rate or the rising rate of HIV in black women or the tinny miasma we hear and see when we close our eyes and really listen to the sounds of black men killing each other over and over again.

Our lack of toughness destroys lives. And again, we pay a price for the decisions we make and we pay that price with the lives we lead. Black men aren’t the only human beings striking unhealthy poses and sucking down unhealthy amounts of suspect sex, drugs, violence and spectacle but I swear that I can’t figure out why our affliction and dependency on drugs, manipulative sex, violence and spectacle seem to be so much more destructive.

We loved you so much, Air. We did. But the truth’ll burn a hole in a cup of water and the truth is that you died too soon. I wish your living legs, eyes, mind and heart were back in Mt. Olive, Mississippi given one more chance to tough it out. I know you wouldn’t let yourself, your wife, your sons or us down. The big question, though, is how many of us down here sucking up air will be tough enough to reckon with our own spinelessmess in the life we have left.

Ether.