But my mind tells me so...

I don’t know if it was ever said out loud, or if the expectation was ever written down anywhere, but at some point in this journey called life, I felt like I had to be perfect. Not the kind of perfect that fixates on aesthetics, or a particular look. I had freedom in that regard, mostly. Trayvon Martin’s murder by George Zimmerman reminded me that I needed to be conscious about what I wear. But even still, my idea of perfection never rested in my looks or my outward appearance.

It rested in how I moved. I felt the need to be perfect in how I carried myself. I feared being seen as weak. I feared people sensing that being raised mostly by women had made me, as a Black man, prone to what some would call feminine qualities. I don’t want to dig too deep into that here, for fear of derailing the whole post, but it’s worth naming how it fed my sense of perfection. I felt that my father’s absence in my development had put me in a deficit. As an adult, I no longer believe I lacked anything, because other men stepped in and filled the role for me. Hold onto that word, though. Perfect. We are going to come back to it, because it explains more than I knew when I first started chasing it.

Here is the thing. Manhood, and Black manhood specifically, is a deeply contextual, experiential, and

spiritual thing. I say that knowing there are plenty of people who will read these words and ask, isn’t that true about everyone? Yes. But I am speaking specifically about what we see, feel, and carry from the intersections of our Black male identity. I wish our experiences were the same. I have always wanted to be able to say that. I just can’t.

And let me be plain about why I name it at all. I don’t set my identity as a Black man apart from white, Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic and Latinx, and Indigenous people because I want to, or because it excites me. I do it because we keep finding our presence, our issues, our identity, and our attitudes reduced to footnotes. And a footnote is what you write when the real story is understood to belong to somebody else.

So hear me. These words shouldn’t be received through a lens of defeat. They sit here to say, passionately, why we bear the weight of more than the moment. Living in the moment becomes a luxury I can’t afford, because I am always managing the weight of more than what is in front of me. Which leaves me with one question I have to answer every single day: who am I?

For some folks, that question got settled a long time ago. I wrestle with it in my mind more than most, and the reason is simple. My identity is never safe. It is seldom respected. And it is regularly challenged. Let me take those one at a time.

It is never safe. Our Blackness is rich with cultural heritage, flush with new possibility, a force that has shaped the vibrant life of our communities. In the little space we have been given, we have made it sacred. And yet, in a country that holds up its moral compass across the globe like a badge of honor, our Blackness is seen by American society as a stain. Not the kind of stain you find in finely crafted stained glass. A stain. Too complex for Oxi-clean. Too deep to be Resolved out of the carpet.

Now catch this, because it is the whole fight. James Cone spent his life insisting that God is not neutral in that fight, that God stands with the disinherited, and that what America calls a stain, heaven calls sacred, made in the image of the God who made us. Two verdicts on the same life. And I live in the daylight between them.

That gap does something to a person. I can’t tell you the exact moment it happened, but somewhere between grade school and college, I realized there was a difference between who I was and who my white friends were. It didn’t make me bitter at first. It made me conscious.

Woke.

Hyper- sensetive

Aware.

I don’t care what you call it, I just know that I started reading rooms.

Reading faces.

Noticing subtlties and processing way too much in my little mind

It’s the way a woman tightens her purse strap against her body when I walk by. The cashier who treats my forgotten wallet like a scheme. The teller who doubts the check is real. The parent who pulls their child a little closer while my friends and I laugh at some long-forgotten joke. That is a full-time job nobody applied for, and it runs in the background of every ordinary day. Howard Thurman had a phrase for it. Living with your back against the wall. Your body stays braced even when your mind is begging for rest. Start to see it yet? This is the ground my need to be perfect grew in.

It is seldom respected. Let’s be 100, this country purchased black bodies and then used them for free to build itself, and then basically told us to shut up and get over it. That same “get over it” shows up in phrases like “shut up and dribble,” and every time reparations enter the chat. We are expected to move on, when that was never the expectation placed on anybody else. Jewish people and the descendants of Holocaust survivors were not told to get over it. Indigenous nations, handed back scraps of land that was already theirs, were not told to get over it. Japanese Americans interned during World War II had their suffering acknowledged, with some form of remediation to showcase communal remorse, at the least. But for Black lives and Black communities, America runs a false flag operation, always arguing at the edges instead of the core.Who do we pay?Who is entitled?

Why do we owe them?

We can’t afford it?

Why should we pay for the sin’s of our father’s?

How about because you are still eating from them!

You want to know what respect would even sound like? It would sound like somebody finally saying it plainly:

We did it. We did you wrong. We used your bodies. We bred you like people breed livestock. We broke up your families on purpose, to break your minds. We wrote books that propped up our policies and pushed the lie that Black people were less than. We spread the fictions of our ancestors, the ones that cast you as biologically, psychologically, and spiritually inferior. We wrote laws to limit your progress, and much of what you live today is not your doing, but the degradation we systematized.

That confession would be the start of rolling back what I feel has been a wildly successful ghosting operation. And that is the part that messes with me the most, because a good ghosting will have you questioning your own senses. It has left me feeling, more than once, like I am sincerely crazy. But I know better. I am not making these feelings up. I am not overreacting.

It is regularly challenged. On top of all of that, our identity is put on trial in a single word, and that challenge alone can be triggering.

Nigger.

Nigga.

or the N-word.

And I know how fast that conversation collapses into a pedantic squabble. Who can say it?Which spelling? Which pronunciation? What context.

All of that is superfluous to me because its really about the weight of it, the texture of it, the venom stitched into it, that is why it keeps challenging me at my core. I don’t think I know rage, real rage, until I hear that word roll freely off the lips of somebody outside our community.

So let’s go back to the word I told you to hold. Perfect. For years I thought my need to be perfect was about discipline, about character, about not letting anybody down. I know now it was armor. When your identity is never safe, seldom respected, and regularly challenged, flawless starts to feel like the only way to stay alive. Perfection was never vanity. It was vigilance wearing a Sunday suit.

And here is where my mind does its best work. My mind tells me that this feeling, this anxiety, this frustration, is not on me. It is not mine alone to own. That is not me talking myself off a ledge. That is the same word a whole tradition has been speaking over the disinherited for generations. Thurman said keep your soul intact with your back against the wall. Cone said your life is sacred whether America ever agrees or not. So when my mind tells me I am not the crazy one, my mind is telling me the truth.

It’s this society I’m living in that has me feeling like I’m going crazy. But my mind knows better. My mind tells me so.

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