My Black Fatigue

And yours

This is the new term, a mixed blessing. As with everything, although we often forget, we pay the most attention to that which is right in front of our faces. What a shame that these are more often doom screens than good people. So our minds are on the hook owing to cultural, news, and political productions. As with all propaganda, there is a kernel of honest truth and the meme spreads. Today, aside from a ship of fools that crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge and the anonymous chunky statue in Times Square, I am paying attention to how I do and do not pay attention to the so-called black race.

Black fatigue, like blackness itself, means what it means to you. So now everybody and they mama gets to opine in this moment. Me, I’m tired of it all. Or to put a finer point on it, I’m tired of black people being black. I’m tired of white people being white. I’m tired of everybody putting in some measure of work on the race plantation. It’s the American dysfunctional Disneyland jungle cruise where all the scary animals motor out on cue under the fake plastic trees. It’s the cosplay drama of superheroes and supervillains where the houses are always haunted and reasonable people keep poking through its basement. Why?

Mike Hind has a long explanation that could be boiled down to this:

Living in an environment saturated with ambient falsehood and not being actively annoyed about being constantly misled we're either in a condition of submerged awareness or maybe what's sometimes called 'lucid denial' (awarely disengaged). These seem to be the only options when you feel powerless to change things.

There's a way in which this is infantilising, which seems unhealthy. Many of us still have 'survival' strategies that we learned in infancy because they saved us stress at the time. We learned not to confront lies. We learned not to be ourselves and to shape ourselves to others' expectations instead. We learned how to overlook internal contradiction in order to fit in.

There's often a cost in later life. We'll stay in relationships or jobs beyond the point at which they're nourishing by submerging our awareness of reality or passively accepting it. We're good at tolerating internal contradiction, accepting - and even repeating - things that we know are not true (much political activism relies on this) and not speaking our minds.

This is our condition in a world saturated with pretense.

America is wealthy enough for this pretense to last indefinitely. I think, quite frankly that the scope of our human psyche is limited such that once we accept a certain set of perceptions then we are stuck without perspectives. I say this as a black American not just looking at black Americans, but as a writer in that sort of alien observation mode that compels me to look at humanity as if I needed everything they do explained to me. To my way of thinking, I am rather amazed that people get along in any way. So I think most people fake their way forward. But let’s blackify that.

Four Phases of Blackness
Wink and I did what I think is one of our best podcasts recently. It is out as #20 in a and it’s a doozy. It runs about 210 minutes - almost as bad as Lex Fridman, but it had structure and we got fairly specific into AI & law, but also into what I now categorize as four phases of blackness. What’s interesting is that when we first thought about doing podcasts this was one of the standing questions. “When did you first realize you were black?” Let’s call that the Innocent. The aim then, in alignment with the theories of racelessness or what I called ‘personal deracination’ was to get people to realize that first trauma and try to undo it.

The point of looking at this is not to undo trauma or corral people into a deracinated state, but to illustrate what appears to me to be a cycle or a pyramid. I still don’t know which. Perhaps the phases of blackness are an eddy inside of Maslow’s hierarchy that is psychologically limiting. We’ll see how well this all holds together.

Phase One: The Innocent Period
As an innocent, you don’t know you’re black. In that regard it’s not your look nor the look of your parents, sibs and relatives that tell you. It’s some triggering external event that alerts you to the fact that there’s this thing called race and you’re a part of it. You’re in the black part, the Negro part, the Colored part such as it ever was in American history. There’s a kind of quantum component to all of this, a self-revelatory mirror gazing affect.

I can remember telling my father, in response to what I hallucinate was some black & white television show featuring dogs and firehoses, that if those white people knew us, the would love us just like we love each other. They just don’t know us, that’s all. We’re wonderful people. That ‘we’ meant my own family - the family I knew before I went to kindergarten. After all, I only knew the black people my parents invited over to our house, and Mrs. Towns, my babysitter, the nurse whose mellow voice, loving personality and sparkling white uniform imprinted a warm fresh baked bread aroma in my heart. She was darker than any of us.

My kindergarten teacher was white, as was my music teacher and first grade teacher at elementary school where 90% of the children were black. I was black in the way all little kids were black, chanting “Mary had a baby, yes Lord”, all the way through third grade. In 1968 things changed all over America. In 1966 my father established the Institute for Black Studies. I was born a Negro, but by the invention of Kwanzaa in which my family was one of the first participants, I was Black.

circa 1967

Phase Two: The Existential Period
As quiet as it’s kept, I never read duBois’ Souls of Black Folk. Simply stated, since I was not only black but young, gifted and black. I had no reason to doubly think about my place in America. My family still was primary, and my inheritance was clear. We were, as far as I could tell as a young person, on the vanguard of the Black Experience. I was in the Watts Summer Festival parade waving to the crowds from a convertible Cadillac. My father was a special assistant to the chief of the County Health Department and busy making MLK Hospital a reality for South Los Angeles. I was on the set of the groundbreaking TV show Julia. At some point in my youth somebody asked me if I could be born at any time and place in history when and where would I choose? I chose myself, right where I was in the transformation of America in the 1970s the first post-civil rights era generation making inroads and crossing barriers never before broached - or so I was told and convinced.

In the Existential period, the black American comes into some awareness of the history of race in America and makes some accommodations to being heir to all of something and some of everything else. One is challenged to reckon with race. What kind of black person am I going to be? How will I behave in the situations where I’m in the minority? How will I behave in situations where I’m in the majority? Is this neighborhood where I belong? This city? This country? What of my destiny? Some black Americans figure themselves like the Jehovah’s Witnesses of blackness; only a fraction will be saved and must therefore minister to the other lost souls. Some black Americans figure themselves like the Roman Catholics, with all the power and authority and saints of intercession. Some abandon Christianity literally and figuratively, apostates of the mainlines. Some become pilgrims. I’d say that was me.

I wrestled with this thing I called ‘the end of my blackness’, primarily because I considered myself neither of and for the black masses nor of and for the elite blacks. I had enough black culture and family to sustain me through everything. Yet like a splinter in my mind, or an obligation to the Mob, there was always something that drew me back to the existential dilemmas of black life in America. I was breaking through barriers like I always expected to, but I got patronizing respect from all sides.

I picked up and put down black trends, mainstream notions, and obscure ideas. But after college, one thing was clear. There was no black unity in America. It was a foolish matter to pursue.

Phase Three: The Nonchalant Period
The period of nonchalance for me came after two radical blows to my consciousness. Since I’m more introspective there are a lot of details I could go into, but these two will do. The first was my reading of the book Drylongso by a blind cat named Gwaltney. It once and for all killed in me the notion that black Americans needed leadership and that I should try to be a part of that, or appeal to it. I was absolutely certain that the black American family would persist and black folks don’t need to be second guessed. I had met enough of the great and of the grimy to know we weren’t going anywhere soon. There was no need to bow down in fear, or give extra thanks for black service.

Take your pick from ‘benign neglect’ to ‘tolerant distance’ to ‘insouciance’ or ‘complacency’. The black American, at some point, exits commitment to ‘The Struggle’ or whatever it is that ‘we’ are all expected by others or by us, to do about whatever it is that supposedly defines our racial, cultural, political and other roles. The nonchalant black American says “let it be” or “whatevs, dude”. She no longer struggles with whether or not she is ‘black enough’. She has figured out her hair and her shoes. Well maybe not the shoes. We become perennially amused, embarrassed, ignorant or cynical about the ‘black issues’ continually tossed around America. From Katrina to Chiraq to the Beltway Sniper to Rodney King to Barack Obama, the nonchalant knows that history rhymes but is not compelled to parse the meter.

The second radical blow was my own family. I chose my wife and the rest of my life. I had babies to raise. It was no longer a priority to be a performance poet of hiphop hermeneutics. This time was about me and mine. For me this all happened by 1994. One of my favorite sayings at the time was “The internet is for me and people like me. The rest of y’all can take the bus.” So after an interesting turn in Atlanta’s Black Mecca, where my best friend was a Nigerian attorney, I moved back to California to work in Silicon Valley.

As I was becoming self-actualized and prioritizing other matters. Blackness faded deeper into the background. It was surely as real a part of me as ever, but new generations and cultural priorities escaped my notice and care. I was as black as I was ever going to be and my preferences got stuck at the international level. I took what I remember to be Michael Jackson’s advice which was not to get married before hanging out in Europe. I’m from a small town called black. I’m not trying to go back and show off. I am what I am.

Phase Four: The Transcendent Period
Everybody knows what Morgan Freeman said to Mike Wallace in 2005. Some wished he never said it. Some figured anyone who drove Miss Daisy would eventually say it. Some jumped up and down, mind blown amazeballs. I can’t remember if I’ve ever bothered to say it. In some ways I have no reason to say it or avoid saying it. It has failed to be an existential matter. I don’t even have the patience to print up a black card in jest, just to give it away.

What is there to say? You’ve read enough history to not care about Black History Month. I can’t think of much else one has to do to demonstrate they are beyond nonchalance, but to get annoyed about the very subject of race and one’s particular existential position in it. Like, why are you even asking? It might sound like I’m reaching to say such a skeptical view of race itself is transcendent. Yet this is what I’m thinking today, specifically that only getting outside of the box of race as an American allows you to casually but directly insist that race itself is an insipid concern. After all, isn’t that what the point of all of the existential hash was about? To get beyond the ass-backward idea that we have racial roles, rights and responsibilities? Isn’t that what morality requires? It’s what transcendence requires.

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him;
and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am,
as that they who are about me,
and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me,
and I know not that.
The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all.
When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me;
for that child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head too,
and engrafted into that body, whereof I am a member.
And when she buries a man, that action concerns me:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume;
when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language;
and every chapter must be so translated.
God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;
but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only,
but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all:
but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were;
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

If you wanted to transcend race, John Donne set the tone in 1624, but the Apostle Paul did it more than 1000 year prior to that. There are dozens of forking paths that lead to the truth that race is false. But some folks get caught in the existential eddies and insouciant circles of ironic indifference. I’m not sure we’ve bled out all of the poison from drinking Saint George’s koolaid, but we all ought to be fatigued about his black life.

PS. As you can see above, my mother was never fat and sassy like that one in Times Square. Cringe.