I'm about a half hour away from the end of BlackkKlansman, and want to take a moment.
I occupy a weird space. To be sure, unless the person my mother told me she cheated with was mixed or black, and I'm not actually my father's, I'm not actually black. A large proportion of black people in my life have said things like, “You're darker than my dad,” or, “Nah, you ain't white,” or “I'm so confused by your skin,” or “You know you my nigga” alluding to a kind of empathy with “the struggle.” As such, I've always felt a kind of solidarity and awareness that I've certainly occasioned to ignorantly betray. No less, when I go to the symphony, giant white crowds of very comfortable rich people make me uncomfortable in a way “being the only white guy” at a black friend's Thanksgiving does not.
That baseline reality that seems to permeate black culture is precisely what I gravitate towards in storied depictions of that struggle. There's something deeper about the language, the danger, and nature of the consequences in this movie, just like there's brilliant dialogue and entire worlds to chew on in a show like Dear White People. You can't shy away from things and exist as a “real” black person in this country. People are out to kill you for dumb-ass reasons and you are disproportionately affected by racist policies and a history where you're considered inhuman.
It's that deep hatred that can't be escaped. It's the pride and perpetual insistence of a damning and degrading narrative. As a purely intellectual question, I'm baffled at how anyone could be so sure and so loud about anything, let alone that degree of hatred of someone because of the color of their skin or how they dressed or talked. As a person who's been at the receiving end of someone's sheer irrational hatred and ignorant pride, perhaps that's the kind of desperate and low place real people connect with across differences.
I understand hate. I understand how much work it takes to fuel flames for people or a world that disappoints you at every turn. I understand the stress and headaches. I understand that there will never be enough words or screaming matches to account for how full a heaving chest feels when you want to obliterate the oppressive force, and yet that force never leaves. I've said I've wanted to kill things or certain people. I felt relieved the day Scalia died, naively enough. There is an immense waterfall of hatred spewing from as many corners as you choose to look.
Here's an example. I recently picked up a washer/dryer combo from Coatsville, IN. The guy was nice, a kind of outdoors man's man. We shoved that thing on the hood of my car, I went to pull out the steal of $100 to give to him. He hands $40 back and says he's a Christian, he's just happy to see it gone, and that “I don't mean to sound faggy, but do you mind letting me know you got back home safe?”
What do you call that? Complicated, to say the least. Is this the kind of Bill Maher “house nigga” comment, but for gays? Do I think this guy's disposition would have changed wildly if I got out of my car with a lisp and said I worked in something he considered perverse as opposed to child welfare? He literally gave me a discount on what was already a steal. He put out to a stranger that he cared that I got back safe. Do we call it a deep abiding hatred for gays, or a confused cultural aversion to something he doesn't understand? Do we react by ridiculing and sanctioning?
I understand hate, but I've never been proud of when it hits. I don't brag about the relationships in my life that have managed to end terribly. I don't routinely work in to conversation how insane my mom is, how shitty the conversations with ex-friends have went, or persistently espouse some level of violence towards all of the people in power I legitimately think are trying to kill me each day. For me, these are incidental feelings of being mashed up with people we barely ever understand or are given an opportunity to work productively with. But then it seems it's one thing to understand your own capacity for hatred, and another entirely to forgive it. And god forbid you practice apologetics.
One thing I persistently worry about is that “impulsive” decision to break something that feels fragile. I want to get it over with. I hate the anticipation of betrayal. I hate the idea of putting yourself out there and believing in something while someone else was just waiting for their opportunity to flip. Hatred pragmatically addresses that too. It preemptively blames people before they get the chance. You get to emote all over the place and proudly profess cathartic rage for all the “others” and “idiots.” This is about as close as I can figure in describing the thinnest of lines between hate and fear.
Fortunately enough, I've spent enough time writing that I don't walk around like a ball of rage anymore. I still pretty fluidly claim to hate things, but not in an obsessive and deeply painful way. All the tragedies of conversation I've neatly packed into blogs or examples. All the dreams stalled or things stolen occupy intricate webs of justification and pithy perspective. My fragile sentimentality is reserved for brief lucidity during infrequent intoxication.
How do you contend with hate? Is it embodied in the all-encompassing abstractions of identity politics and storied victim-histories? Is it individual instances of poor judgment more or less spurned on by a deep abiding racial or sexual hatred? Is it the general lashing against all that makes you afraid and that's hard to understand? A call for peaceful protest or truth and reconciliation isn't to deny these forces or their consequences. Asking for the conversation and the acknowledgment of pain is not an encroachment on freedom or rights. The effort in life should be towards mellowing of that hate impulse. The dialogue should be calling it out for what it is. And people who are actually filled with hate need to be reminded as often as they can that that's what they're full of. That's the face of their “Christian love” or “purity of intention.”
Stay cool, my brothas. We're already dead. Some of us just know that a little more than others. And everybody's terrified.
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