It cost me everything.
It cost me my best friend. because the moment I start to, in his mind, “outshine him” is the first time he calls me nigger. Not nigga, like he and his family have been calling me since I was in first grade. Which I thought was acceptable at the time. A hispanic child calling his “best friend” nigga because of the music he listens to, because of the American capitalist system he’s engulfed in, because some where along the lines he learned that black skin is synonymous with nigger.
It cost me my cousin. Who because of his lighter complexion thinks that the type of nigga he is and the type of nigga differ. I often wonder when he first called me nigger, with a conniving smile and intention to hurt me, if he fully understood what he was saying to me. And what he was actually saying about himself.
It cost me my father. Who like some conservative black americans, put Christianity above their blackness, above love, above understanding. Teaching non-violence and waiting for great white man in the sky to come save them. “suffer today, for tomorrow when you are in heaven you will be reward for your sacrifice.”
it cost me my peace of mind, because I can see the web of lies pulled over the faces of the majority of americans, black white latino asian. And to survive and even thrive the american of the 21st century I have to participate in same system that had stolen pan-africans and oppressed them in the first place.
Everyday I feel that I get a little crazier. Every page that turns confirms the ugly true I’ve tried to run away from. Every fear I’ve had as a young boy has become true, and I can’t seem to wake up from this nightmare. When I was a child I had two fear that I can remember. One was that I’d die alone, with no family and no loved one to remember me. To hold my hands in my last moments and tell the lies that never ceases to end, “It will be okay”.
The second fear, a fear that I’ve never quite understood where I developed this fear but all the same I’ve had this fear with me for as long as I can remember. The fear that something is wrong with me and no one ever told me. That in my mind and in the way I interact with the world everything seems okay but under the surface and how I appear in the world, I am sick. I don’t know where this fear came from but if I had to guess, it may have had to do with two student that were in my elementary school. These two students were, and I suppose still are, “mentally retard” or on the spectrum as we say today. I watched Amanda and Jenelle for years as they innocently interacted with my classroom over the years. Everyone knew of Amanda and Jenelle and their limitation and together teachers and students we would allow them to be themselves without judgment. And one day I wondered, if I too was, mentally retard, and if I was, how would I know? I mean I’m in the same school as them, even in the same classroom. Do Amanda and Jenelle know that they are “different”?
Burning in paradise 