Punch Me Up to the Gods

Black boys don't get a long boyhood. It ends where white fear begins, brought on by deepening voices, broadening backs, and coarsening hair in new places beneath our clothing. Then there's our skin, which provides little middle ground.

One of the reasons I took this trip is to prove to myself that I am allowed to take up space in the world. I used to believe that the space I occupied was conditional. That I had to please anyone and everyone around me in order to exist because I had made the horrible mistake of being different.

I have only recently begun to factor my mental health into the act of living.

There is no thing on earth more dangerous than a man who refuses to accept that he is carrying all of these loads, because it then becomes up to everyone else to carry them for him in one way or another. Other people have to pay the price for his insecurities. If my father could not be the “man of the house,” he didn’t seem to want to be anything at all.

My Heart [...] has been full of love for humanity; the only difference now is that I'm including myself in the process.

So many white people in America are "afraid for their lives" all the time. Far too many of them seem to prefer being white to being human.

It is only through your own lived experience that you will learn that living on the outside of 'normal' provides the perfect view for spotting insecure and flimsy principles camouflaging themselves as leadership or righteousness.

When I was a kid, I thought that the key to being a Black man was to learn how to properly lean on things to look cool. What I didn’t know at the time is that what Black men lean on the most, whether we want to admit it or not, is Black women.

He was the exact opposite of the Black boys who gave me hell every day. He was sensitive. I wanted Alex and I wanted to be Alex.

I wondered if Blackness was responsible for inferiority or if God just made those who were inferior Black.

He “play punched” me to toughen me up—​blows to the side of my head or in the arm that were so hard that I knew somewhere deep down inside that he really didn’t like me at all.

Black life in America doesn’t seem to allow for it. As a race, we are often admired for how “strong” we are and for how much we have endured. The truth is that we are no stronger than anyone else. We have endured, but we are only human. It is the expectation of strength, and the constant requirement to summon it, fake it, or die, that is erosive and leads to our emotional undoing.

I have given up on the idea that there is any place in this country that would be any different.

I hated him in that way we sometimes learn early to hate ourselves when we’re different.

My father back then believed in beating Black boys the way Black boys are supposed to be beaten. For our own good, he would say. Meant to toughen us up for a world where white people feed off our pain and to teach us that we cannot give them the satisfaction. Any Black boy who did not signify how manly he was at all times deserved to be punched back up to God to be remade, reshaped.

I think about my father and the clarity that comes with age tells me that he must have suffered... He was anxious. He was lonely. And he was insecure. There is no thing on earth more dangerous than a man who refuses to accept he is carrying all of these loads, because it then becomes up to everyone else to carry them for him in one way or another.

My second baby was a girl. Cutest thing you ever did see. He was happy with a girl. His first born. He liked havin’ a girl. He fell in love with her and played with her and praised her every move. Seem to me that men only happy with the female sex when we just girls. They want us to stay girls because they don’t like grown women.

She drops her pants and steps out of them and toward me in one motion. We kiss and I wrap my arms around her. I am fascinated by her breasts against my chest. I am fascinated by how soft she is all over. I am fascinated by how small she is. But all I am is fascinated.

This could not stand. And now I was being taken to go fuck “some girl” to prove that Corey had not been hanging out with a sissy. I was to prove that I was not an insult to my race and my gender.

I took his disguised ass-whuppin’s almost every day, believing that, one day, he would deliver the one punch that might change me.

Stop feeling fear and pain. Tuan’s father is telling me to tuck it away somewhere where no one can see it. To be ashamed of it. It’s the age-old conundrum. Black boys have to be tough but, in doing so, we must also sacrifice our sensitivity, our humanity. I can feel his urgency and know that my body has done something wrong.

It isn’t as if they don’t have reasons in America to be afraid for their Black children.

I knew immediately that cocaine would be a mainstay in my life.

Expectations are useless when you're surrounded on all sides by human nature.