False Flag
I bought a pair of socks once. I’d trekked into this streetwear shop in Cambridge’s Central Square, Expressions, because I thought they might have outfits for me I couldn’t find elsewhere. At the time, in my twenties, I was tired of department store fare, and thrift shopping wasn’t a strength. One of those cool stores, the sneakers there were too high-priced for me, but there was a discount tee shirt rack that proved promising. I didn’t want to “dress Black,” but I didn’t want to feel like I couldn’t traverse a shop where most of the clientele and staff were, either. I just wanted to find cool shit, and I’d come to a place in life where I accepted where I’d find the cool shit.
I don’t know why I got them. The red, black, and deep forest green stripes of the sock pair just jumped out at me. Did I realize in that moment that those were the colors of the Black American flag? Did that come later? It’s hard for me to say. I can tell you they were comfortable as hell. I can tell you I almost immediately became insecure about wearing them, as if they were an ornate African print of some kind. I can tell you no one ever seemed to notice this microaggression of mine—well, maybe the woman that rang me up. No one cared, but I was terrified of a co-opting misstep.
Years later, when preventing Black death rose to the cultural forefront as a cause du jour, I suddenly felt more comfortable slipping them on. Like I was some kind of early adopter. They were a private prayer, a nigh-invisible way of reminding myself what was important to me. But they were fraught, too—a skin I was wearing that, I worried, perpetrated theft against the very people whose approval mattered most to me.
Still, I love those colors. And if the socks fit…
Compare and Contrast
I am a mess of contradictions. It feels like I’m writing this for my Black friends while partially hoping they never see it in fear of their well-reasoned disavowal of my ugly, unfortunate honesty. My cowardly shouting that I learned something important during all our lives together. Me and my insistences.
When I was younger, stupider, I’d have tried to make good on the love conferred upon me by giving the world the declarative statement on how best we can all, as my jester of a buddy and Rodney King put it, “get along.” I’d have tried using the King’s English and sourcing the story and putting it in a well-wrapped box of respectability where Important Audiences could come across it and finally be Made Good. I’d have worked so hard.
In fact, I did do this, spending years reporting on a story about the aforementioned Massachusetts busing program, which beneficially desegregated the lives of many generations of students but left those making the biggest sacrifices to carry the biggest load, as children as well as into adulthood. I started to write that story hopeful that programs like it could help more white kids like me better their perspectives and involvement with racial issues. In working on it, however, I learned with new illumination how very painful that busing experience was for people like some of my closest friends, how much it cost them, and how much it hurt that they continued to feel alienated not only by those areas where they went to school, but the home neighborhoods they returned to each evening. They were trailblazing community builders left without a home. It was fucking bullshit.
If I seem upset it’s because I feel like we were raised under a false banner. It’s not that segregation is righteous, of course, but integration in our society has always meant integration to a norm too sick to accept. It’s one thing to be willing to adapt. But the environment is meant to evolve, too—and that’s where, I’d say, even before this latest abomination of an administration, we’ve failed, as a stubbornly white society. But, without that imperfect solution, my life would be unrecognizable. I was lucky for the sacrifices others made, for their impacts, the fissure of their presence, shaped me.
Never have I thrown myself into a story like I did this one. I grew obsessed, and the project only got bigger and bigger. I didn’t want to passively observe what had gone on; I wanted to make a material impact on what would come in the days to follow. I was without boundary and underdeveloped, as a journalist, for the job.
When I was killing myself to report the busing story, I needed an adult. So I reached out to one of the only Black teachers my high school had, Mr. Joseph Zellner. Mr. Zellner was a character; he was unconventional in some ways and some kids questioned his intelligence, maybe because he sometimes looked downward when he spoke or because they were fucking assholes.
When I spoke with Joe Zellner 16 years after high school, my former history teacher taught me something—that despite my living memory, Concord was never so lily white as it was made to seem, just as America was never, but that supremacy and money painted primer over its long history. He, who in his free time plays as a Civil War reenactor, told me of how he spent his years there, from the 1970s to the mid 2010s, dragging the community towards the enlightenment it professes. That Mr. Zellner was hospitalized as we had this talk only heightened the impact of our exchange.
After we’d spoken for a while, Joe admitted that when I first contacted him he struggled to recall which of his Concord students I was, until he got a flash of an old competitive tic of mine I’d had in his Africa and African-American history class, a revealing bit of my own history.
Apparently, when our tests were graded and handed back to us, I would always check in with a girl who went by Tata, who since first grade had been probably the smartest, most driven girl in my class, to see how I measured up to her. As Joe described it, he always noticed that I was comparing myself against her and only her—not only in our African-American history elective but in all of our shared social studies. There were other brainy kids in class, but only Tata could tell me if I’d done well or not.
When he told me that, I laughed. I had no memory of it. But it made me proud. Because I was willing to, at that age, risk embarrassment for familiarity. Sure, her Blackness had to have been a factor, as surely as it is a part of who she is, but our exchanges, I know, came primarily from being unafraid of boundaries, being willing to play with someone that not every kid there was prepared to. She could be intense! When we were no older than seven, she’d threated to “eat me up” in the schoolyard. But she was one of my favorite classmates, a font of pride and joy. I always got the sense that she came from a particularly supportive family, with substantial expectations of her. We saw each other years later, while I was working at a mall during college, and our repartee picked up right where we’d left it off, her curious about me and me her. Maybe all that comparison hadn’t been so unwelcome, in the end.
But worms can turn. It’s hard to look at these stories and identify where things went from admirable, if we want to say that, or innocent, to troubling. If these relationships were so important to me when I was growing up, doesn’t it make sense that I’d seek them out as an adult? If “diversity” was a cultural value, en vogue, wasn’t I following in accordance with society by putting primacy on it in my personal life? If I was repelled by monochromatic whiteness, doesn’t it make sense that I’d be drawn towards a more colorful life?
Soft Launch
The truth is that as a kid yes, I did feel special. Set apart. I needed it. Deeply insecure, I was without in so many ways. Or at least, that’s how it felt when cast against my surroundings. But, my friends did not let me flounder. They said to me, Yes, You are special. Yes, you are like us. This world is hard on us, too. Let’s laugh about it. Let’s create ourselves a haven, in the middle of the minefield. Let’s keep each other going.
It was all confusing, however. There was no word “ally,” as yet. There were white women and Black guys who dated. There were white dudes that needed a street persona. There were hardly any examples of white guys dating Black women, which I think I found vexing. Because I didn’t feel like I had Black friends. I felt like I had family.
My childhood cocoon couldn’t preserve forever. I went to college hoping I wouldn’t be without the kind of companionship to which I’d grown accustomed for long. I was so confused. I saw the National Society of Black Engineers was hosting a Madden tournament. It was my favorite game and the first freshman mixer that spoke to me, so I went. It didn’t go as I planned. For one, I fucking sucked at my favorite video game, it turned out. And while I wasn’t made to feel unwelcome, on that particular day in that particular room no one stepped in to save me from my loneliness. And let’s be clear—it was no one’s job to. I was the space’s uninvited intruder, seeking to fit in where I couldn’t expect to. But my experiences led me to certain beliefs about where I’d be most at home on campus.
I don’t regret going, though. Like the first time I rode the Metco bus, the soft tissue damage of entering Black spaces and squirming a little developed in me a willingness to be a hint uncomfortable that I prize. It’s useful to be reminded, or even to learn firsthand, about the difficulties of being the minority in a space. It’s instructive. Hell, it can be transformative, even.
When I was single and in my thirties, my friends and I were stalwart in frequenting what were, functionally, mostly Black dance nights. It was a cool majority-minority scene around Cambridge and Boston that brought out a stylish and fun crowd. In attendance with a group of heartbreakers I’d bonded with over music and the pursuit of romantic approval, we were there because it was the only place you could hear the tunes we loved. It was a special little slice of the city and I felt, honestly, honored to be welcomed in it, even if I wasn’t always perfectly at ease. I mean, there were certainly people, white people, there who were much cooler. Whose outfits popped more brightly, whose insecurities were better resolved or buried deeper. But with the friends I’d made as an adult at my side I felt I belonged, in my way. Until it was time to find a dance partner.
I think my racial hangups might have manifested themselves most when it came to dating Black women. There were a few honest tries, but things never went particularly well. Some I over-pursued, some I undervalued. There were missteps. I just wasn’t my best self, it shames me to say (though that was not uncommon to my dating life). Maybe I overthought things. Or maybe it simply wasn’t fair to try and saddle someone else with all my previously described baggage.
Because I was never more desperate for approval than in those dance night spaces. But as attracted as I was, I was even more chaste. I so badly didn’t want to approach women in the wrong way, the best thing I could think to do was to spare this crowd my usual intrusive conversational routine and leave them alone. I left the door open for someone, if they chose, to back up in my direction on their own, but lightning proved not to strike quite so repetitively. Still, despite never quite obtaining the attention I sought, those were some of my favorite nights. Being there, not feeling out of place, was enough.
I was finding that I felt most comfortable in mixed-race settings, I thought. I liked interacting with people. And sure, I had a little bit of anxiety about being in the minority for once, as it is not something that the majority of white Americans do very often. But no one was out to get me. No one paid particular mind or cared to be hostile. Did I expect otherwise? I guess, on some psychological level, I had shields up.
I wanted so badly to belong—not only with the friends I’d come with but the strangers there, too (what’s more alluring than the acceptance of strangers, after all). Here, I think, something festered. Some wire got crossed. Some aspect of my ego could not handle the dynamic without shorting. I didn’t just want to be there. I wanted to be loved there. Seen. Understood. Embraced. And the funny thing is, I got plenty of love—from my group, the venue staff, the DJs—or at least recognition. But it was hard to get enough. When one side of the aisle seems to be offering each other unconditional love and support, set to a beat, and the other side is just all white people, it’s hard not to want to pick a side.
Common Colors
To some it will be no surprise that it was at a New England Patriots NFL football game that I had my first and worst-ever encounter with abject, hateful racism and ogrish bigotry.
In the aftermath of a prime-time matchup against the Houston Texans, my stepfather, a gaggle of his friends, and I were tailgating and we’d invited a stranger and his lady to join our tent for grub as the traffic let out and the drizzle let up.
They were up from somewhere in Pennsylvania, the guy said, but he had roots in Western Mass. A big Pats fan as result, this was his first time back since his youth. He was wearing a Vince Wilfork jersey, a wide-bodied number 75.
We were all shooting the shit when out of nowhere he said, “You know what I like about you Northern folks? You really know how to keep your niggers in line around here.”
It froze me. No one engaged. They pressed on.
I was in shock. I’d never been confronted like that before. This was like afterschool special racism.
Here I was, the young man I’ve been describing all this time, suddenly cast within this, what I knew to be that moment of truth. It was overwhelming. I made what I thought was a mature decision to excuse myself to take a piss. As I did, my rage boiled. Not merely because of this asshole. I started to grow resentful and judgmental of the middle-aged white men I was with who hadn’t reacted to this man’s assault on our decency. And I was, of course, mightily angry with myself, for not meeting the indignity with immediate force.
But why was it my job to fix this situation, I wondered? Still in my twenties, I was the junior partner of this excursion. Wasn’t it their responsibility to be the adults? Some woke king I was proving to be.
As I held my dick in my hands, my mind raced. I thought of my oldest friends. I thought of the girl I was hopelessly pursuing at the time. I decided it was not for this man to corrupt my world. He didn’t have the right to make me hate myself or people that I loved. So, I returned to the tent, I tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Hey, pal—you gotta get out of here.”
“What? Why?”
“You can’t be talking that shit. You gotta go.”
“What the fuck?!” He spun out of control. He was shocked to be called out. He thought he was in private, closed company. He didn’t know who the fuck he was talking to. “You’re a goddamn nigger-lover!” he cried, mortified.
His wife went stone faced. They hauled to their truck. He repeated his accusation as they fishtailed away in the pissing rain.
The party was over. No one talked much on our way back to the hotel. The tempered but ultimately forceful way I handled that situation is one of those few things in life that I like to think I just did right. I liked feeling like a hero, a savior to the cause. You’re goddamn right, motherfucker. You’re goddamn right I am.
I like that my opponent was so pitiful and crumpled so quickly, his paper armor all wet. Still, it’d be more satisfying to me today if I’d punctuated his disinvitation with more vitriol. Did I call him “pal?” “Guy?” “Man?” Why had I been so familiar with the enemy?
I wish I could sit here and beam with pride. But the more I sit with that story the more I worry that pathetic interloper still managed to debase me. What he called me made me proud, I worry. This was a vulgar badge, covered in shit, insinuated on me. Another way to define myself through reliance, in measurement. And despite knowing better, I started telling the story. To all the people I needed to know what a good boy I am. Like a cat with a dead bird, I made a trophy out of something that could only bring disease in its wake. When I did that, that motherfucker won. He made me feel, in a way, like him. A person who saw the world only through divides.
Something took root in me then, I worry. A seed of ego, watered. I saw an enemy and felt he was decisively not me, wholly unlike me. So what could I possibly have to worry about?
Immersion
In this piece it is possible if not likely that I’ve opened myself to critiques of binary thinking as it comes to race. Perhaps—I certainly believe it’s proven to be the preoccupying matter of our national identity. I’d hate though to present as if I have no care for the intersectional matters of the BIPOC community, if that term is still in vogue for you and yours. I have certainly been, in my life, careless about the sensitivities of AAPI, Latinx, and First Nation assimilation, in particular. Never mind my other blind spots around the world, the entire Middle East, for example. I would not say these are less critical matters of our society and general community. I would only say they have not been as formative, in the same ways, to my experience.
I have a lot of contradictory feelings about whether it even makes sense to share any of these thoughts, but ultimately I’ve always felt that we whites have to try doing more to have our own informed conversations about racial experiences, if we hope for improved conditions. But uncomfortable questions can arise. Even basic ones can present tensions.
What goes into the pursuit to be liked? And if it breeds kindness, commonness, is that such a terrible turn? What’s so wrong with trying to make friends with everyone?
Except, of course, for the hanging threat of deceit. Maybe it’s not loving people for who they are, or not loving at all. Maybe it’s something else. Something less honest. Maybe neediness, plain and true.
I wish I could tell you my hands were clean. I wish I could say I’d done no harm of infractions micro or macro. But it’s not my place to say.
Something I worry about is whether my need for Black people to like me metastasized when I was given the chance to write about them for a living. Now, all of the sudden, I was in the business of broadcasting my access, but I had to do a good job in order to feel worthy of the friends I thought I was making, the job I was doing.
I’ll tell you more about my earliest days of professional wordsmithing another time, but after a few years of it I was invited as a growing writer to help tell the stories of young hip hop artists around Boston. This was an honor, to be welcomed into decidedly cool places, but it complicated my issues. I’d come a long way since high school—now, I practically only listened to music by Black artists. After a spell writing about national acts for the local paper, I made friends with a supremely connected promotor who went to lengths to support me by bringing me into spaces I could never have gained access to on my own. Suddenly I was among the few white faces in colorful rooms, and I liked it. It was affirming not only of my personhood but of the sensitivity I’d sought to bring to my writing. My hand was no less heavy than any other writer, but I strained to keep it just aloft enough to break no boundary, betray no trust.
Still, there were tradeoffs. Because of the expectations I put on myself, I thought it was my job to be everything to everyone. I felt such a heavy burden to ferry each and every artist I met to the halls of respectability by masterfully writing them up that it froze me. I bent then buckled then broke. All I wanted was to help everyone I met, but I wasn’t capable, in my state. I wanted too much, and it froze me. I didn’t know why, yet, but I’d cracked.
The fact was I was much better at being friendly with artists than being a professional covering them. Part of this was my working style. Because I so genuinely admire anyone who puts their creative heart out there for the world to see and judge, I let them know it. Also, since I had not come to the music world through a musical background, there was an element of tastemaking and gatekeeping to the job that made me wince. Suddenly I was meeting young people of all stripes who it felt like were sure I was the key to getting their next break. I wasn’t the only one yearning for external validation, after all.
This put me in a vice. Who was I to say that someone 10–15 years my junior from a neighborhood nothing like my own was or was not deserving of press? This just was not a professionally developed skill of mine. I could, however, come to like them, root for them, position myself in their corner. And, at times, with the key help of others, I could get the opportunity to make good on that goodwill and work to tell their story in press. But my process was too time-consuming, too consuming overall, for me to work at a steady enough clip to be an adequate reporter of the scene or satisfy my own sense of dutiful obligation.
Writing about rap complicated my feelings of solidarity and allyship. It’s complex—I was invited into those halls largely because of my practice in visiting the houses of others, on the terms of the residency, but I wasn’t solid enough to be able to both be a guest and be of help. I led with respect and didn’t over-ask, but I failed to deliver returns on the invitation. I didn’t write about the musicians as consistently as I’d wanted to. I barely wrote at all, in fact, but I made it to every event. It felt like showing up for a dinner party with nothing to contribute. And yet I’d still be invited back time and time again, but each time it would make me feel worse, because it wasn’t that I forgot the dish or wine but that I was incapable of delivering it.
This work wound its way into my personal identity. In recent decades, who we are and what we do has increasingly become core components to how we broadcast ourselves, who we want to be understood to be. By this point, I wanted my life’s extended community all to see what cool shit I was up to, who I had become. Not someone who “hung around with Black people,” but one who helped creative people from different walks, many of them Black musicians, get their just due. Someone who could be trusted.
I wonder if part of the issue was the job made me feel like the name I’d been called, “White Chocolate.” When I was able to make good and write the artists up, I was trouble-free. But when I failed to, I was nothing but a poseur treading on grounds I hadn’t earned access to.
In other words, yet another white disappointment.
Next: Part 3 (of 4) - The Mined Field