America and I
I guess it started when I heard a child speak the other day. I flipped through the latest issue of Runner’s World magazine−some article on the validity of carb-loading benefits for long-distance runners. Usually people’s voices serve as background noise while I’m intently reading something of personal interest, but for the first time in quite a while, the scene turned its clothes inside out and read itself right to left. The words on the page that I held were merely complimentary fonts and characters while the young voice snatched my attention. I can’t even remember what exactly was said, but more so how it spilled into the air…
Race is but a delicate feather in the coat of a jittery bird that’s struggling to look at its truest reflection in the nearest pond. When we attempt to pluck it and take the specimen inside for analysis, anyone handling such a feather shouldn’t even bother if the microscope is inherently faulty and its lenses altogether arrive prepackaged and fixed. The scientist without dirty hands has really made no discoveries at all, and unless he or she is prepared to cause a stir, then these superficial mega conferences aren’t really worthy of attendance in the minds of lovers, agitators and poets.
I come to you today like any other mark on the calendar: As a black man in the United States of America. That designation compels me to speak with trembling tongue and write with vibrating fingers. Not out of fear for my life, though these are times where if I can leave my home and return to it all in the same day I am counted as blessed and favored, but I am charged with the attempt to speak for many, an appointment I do not take lightly, an agreement I’ve come to sign in partnership with reason, empathy and emotional reform. It’s as if I’m holding a premature baby fresh out of the NICU, and all I have is a swaddling blanket and bottle with just enough milk.
Certain fights have come and expired. The vigor and energy behind them waned. Many citizens are done explaining why Colin Kaepernick kneeled in a red jersey and hasn’t seen a huddle since. Large factions have thrown in the towel when trying to foolishly convince deaf ears and sealed hearts that often times hard work is no automatic determinant of individual success and enshrinement. I speak for myself, when I say: Gone are the days when I felt I must elaborate on why I must always smile in the presence of the majority or else be typecast as a militant son whose “anger” is unwarranted and oh so dangerous if not smothered and extinguished before it rubs off and sets quiet law abiding towns into a fray. I’m afraid this well has run out of water, and silent movies aren’t entertaining open eyes any longer.
I am disqualified from representing the Korean experience here in our states. It would be totally distasteful to say I can understand what it feels like to hear my name come from the lips of a loved one in Arizona with whom I am now separated by barbed fence after we tried to tiptoe across the present day Mason Dixon−a line steeped in blindness towards more glaring bugs and generational pests who wear hoods and pull on strings of policy. I am not a woman; I don’t necessarily feel inclined to run with a partner when a narrow bike path offers little lighting. When I read Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street, I desperately wanted to be the brown female coming of age in a leaning house with crumbling stairs in Chicago, yet it wasn’t my vignette to doodle from a perch. In my neighborhood, I look at the tricolored Irish flags that wave on both sides of the street that I often take my morning runs on and marvel at communal pride, a riveting ideal. Those stories belong to their rightful authors. A vagabond once told me: “You get yourself into a bind, telling stories which aren’t yours.”
To be black within the red, white and blues of America is to be parallel with untainted biographies and somewhat perpendicular with homelessness. In the precise sense, that I am of Africa, but not from Africa. I am often told to “go back” to its vastness and be enveloped within its wingspan if ever I wish to vilify a select mob mentality once thought to be politically dormant in these conjoined states. Yet how can an item be returned to a market where it was never manufactured? This morning, I struggle to find a receipt of transaction that is worth presenting as sufficient documentation. Just as much as if one was called to recite the history of his or her biological clan only moments after meeting its members with the crushing news of previous adoption still stapled to the folds of the brain, home is more than sitting with figures that share my wide nose, coarse mane and full lips. Michael Jackson’s “Stranger In Moscow” comes to mind, and it is raining.
Even red hats stitched with white lettering strike different chords depending on the mood. Allow me to divulge the evolution of my inner timeline, regarding the matter. Initially, MAGA slogans provoked indifference. It was yet another new phrase to elicit hope in another charismatic candidate whose lofty promises fall limp, or at best, incomplete before a new cook rearranges the silverware. We all know pompous kings and empires dissolve and another assumes regality. Indifference turned into exact contempt, for any man with time to sip his morning coffee and ponder the heavier winds of fall, can come to the realization that such a command is meant to be utterly divisive while wearing the mascara of proposed unity. That command seeks to separate us from our inevitable destiny if America truly stands for what it says it does. If America is true to its surface declarations, it will be less historic when black boys are presidents, white rappers can just be MCs and naked women can hold signs in Time Square without “asking for it.” Contempt has now transformed into a chuckle, a rather clipped disappointment towards those trying to explain its real meaning away. I can only label those takes as cute. I suspect this whole essay is to be regarded as one written by the misaligned and ungrateful. Hence, we now have Love It or Leave It nailed to our paneled doors like Luther’s 95 theses.
Forgive us all if we feel as though we know exactly why it took more than two months for “two God-fearing good” white men to be arrested for killing a black runner, yet if the actors wore opposite skin tones, swifter martial action would’ve taken place, perhaps. Believe me when I say, it pains me to still have to think this way. I don’t want my children to have to think and maneuver as such. My enemy is not with any certain pigment or heritage. I rail against injustice and long corridors of hypocrisy, which play home to strange fruit and nervous guns. These are things I am ill-prepared to tell my babies, yet I must. The words I heard which sparked it all were very familiar ones. It was the sweetness contained in the voice notes of my daughter. Just hearing her talk made me put down the magazine, and hold on to an idea.
