Young Black Men, part one
His shape is round - every body part from the chubby face to the stubby fingernails.
His outfit is a black hoodie, blue jeans and a pair of flip flops that he wears with socks. It’s winter so his feet must be freezing. I tried to give him some of lil bro’s old FUBU shirts- just his size - but he said to me “Ms. Lauren, kids don’t wear these kinds of things these days.”
Talk about feeling irrelevant. At least they weren’t my clothes.
We talk about almost everything. Some things he is not ready to say, some things I am not ready to ask.
“What do you know about your history?”
“Nothing,” he replies.
“You don’t know anything about your own history?”
I’m only lightweight surprised. I knew nothing about my own history until after I graduated from college.
“Nope.”
“They don’t teach you about black history during black history month?”
“They did. They taught us about Osama bin Laden.”
My first thought is “Osama bin Laden is not black” but I don’t say it out loud. My second thought is “What the fuck- they taught him that Osama bin Laden was black?”
There is so much work for me to do.
I let him look through my wallet - a sure violation of the “self disclosure” rule - and he learns about donor stickers and Class C licenses. When I pull out my student card, he appears to be surprised that I’m still in school.
“You go to school?” he asks.
“Yeah, I like school.” Funny thing is - I’m being serious. “Don’t you?”
“Nope. I bet you don’t have teachers like I do,” he says.
“I bet I do,” I reply.
“I bet you don’t have classmates like I do.”
“I bet I do,” I reply again. “How many black kids are in your class? How many white teachers? I only know one brown woman like me in my school.”
All of a sudden, we are the same age, share the same struggle.
He looks me straight in the eye and says, “Everyone at your school is white.”
I think we just had a moment.
I tell him how excited I am to finally be able to have a brown woman as a teacher. (Super excited!!!!!!) I want him to be excited too but there are no black teachers at his school. Only janitors.
As I’m driving him home, he says to me out of nowhere: “I don’t like black people.”
“What? Why don’t you like black people?”
Again, I’m only lightweight surprised. The way that mainstream society portrays the black community in the media … are you surprised? If you are, then we must be watching different TV stations. Maybe living in different worlds, even.
“I love all black and brown people. I love seeing black and brown people do great things.” I tell him this and I mean it.
Silence. And then:
“I was just kidding,” he whispers. “If I said I hate black people that means I hate myself.”
Exactly.
