There I Was, Being Black All by Myself

The government shutdown was inevitable. The extreme right, the Tea Partiers, the “wacko birds” were going to make it happen. They are holding the country hostage. They say it’s because of the debt ceiling, and they want to defund the ACA, or what they refer to as Obamacare. But that is just rationale for the true reason.

Why is it that D. Whiteman feels perfectly comfortable walking up to my husband Ronald, who is black, to start up a conversation that generally begins like this? “I don’t like your president. I’m not racist, but I hate him.”

It happened just yesterday at the golf range. I’ve written about the white guys at the golf range before. The owner calls Ronald “black Ron” and Ronald regales me with stories of the things all the old white guys feel perfectly comfortable saying to him.

Yesterday Ronald was talking to another black guy while they hit balls. The guy had been a college basketball player. Now sixty, he is just a few years older than Ronald. They had talked for some minutes and were enjoying the conversation and hitting balls side by side. Then D. Whiteman, who was down on the other end of the range, couldn’t take it anymore. He walked over and broke into the conversation.

“Why did he do that?” I asked Ronald as he recounted more details of the story this morning.

“Because two black guys were talking, and white people can’t stand it. They think we are plotting. They can’t help themselves.”

I’m white, but I know it’s true. What’s the thing a lot of white people dislike about Hispanics or Asians who are new to America? They speak a different language. And when one is bestowed with societal privilege, it’s easy to believe that the only thing people who speak a different language could possibly be talking about is the white American who can’t understand them. The whole goddamn world revolves around them. And that’s what the white guy was thinking when he walked down the range and got into the conversation between the two black men.

Ronald and the other black guy gave each other a look, but let the white guy talk. Soon it turned bad.

First, the white guy was instructive about golf.  Ronald’s been playing for almost 40 years, and he takes his practice seriously. With the range owner’s permission, Ronald sets out targets at certain distance intervals. Then he goes through a series of exercises. Hitting high, medium, and low; moving the ball five yards left or five yards right of his intended target; landing on the target or making the ball roll up to the target. He is retired. He goes just about every day. He’s better than good. He’s a single-handicapped golfer. He’s studied the sport for all the time he’s played, in depth, and took lessons with some of the finest teachers. A lot of people ask Ronald for golfing advice, and he generously gives of his time and knowledge, not asking for anything in return. He loves the game that much. Why would this white guy believe he could teach Ronald a damn thing, especially when he wasn’t asked?

Because he assumes he knows more and that Ronald knows less.

Then the white guy changed topics and started in on gun control and Obamacare. Ronald disagreed with him. The white guy said, “You don’t understand the concepts.”

Why did the white guy think Ronald was not capable of understanding the content of the conversation?

Because he assumes he is smarter and Ronald is dumber.

Ronald looked at the other black guy and said, “Excuse me, I have to take care of this.”

“Do what you have to do,” the black guy said.

Then Ronald went there, deep into the darkness of anger – where he recalls the countless times he put his life on the line as a firefighter to save the life of someone who thought Ronald wasn’t his equal or who said he didn’t want the black guy in his house even though it was burning down or to perform CPR on his wife even though she was dying – and he blasted the guy, called him a motherfucker, and asked him who he thought he was. Back in the seventies, when we met freshman year of college, he would have said, “I hooged out.”

He was silent when he got home. He went straight up to the man room.  When he came out he went straight to our bedroom, sprawled sideways across the bed, and pulled a blanket up to his chin. I cooked dinner, called him to come eat, and we ate in silence. Told him after I cleaned up that we could go to Lowe’s and buy a new cabinet mounted microwave because ours broke. We drove over in silence. I knew something happened, maybe not one incident, maybe something cumulative, but it was something.

I was glad Lorne was working in the appliance department. He’s a black guy from Pittsburgh, and he and Ronald talk a lot, sometimes for hours.  As he showed us the microwaves, Ronald started talking.

“There I was, just being black all by myself, and along comes D. Whiteman,” he said.

Lorne laughed. “I hear you, man.”

Then the story came out, a detail at a time. I didn’t say much. I let him talk. He needed to. He needed to be understood by someone who had experienced the same thing over and over.

Finally, I spoke up. “This is why just about every middle-aged black man I know suffers from depression.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Lorne said nodding.

You’re a black male in America. You survive childhood and your teenage years where your chance of dying jumps into double figures. You go to college and graduate. You survive your twenties, which include numerous run-ins with the police like DWB (driving while black) and you don’t end up in jail, at least not for more than a night. You get a decent job serving your community. You get married, have children, and raise them with love and compassion and warnings about what it is to be black in America. You stay with your wife, even when the job is killing you and your white colleagues are trying to drive you off the job because they think blacks don’t deserve to work there and you try like crazy not to let that darkness creep into your marriage or cause you to fail on the job. You hang in. You put up with the bullshit. One day you retire. You reach that age where you think the bullshit shouldn’t happen anymore.

But it does. It happens every time you step out the door and some white yahoo wants to tell you what time it is. It happens every time you turn on the news and watch the Congressional bullies try to knock down President Obama because they know and you know that they can’t stand a black man in the highest office of the land. You start wondering how much longer you have to put up with it – the racism, the contempt, the hatred, the paranoia, and the sense of entitlement that white Americans walk around with like it’s a badge of honor. You’re sick of it but you get bombarded with it every single fucking day.

That’s what it is like to be a middle-aged black man in America.

It pains me to witness. I feel hopeless, helpless, and outraged. I want to become a recluse, give up on humanity, and just wait till this life is done because other people make life suck, and I am unable to make it better for the person I love with all my heart and with every bone in my body.

Then I think that President Obama must feel very much like Ronald and millions of other black men. Why are they attacking him? Why are they attacking laws that the majority of Americans support? Because they think he doesn’t understand the concepts. Because he will never achieve whiteness, as if he ever aspired to, as a mixed-race individual. Because they are confident whiteness makes them more capable, smarter, and better.

I don’t know how he has put up with it as long as he has without losing it, without taking care of it, and without calling them motherfuckers. He’s been careful to keep race out of the conversation except when absolutely necessary, because he would be accused of pulling the race card. But the race card was already pulled from the deck by the GOP and the racist crazies who rant and rave about the president and who feel perfectly comfortable letting every black person they see know what their opinion is of the president, your president, and what they think of you, because their opinion matters and yours doesn’t. They are entitled to have an opinion, entitled to tell you what it is, entitled to tell you how it is for you as a black man in America and that you are wrong, and you don’t know how it is, and you are to sit and listen to them because they are better.

Ronald tries to make me feel better when he says, “I know you try hard. I know you understand a lot of it, but I am the one out there being bombarded, and I am tired. I can’t do it anymore.”

I know. I feel that way, too. That’s why I don’t break the silence when he doesn’t want to talk. It’s why I can barely write because I’ve been through it over and over, and I’ve written about it this way and that way, but nothing changes.

President Obama must be feeling it while the extreme whites are yelling for his impeachment: “There I was, just being black all by myself, and here comes D. Whiteman.”

 President Obama is one of the millions of middle-aged black men in America who waded through the bullshit and danger, only to discover they are still trapped by white entitlement and privilege.

I know the real reason for the government shutdown.

President Obama

Profiling Fatality

Everyone who isn’t a total recluse has heard about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old black boy from Sanford, FL, the city my in-laws were born and raised in, and in which we still have family. Trayvon left his father’s house in a gated community to run to the convenience store for some skittles and iced tea during the halftime of a game he was watching on TV. On his way back he realized he was being followed and called his girlfriend who encouraged him to run. He didn’t, and self-appointed neighborhood watch president George Zimmerman caught up with him, confronted him, then shot and killed him.

Zimmerman, identified as white by the police but Hispanic by his family, claims self-defense under the Florida “stand your ground” law and the Sanford police apparently agreed with him, at least until public outrage changed their minds. But as of this posting, he still has not been charged.

Profiling is a dangerous game and so is carrying guns.

I’m married to a black man. I spent many hours in our thirty-six years together worrying if he was safe out there in the world, a world that mostly considers him to be criminal or dangerous just based on his skin color. No matter that he spent twenty-five years serving and protecting the citizens of our community as a firefighter. No matter that he is a devoted husband and father. No matter that he is a talented artist, musician, and single-handicap golfer. No matter that he is an ethical man who wouldn’t pick up a dime off the street unless it was to return it to its owner. His black skin is all that mattered when police frequently stopped him for DWB, driving while black, or when women locked their car doors as he walked through a parking lot back to his car or when people treated him disrespectfully or ignored him completely.
Once Ronald got home very late. I was worried and angry. "Where have you been?" I asked when he walked into the bedroom. "I was ready to start calling the hospitals."
"I'm going to turn on the light," he said. "I don't want you to be upset by what you see, okay? Then I'll explain what happened."
He turned on the light, and I recoiled from the sight before me. His T-shirt and shorts were covered in blood. His cheek and lip were swollen.
He had gone to Planet 505, a bar on Westcott Street, to listen to a band. On his way back to his car, he was jumped from behind and punched in the head. A fight ensued. The other man, a white guy, kept calling Ronald an Arab. When the police arrived, they immediately assumed Ronald was the perpetrator and cuffed him. At least the other man admitted he had started the tussle, and Ronald refused to press charges. While the inside of Ronald's cheek had been torn open when the man grabbed him in the mouth during the fight, the man now had four broken fingers to show for it. He refused medical assistance, and Ronald drove himself to the emergency room where he received three stitches inside his cheek. The man said he attacked Ronald because he was the "Arab man" who had broken into his car. He believed this because that night Ronald wore a Kufi, a hat worn in northern African and some mid-Eastern countries. He profiled him much like Zimmerman profiled Martin because he wore a hoodie.

I’m married to a black man who has a license to conceal and carry a gun, but he doesn’t, unless he is transporting his guns to the shooting range for Olympic-style target practice. He doesn’t carry them holstered, but locked and unloaded in a gun box in the back of the SUV.

He also is certified to teach pistol safety and taught classes a few years ago.  He told me how men walked into class with swagger, and how they sent their wives to class with guns too big for their hands and too heavy for them to handle. Some class members, men and women, mentioned they couldn’t wait to shoot someone.

I was appalled by his stories, but he felt he could provide a service: if people were going to own guns then at least they should know how to use them safely. He added some of his own expertise, for those anxious to shoot someone, about what it is like to react in an extreme circumstance, like firefighting or maybe in the case of someone breaking into your home. Your body wants to flee; your heart is racing; your breath is heaving; your senses are heightened; your fine motor skills leave you, and you lose your accuracy, that is, if you ever had it. He wanted his students to know that it isn’t easy to make good decisions under such circumstances and that an impulse decision might be the wrong one. In addition he would ask them if they had thought about what it would mean to shoot someone.

Did George Zimmerman ask himself what it would mean to shoot someone?

I wrote about how shooting someone can change a person in my post Human Urine (http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/01/human-urine.html).

Zimmerman said he shot in self-defense, but was he brandishing his gun when he approached Martin? How would you react if someone approached you with a gun? I think I would be paralyzed by fear. Perhaps you might push him, if you could. Maybe that’s what Trayvon did. We won’t ever know what happened that night.  I wish Trayvon Martin had arrived safely back in front of the TV to catch the end of the game after his snack run, but he didn’t because he was profiled and someone who was carrying a gun made a bad decision and acted on it. Was protecting Zimmerman’s neighborhood worth Trayvon’s life? Will he ask himself that question for the rest of his life?

So many gun proponents think we should all be carrying guns, maybe like the Wild West. But I think only the police and other safety officers should be carrying. The “stand your ground” law is being considered in the state I now live in as well as the right to carry in public parks. That scares me. Most people aren’t trained the way the police are trained to handle guns and potentially dangerous situations, and bad decisions will undoubtedly be made that will change or end people’s lives.

I remember the boys my daughters went to school with in our urban school district in Syracuse. In kindergarten they were sweet, creative, and fun loving, if not mischievous. By eighth grade some were over six feet tall. They were boys still, but they had man-sized bodies. Already people showed fear around them, particularly the black boys, but to me, they were the same boys with the mischievous smiles from the kindergarten class.

“Hi, Mrs. Hagan,” they called out when they saw me in the hallway or the parking lot, some with baritone voices. I feared for them in the same way I feared for my husband. How would the rest of the world treat them?  I know my fears weren’t unfounded. Look at Trayvon. He should have been able to watch that game, eat some skittles, drink his iced tea, talk to his girlfriend, have some teenage fun, go on to college, get married, become a father and a productive citizen, but instead he died. He was profiled and someone had a gun.

When our young black men are categorized and profiled, what chance do they have for success? Why can’t the world see the sweet faces and mischievous smiles beneath the hoodies? Why can’t they see another human being full of life and potential? Why must our young black men die too soon?

(Excerpt from Chapter 6 Being Black All by Myself, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

Ronald would grow silent and pensive in the months and years that followed as he slipped into a deep depression – the depression that would rob me of his stories and leave me wondering if we would stay together after all we had been through; the depression that lay on him so heavily he wondered, seven months after his almost fatal fall, if he could attend his nephew’s funeral.

I dreamed about Yancy the night he died in July 2005. His sweet child’s face, even though he was a man by then, his sensitive eyes, his looming silhouette, all in the dream, but there was a gun in his hand and it went off. Whom did Yancy shoot?

I thought the dream was odd because Ronald and I had not seen him for years. He was the baby who made me cry when Ronald called me at my summer job in 1977 to announce his birth. Sylvester Jr. and his wife Marsha separated when Yancy was just six, and later divorced. The lingering mistrust between Yancy’s parents left him mostly with his mother. Yancy was angry, too, that his father started dating white women right after the split and eventually married one. He must have thought it was the ultimate betrayal.

 Twelve pounds when he was born, Yancy had grown to over six and a half feet tall by the time he was a young teen. He dropped out of school. He served a prison sentence for assault and robbery just after he turned eighteen. He was a boy in a man’s body, a boy whom many people viewed as a threat because of his size and the color of his skin; a boy who could not contain his anger over the way his life veered off course. Perhaps it had never been on course. His descent into delinquency, drug use, paternity, joblessness, seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy. He had been a smart, adorable little boy, and that is how I remembered him best, so the dream surprised me. I pushed it out of my head the next day until the phone rang.

“It’s Mom,” Bertha said. “Yancy shot himself.”

“Oh,” I said, “I thought he shot someone else,” the dream pushing its way back into consciousness. I must have confused her. “Is he going to be okay?” I continued, thinking it had been an accident, hoping for it: maybe he had shoved a gun down into his waistband to hide it, and it went off.

 “He’s dead,” she said.

Marsha called me a few hours later. “I want Ron to be one of the pallbearers,” she said, grief halting her voice. “Yancy reminded me of Ron: both of them so sensitive, so artistic.”

“I’ll ask him as soon as he gets home,” I said, the blood pulsing in my temples. When I told Ronald, I saw the vein quivering over his jaw the way it did when he was stressed or angry. He dropped his head. “I don’t know if I can go,” he said. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“You don’t have to,” I said, protective, worried, sorry I had to tell him. “I’ll go. Cara and Mackenzie will go.” They were in Syracuse producing their second evening dance concert. “We’ll represent the R. Hagans.”

“When is it?” he asked. I gave him the details, and he turned and picked up the phone and called the Fire Department to request funeral leave.