Chadwick Boseman just died. And these are my tears for him and everything else that has happened this year.
#RIPChadBoseman #BlackPanther #chadwickbosman #WakandaForever

I have had enough of 2020. I feel like I am stuck in some terrible intellectual purgatory. I don’t know what to say, what fight to have, what argument to make, or to whom to make that argument. I live among white people whom I love—white people who are well-read and

freedom-loving. White people who have not read Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative. White people who saw every Marvel movie that has come out since 2008, but skipped Black Panther because— well, because… I don’t know why they didn’t see that one. But if I were to speculate,

I would not come up with any good reasons, certainly not any that make excepting that movie any more forgivable than one’s reason for not having read Frederick Douglass. If Jefferson, Washington, Adams, et. al are America’s founding fathers, its founding sons, the intellectuals

who brought it back from the abyss of civil war, are on a very short list. One of them is Abraham Lincoln. The other is most assuredly Frederick Douglass. Put him on Mt. Rushmore with the other four. But I live among freedom-loving white people who don’t even know who he is. Sure

, they may know of him. But they don’t know him. And in my fifteen years as a teacher and thirty-eight years alive, I have most certainly learned and taught among teachers who have never taught him. And I do not mean to condemn any of the teachers who have meant so much to me

over the years. But I taught him alone last year. And I would have loved to share that experience with mentors and colleagues.

And then on the other hand, I was raised by black people whom I love who have never read the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation

Proclamation. And I must navigate a world of black intellectuals who either refuse to recognize or simply do not know the proper context in which those documents were written. Black people who will look at those documents and somehow deem them racist simply because they were

written by white men. They take American slavery and only intend to see it out of its full historical context. Yes, it was horrific. Yes, its legacy endures to this day (and I live among white people who don’t see this and black people who misunderstand it). The black people I

love and admire will not look at slavery as the complex issue it was, and they most certainly will not respect or acknowledge the white intellectuals who wrote against it, who were troubled by it, and who spent their entire lives writing doctrines to abolish it—let alone the

white people who literally fought and died to abolish it. And I’m not talking about white intellectuals who call themselves progressives today. No, those white people are hard at work trying to enslave everyone as fast as they can—even if they don’t know it (and I hope they

are merely ignorant because they are literally trying to burn the country to the ground with their “love”). I’m talking about the white intellectuals who are condemned for living at a time of slavery or even having slaves. Ridding America of slavery was an

intellectual battle that had to be fought, that took nearly 100 years of intellectual fighting. Like it or not, people had to discover the logic that made slavery evil. And white intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries did a lot of the heavy lifting in that discovery even

while Africans were enslaving more Black people—ARE STILL enslaving Black people to this day. White intellectuals had that fight before the blood was spilled so that the blood would not later be spilled in vain. And lately, it has been feeling like

it was.

I am stuck in some terrible purgatory in which I must explain to white people that black lives matter, and to black people that all lives matter. Because both sides are missing the point of the other. No, that’s not true. Both sides refuse to

hear the point of the other. So let me say this: Black lives matter! And it needs to be said because I know white people who cannot fathom black life from their bubbles. I’ve told white people the details of my black life and it shocks them. Every time. And I’m not just talking

about the racism I have experienced. I’m talking about my black life—my black experience living among impoverished black people, among black villains who do not care about other black people and among black people who were trying their damnedest to get away from black villains

while being held back by white police officers. Because believe it or not, police officers pull all black people over with the fear that any one of them might be a killer drug dealer. I don’t know a black person who hasn’t been anxious when pulled over by the police for

something as small as taillight or a seatbelt. And as much as I am a proponent of good police officers, I can never ignore or forget my own experiences of being pulled over and being accused of dealing drugs. Maybe that one cop in Maryland thought it suspicious that

a 22 year old black man would drive a Cadillac across state lines. Or maybe he was just an asshole to everyone that day. Either way, when he made me get out of the car, when he searched my trunk illegally, and when he scoffed at me when I explained that I had never even smoked

weed before, I was terrified. Terrified even though I had no drugs, my car was legal, and I had indeed never smoked weed before. I kept my head down and hoped he would just hurry up and let me get back in my car without any trouble. No free American should

feel that way around the police. Full stop.

And still the irony of that matter is that black people are being shot by the police because some officers are the kind of white people who are terrified of black people. I know the kind. Trust me. When I've walked down the street with

a mask or a hoodie, I've seen the alarm. I’ve seen the double-takes, the involuntary jerk movements. And if I've needed their assistance, I've seen the relief when they realize that I am well-spoken and mean them no harm, that relaxing of the jaw muscle right as they remind

themselves there’s probably nothing to be worried about. Probably. Because if Trayvon Martin were a white KID, I have a hard time thinking George Zimmerman would have looked twice at him, hoodie or otherwise. I make jokes about fearful white ladies clutching their purses when I

walk by. I don’t worry too much about it, and I am light-hearted when I say these jokes. Nevertheless, it is not lost on me that the jokes work when I say them. White and black people alike laugh when I say them. Because deep down, they get it. The best jokes work because

they have within them a little bit of the truth.

I am stuck in some terrible purgatory in which I must explain to black people that all lives matter because from a purely logical point, it is true that one cannot fight for any lives without fighting for all lives. Freedom goes

all ways or none; it is impossible to dole it out on a case by case or race by race basis. This is why “black power” and “white power” sound like the same words to people seeking to be rational about the issue. You can’t kill white power by seeking black power. And yes,

I get that black power is supposed to imply black love while white power has always been explicit in black hatred. And I understand the need to remind black children that they are beautiful and powerful in spite of the standards of beauty and power presented on television. But

"white power" and "black power" still sound the same. And if you talk to a white supremacist, they will not hesitate to tell you how much they love the white race. Furthermore, if you talk to the most pro-black people that I know, you won’t have to talk to them long before they

tell you how much they hate white people—even if it’s in jest. Just remember what I said about jokes.

I could give an entire lecture on the connection that today’s government institutions have to slavery, how racists used the prison system to enslave black people right after

emancipation, how the KKK led to Jim Crow and how many of those hooded fiends found their way into the police force where they use the shield to mask their hatred to this day. #blm #RacismInAmerica

I can talk about the failure of Reconstruction, how the intellectual legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass was all but dropped as soon as those men died. But I wouldn’t know who to give that lecture to. Because the black people I know are suspicious that Lincoln was

a closeted bigot in spite of his work as a lawyer and statesmen BEFORE he became president. And the white people I know haven’t even read Douglass’s work. They don’t know the man who rose from slavery to write as eloquently as any founding father. My God! Whatever

race you are, how have you not read that book? Or his speeches? The bravery to say what he said when he said it? And if you have read his work, how can you not see how important he is to American history? He was the second coming of Patrick Henry. Only, Patrick Henry was

pro-slavery. I've known and had great history teachers who have not read Douglass's work. And that’s what black people ought to mean by white privilege: that white people can go their entire lives thinking themselves intellectuals and freedom-loving without ever knowing or

reading about the black men and women who wrote pages and pages about the freedom they had to claw for and sometimes die without. Yet, black people would have died if not for those black intellectuals, and black intellectuals today dare not live an unexamined life in which they

haven’t read those works.

I am in some terrible purgatory because Chadwick Boseman just died. And I know white people who probably don’t even know who he is, what he meant to black people, and what he should mean to all Americans.

Not just because he so eloquently portrayed some of the most important people in America’s history—from Thurgood Marshall to Jackie Robinson, roles that would be enough on their own merit. But then he went and portrayed a superhero!

A black superhero like white Superman with all of the same poise and dignity and morality. And in a Disney movie that somehow managed to be as great or greater than the other Marvel movies WHILE ALSO correctly and eloquently presenting the arguments of Frederick Douglass,

W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T Washington, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X all at the same time. And I live among white people who have not only failed to read any of the work by those intellectuals, but also neglected to see the movie, even though they’ve read Adams, Jefferson,

Franklin, and Locke AND probably saw even the subpar Marvel movies. And I was raised by black people whom I love and who think we ought to tear down the statues of Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Locke, the very men whose intellectual work made

freedom possible. Before them, everyone was the slave of the king, the church, or the state. Or the TRIBE. The words of white intellectuals introduce the world to the concept of freedom. The words of Frederick Douglass ensured that those words were applied to all races.

I am in some terrible purgatory because T’Challa just died. And I know black parents whose children will cry when they break the news to them. I hope some white children wil cry, too. Hell, I’m crying. And I don’t even know whose shoulder to cry on.
#ripchadwickboseman