Black Minds Matter: The Black Gaze
Blackness. Liberation. Flyness. Ideas. Freedom. Power. Unapologetically.
#1 I Love the Black Gaze
Be honest: What would you think if you saw a Black person strutting down the street gleefully eating a bucket of fried chicken without a care in the world? Would you cringe and think, What will white people say??? Would you wonder if that person was setting the race back? Or would you see the joy that person feels in that moment, happily eating a beloved food, unburdened by what white people will think, focusing only what makes them happy and gets them through the day? Would you applaud them for being free from worrying about what white people think?
I love Precious. And KFC.
It’s painful to see the world through white gaze glasses. It’s exhausting. It’s degrading. And it’s demoralizing to center them. One of the most powerful periods of my life was when I was taught how to identify the white gaze inside of me and shown how to root it out. That’s when, like Neo pulling the cord out of his skull in the Matrix, I was able to enter a new world. When I began to see the world through the Black gaze, liberated from the fear of white judgement, it was so empowering. When I stopped thinking, How do I make sure I don’t embarrass the race? and started thinking, Who do I want to be? I became a much happier person. Where white people often look at us and our art and our being with a lack of understanding, with negativity, and with condescension, Black people tend to look at my actions, my art, and my being with the assumption of humanity and with understanding and with love. Looking at the world through the Black gaze is ennobling. Centering Blackness feels powerful. Once I started seeing the world through the Black gaze, I refused to go back.
And yet now I see that my work at destroying the white gaze inside me was not complete. I have remained infected with the white gaze. I have been willing, at times, to quiet myself in order to keep from making white people uncomfortable unnecessarily. I have held my tongue and modulated my words so that I didn’t scare them. No more. The last few weeks has lit a fire inside me that I will not let go of. It has led me to say whatever I really want, to call out white people who aren’t being anti-racist, to talk about abolition and reparations as if these are not radical ideas but necessary ones. I have made white people uncomfortable and loved it. I have refused to swallow my thoughts and insisted on showing up as my true self even if that means annoying white allies as I push them. Recently a Black friend of mine said that the last few weeks has inspired him to say “No more code-switching.” He’s no longer going to modulate himself and his persona to make white people comfortable. I want to be like that. And I want every Black person to know this freedom. Blackcentrism is like a drug that will make you feel powerful and accepted and loved. You definitely want to take that red pill. Lena Waithe told me that when she was making “Queen and Slim” she only accepted notes on the script from Black people. I want to make art like that. And I want every white person to know that if you can’t handle me at my truest, if you need me to retreat from who I really am, then you aren’t accepting me at my realest and you’re asking me to cut off a part of myself and we aren’t really friends. If I have to hide a part of myself to be around you then get out of my life. I’m not doing that anymore. I’m gonna be as unapologetically Black as I can.
#2 Can We Shoot Our Way To Freedom?
Is Black freedom merely a few guns away? The NY Times seems to think so. There was a rather insane video in the Times last week that featured a series of Black people saying they feel increasingly unsafe in the world because of police violence and crazy white people who pull out their guns in small confrontations and because of all that these Black people feel like they need to own guns. It was called I’m a Black American. I Need a Gun to Feel Safe in This Country. There were no Black people in the piece who said they do not feel like that but hey who needs balance in media? This video essay was so simplistic in its reasoning (feel scared—get a gun!) and so lopsided in its discussion (just Black people who had guns) that it felt like an NRA ad (except that the NRA is racist and the core of its appeal is you need a gun to protect you from crazy Black criminals but put that aside for a moment). According to a 2017 Pew survey:
36% of white Americans say they own a gun
24% of Black Americans say they own a gun
49% of white Americans say they live in a home where someone owns one
32% of Black Americans say they live in a home where someone owns one
Even though many Black Americans live in proximity to danger from guns, three-fourths of us opt to not own guns. Perhaps they know that more guns do not make us safer. If they did, America would be the safest nation on Earth. It is far from that.
If we were talking about a Black Panther-like politicized usage of guns to force changes in America’s far-too-lax gun laws then I would be down for that. But the hysteria-based motivation for gun-carrying that’s discussed in the NY Times seems far more likely to lead to tragedy. It certainly does not make sense for Black people to take up arms against the police. It’s suicidal to pull a gun on a cop. I am for the abolition of policing but that means destroying the system of policing, not attacking or murdering individual cops. If an officer pulls a gun on you, pulling out your gun will be the last thing you ever do.
Yes there are a lot of crazy white people, walking around with guns, but I don’t see how the path to Black liberation includes us owning more guns. I don’t think freedom means us arming ourselves so that we can be as dumb and as overaggressive as the dumbest, most overaggressive white people. Progress doesn’t mean us acting as badly as white people do. Now, I am not a pacifist. I believe that it is morally right to respond to overt racism by punching a racist in the face. But your hands will probably not kill someone.
I reject the notion that pulling out a gun automatically makes you safe. In so many cases, having a gun made someone even more vulnerable. Philando Castile was sitting in his car with his family, calmly informing an officer that he was a licensed gun carrier, and then he was dead. John Crawford was in Wal-Mart buying a gun when officers stormed in and shot him. Tamir Rice was holding a toy gun. I could go on.
And I don’t believe that pulling out a gun on another citizen necessarily means you have the upper hand. I reject the Wild West notion that the gun instantly makes you the strongest player. Take, for example, the recent incident in Michigan where a white woman in a parking lot got into an argument with a Black woman and her teenage daughter.
The white woman, Jillian Wuestenberg, was legally licensed to carry and pulled out her gun. If the Black woman had pulled out her own gun in response then someone would have been shot and possibly killed. Instead, the Black woman used her phone and it proved to be the more powerful instrument. She videotaped the incident, posted it, and walked away from the moment unscathed. Wuestenberg and her husband were arrested and charged with felonious assault. They each face four years in prison. Her husband lost his job. Who won that confrontation? It’s very European and colonialist to think that the gun is an all-powerful tool that gives you overwhelming power in any situation. It does not. It’s insane to think that Black people can shoot our way to freedom.
#3 Must See Black TV
Random Acts of Flyness on HBO is one of the Blackest shows I’ve ever seen. I’m late, it came out in 2018, but I started watching it last week and I zoomed through the whole first season in half a day. It’s a wild, surrealist, experimental sketch comedy show that’s thought-provoking and hysterical. It rejects the normal structures and subjects that shows are often based around. Let me tell you what grabbed me: the season begins with an iPhone selfie-video of the show’s creator Terence Nance riding his bike while telling us about the episode that’s to come when a cop pulls in front of him, knocking him off his bike, as if the reality of Black life is interrupting the dream of the show. They argue. Nance runs, the cop runs after him, and then Nance suddenly takes off into the air, flying up and away. (People who remember my early magical realist fiction like The Portable Promised Land and Soul City will be like, yeah I know why he likes that!) And then we jump right into a sketch called “Worry No. 473 of 1000 Worries That A Black Person Should Not Have To Worry About,” where Nance accidentally climbs into a car that looks exactly like his but is not his, leaving him to fear what will happen after the frightened white woman calls 911. And then there’s Jon Hamm doing an infomercial for a cream that will help clear up “white thoughts” which ends with someone texting Nance to say why is the show talking about whiteness at all? Later for them. Talk about Blackness. He agrees and we flip to Black Thought talking about Black thoughts. And on and on. I love this show. Can’t wait for season two…
Terence Nance is brilliant.
Check out my podcast Toure Show—this week’s guest is Joe Budden.
My political podcast is Democracyish.
Twitter @toure
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