I would not have you descend into your own dream. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. No.
I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age.You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. I could not retreat into the church and its mysteries. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. The Struggle is in your name, Samori—you were named for Samori Touré, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. It was the psychosis of questioning myself, of constantly wondering if I could measure up.
She can hope for more. But it does not,’‘But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. I am not a cynic. And I would not have you live like them.
That forces an historical reckoning. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. What any institution, or its agents, “intend” for you is secondary.
But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. Who could know?When I was 6, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. Or was, until lockdown hit. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. Here is the motive for the great war. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. This is a politics that rejects innocence and amnesia. But more than any shame I felt, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you.I am speaking to you as I always have—treating you as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting weather of early spring. Some of them came down from Drew Hall, with their caps cocked and their backpacks slung through one arm, then fell into gorgeous ciphers of beatbox and rhyme. I saw its epic sweep in the students next to Ira Aldridge Theater, where Donny Hathaway had once sung, where Donald Byrd had once assembled his flock. Would those be the same black kings who birthed all of civilization? Some of them studied Russian. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. We would not kneel before their God. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear.My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved.