Have you ever known what it felt like to be a problem?
It’s a question WEB Dubois asked once in The Souls of Black Folk. I think it’s this question that is driving people to ruin their own neighborhoods.
Here’s a secret you may not know: A lot of us black people hate ourselves.
We are told by a country that enslaved us for hundreds of years and segregated us for a hundred more and sidelines us in every area from the court system, to the education system, to treatment by law enforcement, to just about every conceivable way in culture…that we’re second class citizens. This is a problem brought about by our own doing, we’re told, and if we had the courage to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we would be out of it.
Don’t blame anyone else for your problems, we’re told.
Blame yourself. And so many of us, in spite of ourselves, see our worlds as prisons. We are not in a position to demand respect and a sense of dignity from other people. When we do, we are demeaned, rejected, killed.
We start to internalize the pain. We become frustrated with the problem. We become angry.
What you don’t know is that, for several days before the violence in Baltimore, there were peaceful protests. Thousands strong — think about it — thousands strong cared enough to stop what they were doing, brave traffic and inconvenience to their lives, and march, peacefully, to show the United States they were hurting. Because it was their fault, you understand. It was their fault Freddie Gray died, in many of their minds. If they had marched longer. If they had been more insistent. If they had demonstrated more, maybe the powers that be, the great media gods, would look down on them and find them worthy and do something. Perhaps the police could care. Maybe, unlike the days of Martin Luther King, Jr., they did have to sacrifice broken limbs and concussions and lives to get people to care.
But the media gods did not care. They hardly blinked. From their great white throne they mostly ignored the calm protests and sacrifice.
And so the people wondered what they were doing wrong. And they looked at their broken down communities, and their hate of their broken down communities extended to themselves. They looked at their paychecks and saw the low numbers reflect hatred. They looked at the assistance checks they needed and were hated for needing because they were unemployed, and saw themselves as problems. They looked at the police who had damaged their lives and ruined them with criminal records and treated them unjustly for as long as they could remember and beyond.
And this was all their fault. Theirs. And nobody cared, because why would they? Those others weren’t the problem. They were the problem. Their neighborhood was the problem.
They knew that going into the rich white neighborhoods would result in strong censure — they would probably be killed there quickly, and — another secret — inside, they may have believed they would have deserved it. That’s what we taught them. It was not the fault of the rich white neighborhoods. It was the fault of their own care of their own neighborhoods that this happened to them.
They were the problem to hate. Their neighborhood was the problem to hate. And there was frustration, because the enormous responsibility they felt to care, to give a shit, to plead to the power of America was unredeemed. They must be the problem.
Not all rioted. But even many who didn’t, many who protected the stores and shops, understood what it was to hate your given identity so much that you couldn’t bear the sight of its cultivation.
Because it all insults you. It all reminds you that you’re a problem. You haven’t traced it back to white America, because everyone has said that the problem is right in front of your face. It’s your kids you can’t control — and if you were a better parent who stayed home more instead of working long hours or getting locked up, that problem wouldn’t be there, so that’s your fault. It’s your job that doesn’t pay enough — and if you had learned to read in the subpar-schools, you might have gone to college. It’s your corner store that taunts you day in, day out, full of food while your children are starving and reminding you, day in, day out, that the reason you can’t go in there and get food is all your fault, it’s completely your fault, because you’re lazy, worthless, and nobody gives a shit about you nobody gives a shit about you NOBODY gives a SHIT about you, because you don’t deserve it, because you have children living on top ramen and that’s your fault, too, because what kind of parent feeds their children that filth, and if you’re trying to find work to feed them something better then you aren’t spending enough time with your kids and that’s why you’re ruining the black community.
It’s your fault. It’s your fault. It’s your fault. And nobody feels any empathy for you that could do anything about it and if you want them to feel empathy for your tears that means you’re not stiffening your chin and that’s your fault. You’re not a strong black man if you cry and you’re another mad black woman if you complain so you don’t embrace those stereotypes that you could become at any moment, that maybe deep down inside you feel you ARE because you’re the goddamn problem…and you see your kid look at you in anger because he hates you, too, because you’ve taught him that you hate yourself because the media has taught you that it’s right to hate yourself — but that’s not the media’s fault either, it’s yours because YOU’RE the problem — and he hates that he didn’t choose to be born here and he doesn’t deserve this and his hate boils over and he realizes that he won’t get heard and maybe he decides he won’t be another person who just shrugs and takes it like you do. He hates his home and his neighborhood and the begging and pleading and scraping it takes to survive and he doesn’t want it to define him so he and it doesn’t define him but the trapdoor is glued shut. He feels the shame when his mother struggles to pay the court costs from yet another expensive traffic ticket (as happened in Ferguson) and gets thrown in jail and he feels she deserves it because that’s what she is taught — while the mothers on the other side of the track don’t even care, pay it without a second thought, and she feels that maybe she deserves it, too, inside. And it’s not really the fault of the drastic racism in employment rates and the racist police and the hundreds of years of subservience the blacks had to endure while the white individuals built up wealth — it is this situation, here, and now. It’s because his mother is a problem and he was born a problem and there is no penance, no way out, of being a goddamn problem, except there is except he isn’t finding it because the problem is him..
It’s pain. It’s deep pain that sears one’s conscience, because it says the conscience isn’t worth the attention of the great white media or the police or the government when yet another dead friend is on the street. Your conscience does not matter unless it becomes ours and if it can never become ours you are an unresolved Problem.
You insist over and over and over again that black lives matter– black lives matter– black lives matter but the marches are getting old and the slogans seem empty and the cameras don’t care and “blacks lives matter” seems like a punchline to a joke and “all lives matter” insistent insisters say that even saying your life matters is selfish and wrong; you can do that but shouldn’t because it’s wrong because they don’t care about your selfish sentimentalism, and you can march and you can toil and you can be “good “all you want but no one cares and the doors to your neighborhood and the prison of self-hatred are slammed and the iron of resolve meets the heat of hate and welds the doors shut and………………..
Blind with rage, you ban against the prison walls. You’re not going to play the game anymore. If you want to feed your kids something better than goddamn top ramen, you’re done begging. They’ll call you a criminal, but they have already criminalized you so much that now, you don’t care; your conscience is seared and taken and gone and invalidated and a problem. The ones who constructed your morality can beat you in the streets. Morality doesn’t exist here. It does not matter. If you are going to be forced to die because you’re so terrible that that’s what you deserve, then, you decide, you’re going to feed your goddamn kids something halfway fucking decent first. It cannot make you any more guilty than you already are.
And the focus is not, at this point, on the white individuals. The focus is on you. It’s on what you need. What you’re desperate to have. You’ve played by the rules most of your life, and you’re done. Or you’ve watched your elders play by the rules for most of their lives, and you’re done because you don’t want to be them, you need to be more than them, and so you go out to the goddamn streets and you start a fire to remind yourself you’re here and that your life fucking matters even if they say your soul does match your skin.
And then the mother meets her son in the street and the hatred of his eyes meets the shame of hers — not of each other but of themselves — and she sees a dead son who police would think deserves to die and he sees a woman who is so terrified of the world around her that she keeps her son indoors against the ever-present background of the ongoing self-hatred of violence outdoors and he sees that as indicative of second-class citizenhood because that is what they have both been told and in their hate they fight in the street and America calls it beautiful love and continues the cycle by putting it on the news because that’s what we care about that’s what we want, the love of self hatred that has kept that neighborhood alive and dying for as long as we can remember and beyond…
I’m not sure…but maybe that’s partly why the protestors in Baltimore tore up their own neighborhoods. I’m open to other suggestions, though.
Thanks for reading.