Race in the US: What if your identity was a lie?Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2015-08-24 18:50Z by Steven |
Race in the US: What if your identity was a lie?
Al Jazeera Magazine
2015-08-21
John Metta
“There are no qualifiers to my blackness, and I will never again be Not Black Enough. I am a black man, and I am angry.”
My father’s anger was a storm.
Like many other boys, I was carefree and careless with a thoughtlessness that bordered on stupidity. The world revolved around my desire to laugh and run in a bubble of fun and I rarely noticed the wake of catastrophe that cast out behind me. But I was always aware of my father watching me, and I was aware of the storm.
He was a giant of a man, with a voice like thunder in the distance. I was a butterfly, small and frightened, observing the horizon of his brow, watching to see if the storm clouds were coming near, waiting for the winds to blow in my direction.
Surprisingly, despite my raucous behaviour, they very rarely did.
There was a deep anger in my father, but that storm ravaged other lands. Most often, my delicate wings felt only his whisper. But the whisper of my father was still a very powerful thing.
Each of my siblings have their stories about these whispers, about the times my father sat them down to have A Talk – a proper noun that is capitalised in our childhood memories the way A Beating is for some children. A Talk was a gruelling ordeal of mental torture where your mind felt like a balloon filled with too much water.
I, the only son of his six children (and his least intelligent child by far), was often caught off guard by A Talk…
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