The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.
– James Baldwin
TV in front of me. Lights off, early summer. Fading light. Lilac and cut grass…
The plain-spoken audacity of the title had sucked me in originally, but the man himself — James Baldwin — had kept me there, transfixed, for those ninety-or-so minutes that I watched the documentary I Am Not Your Negro.
Though it was (embarrassingly) my first time ever being exposed to him it only took a few minutes to realize the genius that I had stumbled upon. By the film’s end, I ached at the words he had written and felt both inspired and confused by the truths I had heard him tell.
I remember feeling physically shaken by it all. At one point, I began to feel wetness at the edges of my eyes. Then the crying became overshadowed by something else, an emotion I couldn’t quite place. At first, I almost didn’t recognize it for what it was. It felt familiar, but only in the way that all old, faded family memories seem familiar. Something akin to “hazy-if-recognizable.”
I began to grind my jaw, forced my eyes shut as hard as I could. I stayed there still, in quiet, furious repose, for an unknown amount of time, thinking only about James and Malcolm and Martin and all the others and all that they had fought for, and their deaths, and that it had come to this — our current culture.
I was fucking devastated.
When I finally opened my eyes blood rushed, and tiny stars filled my vision. I hadn’t realized how angry I had become without even knowing it. Actual anger. Not frustration or helplessness or betrayal. Just pure, unadulterated rage.
As background, I’m no stranger to emotional meltdowns. I’m a military veteran who deals with PTSD. Sometimes shit happens and I end up in a human puddle in the shower in the morning or driving over the West Seattle Bridge bawling my eyes out as I death-grip the steering wheel. Sometimes worse shit happens. If I’m honest though, rarely do I feel real rage.
Apparently, James had gotten his point across.
As I sat in front of the TV, now stopped and silent at the end of the documentary, I let my feelings wash over me, giving myself time to process. My hands took a while to relax, and I had to rub the tension out of the muscles in my forearms. I took a long, controlled inhale, let out one last, deep sigh. Rubbed my eyes and hoped for clarity. And that is exactly when it happened.
That’s when I felt helpless for the first time that I can remember in my entire adult life. Truly helpless. Not just being stuck or confused. I’d been to those places many times before. This feeling was different, like being trapped or crushed in a vice, unable to escape no matter what I did. Like choking on the finest dust or drowning in the wettest water.
See, it’s not that I hadn’t realized that America is a country with both a deep and abiding love affair with racism – I have a degree in history and another where history was the focus. I am intimately acquainted with the trials and tribulations of both US foreign and domestic policy toward those non-white and/or non-European.
What I didn’t understand until that evening—something I could have never properly understood in the first place—was the true depth of the concept that racism in America was “institutionalized.” That it was systemic or baked into the system—and with both malice and forethought in mind—was new to me and it shocked and horrified me.
Yes, of course, I know that there have always been bad actors and misguided belief systems, but the idea that my country, my leaders had actively conspired over centuries to institutionalize racism and seek both the demise and oppression of people of color was a lot to take in. And it made me feel helpless to do anything about it.
Call me naïve, but I simply didn’t know how bad things truly were.
Now, even in post-truth 2023, institutional racism is as common an understanding in most circles as the sky being blue or water being wet. Hell, maybe the concept was as common in 2017 when I first watched I Am Not Your Negro and my skin color, education, and economic background had given me just enough privilege to not have to run smack into it like a freeway head-on. I’m not sure. But that was my catharsis. My becoming. What had been learned that night could never be unlearned.
—
Holy shit, did I really spend seven years in the military for this?
That was one of my first thoughts when I began to analyze my anger at the system that had produced and perpetuated the racist bent of this modern United States. The more I thought about the mechanisms of oppression that had been put in place to fully achieve the goal of institutionalized racism, the more I could feel my stomach turn and my blood boil. The scope and breadth of this thing was fucking incalculable. James was totally right; I knew it then.
Worse yet, in terms of mechanisms of oppression, the federal government had classically been one of the worst and most pervasive, to say nothing of state or local authorities, and I had spent over 17 years in one federal job or another.
Not that my positions had any direct role in furthering institutional racism per se, but in this writer’s opinion, being obliviously adjacent to the machine is eerily close to being complicit in its workings.
Objectively, I’m sure there are very few if any workaday federal employees who actively contribute to the U.S.’s systemic racism problem in any way. Classically, that job has been carried out by a cabinet-level position of some type, typically the Department Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Despite that, the machine still requires ever more disparate and adjacent pieces, parts, and participants to function, and self-reflection on our place in those workings can often awaken us to other, greater understandings such as the desire to help change the system itself.
Know that we are adjacent to the machine and never forget it.
I’m fairly sure that’s the only way to beat it.
—
At some point I found myself reclining on the couch, muscles finally relaxing, fight gone out of me. The sun had gone down a while back and even the last vestiges of blue and violet had given way to the wan orange of a sodium lamp somewhere down the street. My cat purred, bunted my chin with his head.
A gust of wind through the front windows. Dancing curtains and desert sage.
It took a long time that evening to process and come to terms with my very new, very complicated feelings about the things I had just seen and heard. My entire view of the United States had been turned on its head, yet again. And this, just when I thought I had come to terms with most of the other heinous, evil shit in my country’s history.
I remember the roughly first time it happened—the first time I questioned my country’s motives. It was around the time I first saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004, three years into a six-year enlistment and not that long after we’d just sent U.S. forces into Iraq under false pretenses. Next was in college when I learned the true story about westward expansion and studied Native American history more extensively. And then when I studied Vietnam. And Kent State. And learned about Stonewall. And the War on Drugs. Trickle-down economics. WMD’s in Iraq. Ad infinitum…
It wasn’t the first time I’d questioned things. Around the age of 9 or 10, my mother gave me a shirt that read “question authority” in large, bold font. She had leaned in and told me something along the lines of “Question everything, okay, Buddy?” From then on, questioning things became a core piece of my persona that I would end up taking with me everywhere in my life, to the grave annoyance of both my military superiors and erstwhile lovers.
The questioning I was doing on that night, however, seemed more serious. Existential and grim, with true repercussions. I wasn’t questioning “everything” in some abstract, cosmic sense, I was questioning some very serious, very tangible things that had real-world consequences, both for myself and others.
This was my country. The soil I’d been born on, the mountains I’d grown up in, and the places that I loved. And it was tainted in so many ways, maybe in every way, its manifest destiny anointed in centuries of blood and pain.
Just as we had stolen uncounted masses from the shores of Africa, so we then pilfered our entire country through trickery and genocide from the Native Americans.
And after all that, our contemporary government actively works to disenfranchise both those who built this nation and those from whom they stole it.
Read that sentence again.
—
That night was one of the first nights that I had ever thought about leaving the United States permanently. I had traveled and explored, but I had always thought of the United States as my home, especially after the rah-rah post-9/11 bullshit propaganda of the military. Consequently, I had always made my way back here from wherever ended up in the world. When I was at the South Pole in Antarctica, as far as I could possibly be away from where I was born, I couldn’t wait to get back to Washington State. I literally counted down the days. That held true for other places I’d been, too.
But after hearing Baldwin’s words, I knew that there might come a time when I would need to abandon the only place I had ever known of as home. The thought of being homeless in that sense was terrifying. And while nothing was happening in the moment, the possibility of a future where the U.S. was simply too fucked up for me to condone staying here haunted me, as it continues to do to this day.
I would later come to learn that Baldwin had similar sentiments, though for different reasons when he left the country for France because he doubted his ability to “survive the fury of the color problem here.”
At that point, in that moment, after everything I’d just come to grips with, staying here and doing anything to combat the juggernaut of racism in America felt like a zero-sum game. An unwinnable, impossible task when pitted against the hidden multitudes that controlled the levers of power. How on earth could I have any type of impact against such a tenacious, pervasive foe?
Then another revelation hit me. I felt this way after one film…
People of color live this their entire lives.
Me, I’m white and assigned male at birth, in the United States no less. Let’s not pretend—one documentary isn’t shit. It merely introduced me to the daily struggle that all people of color have had to face and will continue to face, in this country, for their entire lives.
Part of my subconscious reminded me that we had grown up “farm poor”: government cheese, food banks, and an old, green Coleman camp stove to cook when we couldn’t pay for power. We’d moved a lot, scraped by, and even ended up in subsidized housing and at one point renting a house on a local reservation near Seattle.
Then that part of my mind drifted to how my experience growing up compared to those with less privilege. I did a thought exercise which I’ve done many times since, trying to put myself in their place as best I could. What I felt was the sting of unbroken generational traumas and unkept promises, both by society and government, whose duty it is to lift those of less privilege up. I felt the sudden realization that no matter how shitty my childhood was or how poor we’d been, there were things I never had to contend with simply because I was white.
I’ve never been and never will be denied a mortgage or college entrance or a job because of the color of my skin.
I will never be denied a job because my name sounds “ethnic,” or because of the way I talk or the style of my hair.
I will never be the focus of hate for being white, and I will never be unfairly targeted, profiled, or murdered without recourse by law enforcement.
Again, ad infinitum.
Even as an out and open member of the queer community, my worst experiences throughout my life lack the dangers faced every day by queers of color. Being at the intersection of racial, sexual, and gender minorities, rates of discrimination and violence committed against queers who are also people of color are consistently higher than those of their white, straight, cisgender counterparts.
All of those things happen in tragic, sickening disproportion to people of color in America, every single day. Not in some backwater developing nation with a theocratic dictatorship half a world away.
America. Every day. The country I was born in and that I consider my home.
This place sure has one hell of a body count…
—
Since I watched I Am Not Your Negro in 2017, I like many Americans, have grown far more aware of the concepts of both privilege and institutionalized racism. Where I was devastated like a stupid child to realize that pre-meditated, institutionalized racism was the rule, rather than the exception, in the United States then, I am begrudgingly comfortable in my phobia of it now. Not comfortable with it, but rather comfortable with my phobia of it.
Whereas I felt an overwhelming helplessness and rage at my ignorance and inability to simply wave some magic privilege wand and grant everybody instant equity then, I have since been brought back to reality, heartened by national moments such as the George Floyd protests and movements such as Black Lives Matter.
I see these things being shotgun-blasted into the public consciousness, forcing us to deal with the elephant in the room. Forcing the concepts and making people talk about them. Making people uncomfortable and making them think. And I like it. Things are happening. Not fast enough, but they’re still happening.
To be clear, I’m no activist. I’ve held a few signs and read a few books. At best, I’m an overeducated critic and occasional nihilist with political leanings and a big mouth. Writing is about all I’ve got to offer.
But I’m not a sucker, either…
I know wrong, bad, or evil when I see them, and I know when things need to change, despite not always knowing how to change them. And while some of the more recent national discussions and movements have made me feel a tad bit less helpless, I still live in a miasma of uncertainty regarding our ultimate ability to truly change the course of a country that has consistently made the active decision to choose racism and oppression over inclusion and freedom.
Right now, I still see wrong, bad, and evil, and I know that we’ve still got a long way to go, regardless of how far we’ve already come.
Despite that uncertainty, Baldwin’s words and his struggle echo constantly in my mind nowadays, leaving me feeling no less angry, but also at the same time validated, empathetic.
I wasn’t crazy; there are others sickened by this also. I know that while I might be a cog in the machine, I’m not the only one. That we’re all cogs in our own way, and that others are also ravenous for more, for better – and that they want to break and cripple the machine, just like me.
Because the only way to change the machine is to know that we are always adjacent to it.