Why Hasn't My Black Body Been Destroyed Yet?

Like Nate Silver, I am a University of Chicago alumnus. I do not have any of Nate’s long earned and deserved clout. I only just recently graduated back in June of 2012. In fact, this is the first piece of its kind that I have written, but I would like you to stick around for a little bit because what I do believe I have to say may actually increase dialogue about the brutality that overwhelmingly occurs against African Americans in the United States.

First, let me tell you some interesting things about myself. Unlike Nate Silver, I have never been under arrest, not even once, which is surprising, if not miraculous, given the statistics you can dredge up about the topic. I have been in the back of a police vehicle though. It was only once when I was about seven or eight years old.

The trip I took through my Savannah, Ga neighborhood seated quietly behind the white officer in his neat beige uniform, behind the reinforced glass that separated us, on black leather seats at 9 p.m. or so at night just before my bedtime, was not a ride I took in handcuffs.

I was not in handcuffs because I was not being brutally arrested, which does unfortunately happen overwhelmingly to children of color who face disciplinary action, but especially to black children, such as this recent incident.

My father and stepmother did not drive me to the cul-de-sac I pointed out to the officer, framed on one side by a huge ditch amidst looming trees, and an intersection along a bypass on the other. No. I was driven by the officer to where I said I witnessed a murder. The officer escorted me there personally in the back of his vehicle, where upon arrival, I instantly crafted the elaborate details of this unnecessary lie.

I said to the officer with a calm expression that I saw a gentleman wearing a clown mask, murder a woman in cold blood, meticulously clean the evidence away with bleach, and walk away with the limp lifeless body in a shopping cart towards the bypass. When the officer finished recording my statement, he took me back home where I calmly walked into our bathroom and cried from the overwhelming anxiety I felt during the entire experience.

I can’t remember feeling any remorse for wasting everyone’s time. I just remember the intense fear I felt while having to calmly recite an absurd lie in a police officer’s face I had never met.

Now I will be the first to admit I completely deserved disciplinary action for the crazy thing I tried to pull off that night. It wasn't an accident why I was in the back of that police car. I was in the back of that police car because I lied to my father, stepmother, and the nice police officer called to my house, about witnessing a masked murderer pushing a shopping cart filled with a lifeless corpse of all things. The beating (spanking for white folks) my father randomly gave me months afterwards, months of punishment, disappointment and lack of trust my father told me he felt in me, was enough to make me never do something like that again.

I was a very peculiar introverted child, prone to rare fits of deep violent rage. Essentially, I was a freak. I was a bizarre loner black ghetto nerd who loved telling macabre stories, even once writing about killing my entire family at the ripe old age of seven.

That’s the kind of child my family had to deal with raising, and yet despite the creepiness of that, they encouraged me to continue my love of telling stories, which is probably why I still love doing so to this day. Because of my family, I have kept true to that course despite all that I am, which I only recently learned happens to be quite a lot in relation to my short years.

I am someone who, once when I was five years old, tried to stab my uncle in the back with a kitchen knife. I was so angry with him in the moment because of how he belittled me about something I can’t even remember now, but at that time I just reached for the knife without thinking and had to be coerced by my grandmother to put it down and not plunge the blade into my uncle’s chest. The consequences of death were still new to me then, so all I remember distinctly feeling mattered was the vengeance I thought I deserved. Nothing more, nothing less.

Then when I was seven, I tried to kill again when I attempted to stab my brother with a pair of scissors. Then again, for the last time, quite some years later, at the age of 13, I was planning to stab my brother with a kitchen knife I planned to surprise him with from beneath a pillow. Before I could execute my plans, I thought the knife needed sharpening on the edge of a metallic sink, until it ran over my thumb, sliced through the nail, and nearly removed a corner piece. Luckily it healed without a scar.

That was the type of person that I was when I was younger. I was a child who was suspended once from elementary school for ten days for using an electric grill lighter as a shocking toy buzzer, an object considered dangerous enough to stop an artificial pace-maker. I was almost expelled by a teacher in middle school when I threatened to remove the hands of whoever stole my egg baby project(I still believe to this day that my teacher took it to teach me a lesson about responsibility)and crib, made from an empty butter container. Then in high school I was suspended for ten days for fighting, and again for one day for tardiness.

I am all of those things, those atrocious attempts I made on my family members’ lives multiple times, my trouble-making ways in school, my anti-social behavior, and yet I am something else entirely as well. As a former IB (International Baccalaureate) program candidate, high school graduate, University of Chicago alumnus, and current Writing MFA candidate at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I’m a walking contradiction.

Instead of being heavily medicated, incarcerated, or killed, as people like me often are, I have cleared some, not all, but some of the most devastating obstacles that bar black people, but especially black men, from “success”. I have cleared them out of sheer force of will, but more so out of dumb luck honestly.

There’s nothing I can say that definitively speaks towards why I happen to be alive and free, with no arrest record today while so many other black people, young and old, well-dressed or raggedy, have had their lives snuffed out by a violent death or their potential robbed by the penitentiary, despite keeping under the radar of violent oppressive individuals and forces.

If you have not determined it by now, my 23 years on this earth, short as they may be, prove me to be a complicated mixture of high and low choices, circumstances and opportunities, just like the lives of so many other people of color. I am like Trayvon Martin in that regard, or Renisha McBride, or Eric Garner, or Frisco Blackwood, my uncle who was wrongfully killed by Miami-Dade police back in 2007. We are complex and problematic people, in my case deeply complex and problematic, and yet I was allowed to live while they all died deaths as brutal as systematic executions.

I was allowed to survive, to be an individual with somewhat of an indeterminate future of my own choosing, probably because I never succeeded at trying to kill another human being, but there’s something else. I also had the opportunity to eventually see how flawed and warped my mindset was, without having someone harass me, handcuff me, beat me senseless or shoot me as an easy target. I live a problematic life, in a problematic city, but it’s my life. It’s a life that was miraculously allowed the chance to untangle itself, even if only just a little.

I don’t come from a socioeconomic background that allows people like me the kind of access to mental health care I needed then to deal with the kinds of issues I was dealing with. I learned to cope with my problems on my own over many years and I’m still learning to cope.

Instead of lashing out, I learned to suppress my anger and blunt much of my expressiveness, which subsequently turned into anxiety, low self-esteem, and depression. Not the greatest route to balance by far, but at least it was adequate enough that I no longer felt I posed a threat to the people I cared about and I no longer gave them need to worry.

I learned slowly how to be more extroverted, to talk with others casually, and to talk about my feelings so that I didn't have to suppress them as much. I was always hardworking and creative, and I learned to dedicate that energy into my academics, which I cherished then and now.

I was allowed to be a flawed human being who made mistakes, while still retaining basic human worth and sympathy. I have beaten statistic, after statistic, after statistic, and I have no intentions of stopping, if this beautiful land of many freedoms called America doesn't see fit to kill me first. I must continue to live, if for no other reason, than to prove that black life matters. 400 years ago it mattered, 400 years from now, it will still matter.