The Young and the Radical — The Awakening of a New Black America
My name is Mattias Lehman, and I am black. I’ve always known that, but at the same time, it’s a new discovery. And having discovered it, I am afraid.
I am afraid that one day I will break an incidental law — jaywalking perhaps, although anything is fair game — and find myself bleeding face down onto the pavement while an officer handcuffs me, or shot dead in my car. I’m afraid that Breitbart or Fox News will circulate a picture of my “alleged gang tattoo”.
I’m afraid they’ll say I was “resisting arrest” when there was nothing they were arresting me for in the first place. I’m afraid that they’ll point out my tumultuous history with officers, and say I endorsed race riots. I’m afraid they’ll paint me as an angry, violent black nationalist who once said on social media that he thought about owning a gun just to scare white people.
There but for the grace of God go I. A god I could never believe in, for in the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, “America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”.
On my good days, my fear drives me to be a better, more driven person. It’s funny, how you live when you understand your life is disposable, the motivation that stems from fear of death. The drive to always be better. A sense of urgency, that only so much time remains to leave your mark on history. The knowledge that you have to be twice as good for half as much.
On my bad days, the fear I feel towards American law enforcement turns to anger. But what if I allow my anger to fester? Could it turn to hate? We have seen what happens to our political future when fear and anger turn to hate, between Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. But what would come of my impotent rage?
Most days — or at the very least what feels like most days — I see some new footage of an unarmed black man or woman bleeding, choking, dying. I weep into my pillow over it, and as tears burn my face I am transported to when pepper spray seared my eyes shut. I clench the fabric of my sheets as though choking the life out of my despair. I live perched on the precipice of anger, parched, staring out into an ocean of rage and knowing that saltwater can’t quench my thirst, only destroy me from within. I can never surrender to that anger, lest it consume me.
I wasn’t always that way. I used to believe in the world. I used to be innocent. I used to be ignorant. One more thing that was taken away from me.
I’ve been black my whole life. It’s funny how the math of race works: a black woman meets a white man and makes a black child. I don’t think I realized how brave they were: born in a time when their love was illegal, married in a time when it was still taboo. When I was younger, I never thought of myself as black. Did I fail to honor their bravery by failing to recognize what I was, a testament to the power of blackness to define racial heritage?
My skin is not who I am, it’s simply what I wear
I’d say, with a nonchalant shrug and the smirk that defined my childhood smudging the corners of my mouth. I didn’t really think of myself as anything. I checked the “other” box. Sometimes I was “half-black”. Never was I “half-white”. Even then, I knew that race was a one-way street. You can’t be half-white; you either are white or you aren’t. Even then, I struggled to find my identity, to see myself reflected in the media around me.
What is he mixed with?
They’d ask my parents as their fingers hovered hungrily near my curls. My mother hated that question. What is he mixed with? Like I was a fucking cocktail. Like my parents decided halfway through that they didn’t want a chocolate cake but it was too late so they added as much vanilla as they could. My mother would always respond:
The secret ingredient is a heaping helping of love
We were her “golden nuggets”, me, my little brother, and my two godsisters. All mixed, all different shades, different hair, different people. I was a gawky nerd and my brother was a jock and sometimes we couldn’t seem more different.
As I matured, I became a political firebrand; a fervent supporter of gay rights, a rabid atheist. Being black never entered into the equation, or so I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Race had left subconscious effects on nearly every aspect of my personal development. I just never noticed, or when I did, refused to acknowledge the impact of race. I “didn’t see race”, which meant I had no way to see racism.
Now I know better. Now, when I close my eyes, I can still see Trayvon Martin. I remember seeing his body — his black body — lying in the street like some inviolable testament to his powerlessness. I saw his blackness, and through it, I saw my own.
In that moment I realized what it meant to be black, to live by a separate set of rules, to have agency only so long as my agency did not bump into that of the wrong white American. A strange man had grabbed a gun and followed a boy, and when the dust settled, the boy was dead. And yet the man was not held accountable.
In that moment I understood why so many black Americans had rejoiced at OJ’s ‘not guilty’ verdict, regardless of their thoughts on his guilt. He embodied the notion of a black man finally being considered ‘innocent until proved guilty’. Black America had needed a win — any win — after having watched Rodney King beaten in the streets. After Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. After Jim Crow. My mother was alive to watch MLK assassinated. My grandmother lived through Jim Crow. This was not history for them. It had been life.
In that moment I understood, but it was news to me. OJ was not just black. He was also rich, and in many ways, rich is a race of its own in America. I saw the OJ verdict as a damning condemnation that America had two justice systems, one for the rich who never faced consequences, one for the poor who did.
Trayvon Martin corrected me, taught me that there was a third justice system, one which destroyed black communities through The War on Drugs and Stand Your Ground and Stop and Frisk.
While this was news to me, it was not new. In 1921, the wealthiest black community in America was attacked by rioting whites on foot, and firebombed from planes. We talk now of race riots as though they were a uniquely black thing, but it was whites who invented and perfected the art against us.
This was the history I was never taught in school, the history of housing segregation and race riots, of lynching and police brutality. The brutal racism that didn’t fit into the neat picture of “once there was slavery, but Lincoln won the Civil War” or “once there was Jim Crow, but Martin Luther King changed that”.
Slavery and Jim Crow were not aberrations from an otherwise good system, contrary to what I had been taught. They were reflections of a racist American culture that still hasn’t learned to address its own anti-blackness, instead choosing to pass the blame on to caricatured stereotypes.
And I am not the only one. All around me, I see my black peers coming to the same realization. A whole generation of black kids — having been force fed the lie that racism is over — are now having their eyes opened. They are seeing the bodies in the news. They are hearing the racist words of Trump and they are learning just how many people believe them.
And their disillusionment is plain to see. It is evident in increasingly disruptive Black Lives Matter protests across the country. It is clear in the student body identity politics that so many use to condemn modern liberalism.
I — and many others like me — were taught that when you play by the rules, the system changes and bigotry dies away. And yet the first black president has faced flagrant racism and those of us who never lived through the Civil Rights Movement have to wonder: where was this post-racist world we were promised?
America has never played by the rules when it comes to black people. But this generation of young black Americans are the first to be raised expecting a fair world, and now we don’t know what to do. We’re sad, we’re hurt, and we’re afraid.
Day by day my fear turns into anger. Day by day I lose more of my precious little remaining faith that America will heal its racial divide soon, if ever. Most of all, I fear what happens if it doesn’t. I fear that Black Lives Matter will one day become a violent movement. Most of all, I fear I’ll be there with them, anger fueling my every action and hate in my heart.
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