I recall one pathetic incident many years ago in Berlin while in the flat of an ex-girlfriend, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, well-read, well-fed, well-traveled, quite sophisticated and “open-minded.” When I, in her bedroom and in the throes of passion, naively asked my girlfriend what was on her mind, she said, staring right at me, smiling, “you. You look like a little Black monster.”
Uhm — yeah.
I was standing there in the fucking nude, erect penis in hand and looking like a fool. But it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to me. There was always the one constant: I wasn’t being loved for my sterling personality, but for some particular fantasy these women were projecting onto me. The further I strayed from this fantasy in their minds, the further each relationship deteriorated.
In many other instances, the very hope of obtaining “Love” from other women was quashed from the moment they laid eyes on me and saw that — even though I MAY have been “well hung” (I guess, as a writer once suggested, that its color was its size) — I still lacked the other attributes that made up a gold old fashioned Black Buck. I hadn’t been to jail, I didn’t talk with “that accent,” I wasn’t tall enough, I wasn’t dark enough (or light enough) — something was always wrong with me; there was always some attribute that left me on the sidewalks with my hat in my hands and the scornful laughter of these respective women ringing in my ears. Only much later have I come to realize that, being typically recalcitrant, critical-minded and hopelessly irascible, I was completely incapable of playing out my socially designated role of “Negro.”
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I can’t be a Negro — I just can’t. I’m African American. To me, acting like a “Negro” is all so shoddy, so dishonest, so silly and degrading. I know that it’s kept me out of jobs, out of relationships. And for this implicit rejection of the Negro role I’ve been ironically typecast as something worse: a sell-out, a “faggot,” an Uncle Tom, an object worthy of scorn and ridicule.
It made me a laughingstock even here in Berlin, where far, far too many Black Berliners (many of them Americans) would rather be loved for being a Negro (or to be more precise, pantomiming, however subconsciously, a Negro) than to be hated and rejected for simply being themselves. But many of you might ask, why the hell are you living in Berlin to begin with?
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Fourteen years ago, I fled America because I did not feel like living every second of my life with a target on my back. But to be honest I always had the feeling that in America, my life was so insignificant that even the cops and hoods felt that it wasn’t worth taking. In the street, outside the wretched classroom, or the suffocating offices or stinking dishrooms where I worked, I was beyond invisible — up to the point, of course, where I’d sit my ass down on a Metrorail in Washington, D.C. and watch, out the corner of my eye, some hyper-paranoid white man casually snatching his bag away from me. It happened to me so often that I’d stop paying attention to it, and if I did (like, for instance, in Athens, Greece, or Berlin, Germany) it was merely to say, sarcastically, “I don’t need your shit, asshole, I make more money than you do.”
That some of these reverse purse-snatchers were or are black doesn’t surprise me, either. In his Autobiography, Malcolm X spoke of a token black receptionist hired as a result of a labor shortage during World War Two. This token Black female, Malcolm noted, had a withering contempt for other African Americans. It is a common thing, and not only in the United States. Richard Wright remarked upon this phenomenon in his autobiography Black Boy when he wrote,
“I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure.”
This passage has been often quoted as reflective of “self-hatred” on the part of Richard Wright. Whether or not such a thing is true — Margaret Walker, author of Jubilee, for her part claimed that Wright “loved white” — is irrelevant. Wright spoke the truth about ourselves and our country that to this day no one wishes to confront: as Black people, we simply don’t take each other seriously.
And there is a specific reason for that. Enter W.E.B. DuBois and his famous 1897 essay “Strivings of the Negro People,” in which he writes of a white man telling him, in so many words, “What does it feel like to be a problem?” Myself, personally, I never felt as if the problem in this country was I, myself, but those obsessively narrow minds that simply cannot accept the fact that I, and others like me, have a basic right to exist without paternalism, without condescension, without having to explain why I exist at all — let alone being in your country, or your park, your restaurant, in your bank, trying to withdraw some money.
If Officer Darren Wilson is to be believed, he saw “a demon” when he chanced upon Michael Brown and proceeded to kill him. Maybe Michael Brown, Jr. was an obnoxious bully, but to be brutally honest the “demon” Officer Wilson really saw (and what ultimately got him acquitted) was Mr. Brown’s face, not his eyes, not his character. It was an African face. To the white racist public aware of Michael Brown, his being black was really the worst part of it — to the extent that his wearing marijuana socks was, somehow, morally speaking, far more unacceptable than James Holmes striding into a movie theater with heavy ammunition and shooting up dozens of people on a whim. We who are white can’t understand Trayvon Martin, Stephan Clark, Breyonna Taylor, George Floyd, or any of these other “Negroes.” As we understand, they were all involved in a lot of dirty, shady business. That’s just how “those people” are. We know George Floyd was knee-deep in crime, a stereotypical black buck, rapper and porn actor — in short, nobody. Breyonna Taylor was involved in drug trafficking as well. Trayvon Martin sounds like he was psychopathic. All of which seems about “black,” doesn’t it? Who commits most of the real crimes in America?
But then again, we can’t get our little heads around a guy like Chris Watts. Why on earth would such a “normal” (said by implication) guy like Mr. Watts would stab his pregnant wife to death to be with his mistress? This simply isn’t something “we good, normal, hard-working white Americans” do. Something horribly must have happened to the guy, right? What was it? What got into his head to do such a thing? Liberalism? Marxism? Radical Islam? Rap music?
Dozens of women sent their heart-felt “condolences” (panties, chocolates and love-letters) to Chris Watts. Dylan Roof was allowed a little meal (by the cops) at Burger King after slaughtering nine “niggers” in a Charleston church. A rag-tag mob of over-privileged, wealthy white Americans (almost none of them were poor) invaded the Capitol at the behest of their President, Donald Trump, on January 6, 2021, smashed out windows, smeared shit on the walls, smoked weed (for which black youth regularly get arrested for elsewhere in the US) stole Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, and threatened to hang Mike Pence, among other things. This murderous whiteness remains somehow less threatening than a black man sitting in a library, reading a book; or walking through the woods bird watching; or sitting in her car, eating a sandwich. In a sane society all of this would sound like cartoonish hyperbole. Sadly, it isn’t. The police handling of the insurrectionists, lunatics who wished to literally overthrow the U.S. Government, was extremely tame compared to the heavy handed tactics they used against the rioters at the George Floyd protests of June, 2020.
Yet let’s stop here. Talking about the rampant and blatant Negrophobia of the center-right and far-right is easier than shooting fish in barrels. We get into murkier waters when we attempt to examine just how deep this national Negrophobia runs in every single individual who lives in the United States — including its African American citizens, but particularly among those of us who consider ourselves “friends” of the African American. I brought up the late Michael Brown as an example because the average non-Black American really can’t distinguish between Michael and me. The average American of any race (frankly speaking) cannot really distinguish between me, Michael Brown, James Brown, Michael Jackson, and that late and unlamented YouTuber who called himself Michael David Carroll.
Well, he is lamented in some quarters — in the so-called Black “Manosphere” — for his supposed “ruthless honesty” concerning what he called, with scathing contempt, the “Afro-American Negro” or in his more heated moments, “savage monkeys.” He had a fathomless contempt for the Black lumpenproletariat, for so-called “ratchet” behavior, for out-of-wedlock births, for what he called “Blackistan,” a monstrosity that emerged (as he claimed) from between the legs of unwed, fat, drunken, drug-added “baby mommas.”
But these attributes of the Black lumpenproletariat can be found worldwide, in every nation and every culture. If one doubts this statement one need only book a flight to Glasgow and go to its inner cities. Or better yet, come to Germany, preferably to Bremen or Berlin’s Neukolln, and one can see similar disasters. Wherever there is poverty and oppression there is an equivalent of George Floyd: that fact alone explains why so much of the world exploded the way it did. The mistake that David Carroll made was attributing the deranged and dissolute behavior of African American lumpens in Detroit, Baltimore or Philadelphia to that of an entire race. This is the same mistake that not only the Ku Klux Klan makes, or even well-meaning center-right and center-left liberals make, but even so-called Marxists of color; it’s just that the further one pushes left of the political spectrum, one is more inclined to find people who can actually think, rather than react impulsively to the skin color of the oppressed. But even so very often the thinking goes awry when applied to African Americans because there is something fundamentally very, very wrong about how Blacks are perceived in contemporary world society.
When white and Black Marxists attempt to find something meaningful and positive and “empowering” in Cardi B shaking her fake fat rear end to the strains of W.A.P., something is definitely askew. When dreadlocked white “radicals” nod their approval to misguided BLM protesters shaking their fat rear ends at the police, we who are black, and hip to the jive bullshit (as opposed to “woke,” the square’s answer to “hip”) can merely shake our heads and say, rather hopelessly, that they just don’t get it. And they don’t.
It gets still murkier and more insidious the further you go down the liberal-left rabbit hole of Negro-worship. As a thinking black person it makes you suspicious of everyone. For my money I do not recall anything from BLM but snobbery and, ironically enough, hostility. While marching with Black Lives Matter in Berlin in 2016, I felt from them a palpable contempt towards ordinary, everyday black people, particularly if they were male; and in recent years, exposures of the nefarious lifestyles and greed of far too many of them has made it clear what BLM’s intentions really were: anything but liberation for the people they claimed to be championing.
And then one begins to question why on earth BLM was so eager to champion men like Michael Brown. We all know Michael Brown did not deserve to be shot over a box of Swisher Sweets, anymore than Latasha Harlins deserved to die over a can of cheap orange juice. Was he championed because he was killed by the cops, or because his thuggish scowl and marijuana socks were — to those who call themselves left-leaning — emblematic of an “authentic” blackness?
All of which naturally begs the question: what is “authentic blackness?”
It’s not that this issue had not been tackled before: one need only reread Melville’s Benito Cereno, even today, to shut up this whole issue as to how “real” our fantasies are concerning Africans. It was published in 1855, one year before Bleeding Kansas and four before the uprising at Harper’s Ferry…and yet, since its publication the Negrophilic and Negrophobic fantasies of this country’s culture — two wings of the same dirty old bird — just keep swirling all around us. That’s because we won’t let these fantasies go. Why won’t we let them go?
Because we hate The Negro.
And why do we hate him? Because, paradoxically, we also love him. We love him because, quite frankly, we created him; he’s our little child.