Preface:
Race isn’t a real thing. The system and larger cultural zeitgeist don’t actually care about your ancestry, the .1% of genetics that distinguish you (and the smaller portion of that we identify as race), or personal peculiarities caused by your biology. The culture and system do, however, pretend to, and, in some cases, even believe they do. But the entire construct has been modular and transmutable since its creation. It isn’t real.
Race operates, though, and has operated. It has mauled and maimed, exalted, exoticized, defined, damned. As a consequence, it’s hard to say it isn’t real, and hurts some people when you do.
Everywhere race is discussed or appears as either a categorical assignment or an operator in the rest of this essay, please employ the mental gymnastics required to hold it as a thing that exists and is, and a thing that definitely does not and is not, simultaneously.
Please also forgive me in advance; I know at the core level that race isn’t a real thing but I can feel its implanted tentacles work and writhe within me, can see the ways in which it and its ties to my socio-economic origin and trajectory dominate some large portion of my personal narrative and actual fate, and live in a closeted space caused in some part by that origin, narrative, fate. There are walls and muteness and isolation that create a sort of vacuum. Race and its impacts are very personal, there is no universal monolith, but on the chance occasions me and other melanin-ful males actually pause and talk to each other about the subject, it becomes painfully clear that there are enduring themes that maybe I can share for a change. I make no claim that the themes that follow are the full tale of my pretend race or that they come from any sort of mind of greatness.
But this is the experience of some people labeled black. I’ll be calling us niggers from here on. Y’all know why.
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Part 1: Definition of the yin-yang Nigger archetypes:
Tonight, I bought a piece of art, an acrylic painting on canvas. In the foreground of the painting is a minstrel-esque black man with big, red lips, painted somewhere between tribal, surrealist, and Stuckist styles. He stands in front of a washed out, almost imperceptible American flag. His right arm bears acronyms of various accolades and organizations. His left arm is raised in the air more in suffering than power, and it’s covered in blood. Below him is barbed wire, a solitary confinement cell, and an inverted exit – basically “the Stranger Things upside down” version of that promise.
There are also the words “Success” and “Freedom” on opposing roads to one another in the sentiment that “you don’t get them both.”
The artist looks very much like a smaller version of my most ferocious cousin. Braids peeking out from underneath a doo-rag or hat. Neck tattoos. Thin and what I’ve heard called yellow or olive in skin tone though I don’t see either of those colors in the tone.
We spoke starting with the art; what each component means for each of us, first in basic terms but coming to the same narrative on the limitations of permissible black male experience, on being trapped within a skin and in a social construct overlapping that skin, on the pressure and consequence of being a house and field nigger at the same time. Both biracial, we discussed the strangeness of a white family and a black family, as well as an urban culture we’re simultaneously too white and too black to participate in and how that somehow translated to being accepted by leagues of “Hispanics” which, from a melting pot heritage perspective makes a busted sort of sense.
We discussed the strangeness of trying to find some purchase on just being while also finding purchase on surviving and how both of those seem to entail either destruction, self-destruction, or phasing into invisibility and obsolescence. We both pointed to the barbed wire at the same time.
It’s an interesting thing – he definitely cannot look like it but he is the son of a college professor dad and a suburban, not terrible upbringing. He’s also spent time in jail, though not convicted of anything. He strikes me as more innocent than not, but you probably wouldn’t guess that if you saw him. If I put on a suit, maybe shave and take out my piercings, and you don’t look too deeply into my eyes, I look perfectly at home in a boardroom in any progressive-leaning city center. I’ve never spent any time in legal trouble. My language use is an invisibility cloak. I come from extreme poverty, childhood neglect, drug addiction, and violent hell.
With some external changes, we could probably switch cultural costumes; we don’t, however, think much of the delta between our upbringings, appearances, and current experiences. We agree easily when I say “like you’ve painted, none of that shit really matters because you either carry the schism of the whole narrative with you or get shot by a cop when you walk outside no matter your origin or what you look like.”
The modern forms of the twin modes form themselves for us:
| Field Nigger | House Nigger |
| Style matches the urban black stereotype and scares (or entices) white people | Code switches so that individual style matches the environment as necessary. Specifically doesn’t scare white people. Not terribly enticing either, not “hip.” |
| Not, or doesn’t seem, economically successful | Some level of relative economic success; “has “moved on up” |
| Angry, maybe seems visibly so – the angry black man stereotype (Can look professional or religious if meets this stereotype enough) | Magical negro stereotype; friendly and placid or, at least, willing to repeatedly engage with others in an academic discussion of “the problem” with an intent to allow the engaged an exit from it/non-guilt |
| Defined as actually black | Defined as white, white-adjacent, wanting to be white, forgetting where they came from, or not actually black |
| Has a reinforced cultural value around toughness, holding ground, and not being disrespected and there’s some probably justified concern that they might actually hurt you or self-destruct about this Read in a typical heroic light – willing to fight for freedom or endure the bottom for honor. Resistance Some weird tie to Appalachian, LatinX immigrant, wild west cultures | Has a reinforced cultural value around toughness, holding ground, and not being disrespected but prioritizes social cohesion and mobility as strategies for address Read in a typical negative light – sells out to be successful. Wisdom. Some weird tie to 1950 suburban, Asian immigrant cultures |
| Fragile egos tied to a strong sense of needing to stand up for that ego Externalizes the frustration and the pain to self-detriment or stasis | Muted egos, whether fragile or not, tied to a sense of needing the body to survive or escape Internalizes the frustration and the pain to greater social mobility and gain Often lonesome, introverted pain symptoms |
Neither of these terms are derogatory or heroic, in my mind. They have been portrayed as both, by all races in this country, but especially by black people who oscillate every half-generation between the two as we scrape to figure out how to continue to survive this set up. In my mind, that’s all they represent – a survival strategy in a game of Candy Land or Snakes and Ladders i.e. a game controlled not actually by player action that gives the illusion of some control.
I don’t really know what its like to be born a house nigger kid except for what I hear about it. I have to say that most of the black males that will talk with me about race are house nigger kids. We’ll come back to it, but one of the endemic faults of being a field nigger is refusing to talk about how things feel, having a full suite of feelings at all, or admit the helplessness of the thing. One thing that is commonly repeated among house nigger kids of house nigger parents is just how much their professor, lawyer, doctor dads bring up that they are still tough, will still fight, are still not things to be trifled with.
This is so endemic to the house nigger experience that Sam Jackson leans into it in Django and there are YouTube videos of black professionals discussing the idea but still somehow trying to convey their toughness in the discussion: https://youtu.be/lOKiKZeYZbU
Meanwhile, every field nigger thinks everyone they identify as a house nigger is “sweet”, which in this context means a pushover who is easily exploited.
Having been born a field nigger among field niggers, I observed this judgment often. I’d have to say I exploited it. What we field niggers glorified, though, was bizarre, especially relative to what we said we wanted – escape, success, respect, peace. For people who so thoroughly stated they wanted to “break out of the game” and relax somewhere with a respectful partner and friends, we much too easily plunged headlong into war and prison and avoided the means of American dream style success. We also insisted on passing trauma around to, or at least mandating it for, the people around us.
The first symptom of the dissonance starts to present itself without much analysis: born a house nigger? Follow the American prescription, know you might get lynched anyway, and pretend or really believe you’re physically tough, while secretly prioritizing emotional intelligence, your minstrel show, a cockroach’s survivability and the peace of your own plot of sharecropped land. Born a field nigger? Talk ad infinitum about being your own thing and breaking out of the path designed for you but, per too strong sense of honor and the belief that toughness is the highest virtue, routinely plunge yourself into the system you’re wanting to break from and follow only a few low percentage options of escape that might allow you to financially prosper while keeping your stifling hood dude persona and honor. This last bit is especially stupid when millionaire poets called rappers wind up in legal trouble or dead for gun and violence charges or overdoses.
The strangest thing is, though, that both the house nigger and the field nigger are aware of this disconnect. Except that I don’t think it’s strange – both simply can’t do anything to grapple with it because actually grappling with it would require checking the facts and trying to problem solve those, and the facts here mean admitting weakness, a cardinal sin in the black community. Both the house nigger and field nigger are slaves, and neither being master’s favorite or king mandingo save you from slavery. These personas exist inside of slavery. You need slavery to be the you that you have been forced to, then chosen, to be.
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Part 2: The Runaway
There’s an archetype no one ever talks about much when it comes to house and field niggers. It’s the runaway slave. Every now and again you get a nigger who recognizes completely that he ought not be one and no longer wants to be and tries to flee to do something about it. I think it’s logical that nobody ever talks about these people at any length because it’s a cold war and they seem to wind up in one of two states.
In the first state, they are caught, beaten, dragged back down, incarcerated, blacklisted, prevent from mobility, vilified. Additional trauma is inflicted and it becomes generational. They build self-worth in the places where they can – I tried to escape; I survived; they had you trapped but they didn’t break you; you’re a tough motherfucker. These fellas also just often die in the escape attempt. I’ve always told myself I’d be one of these; the “you’ll never catch me” type or Nat Turner slave rebellion type. Important fact: Nat Turner died at 31. The average net worth of Black Americans is $19,000, one-tenth of white Americans, and, yea, you’re tough if you can live on that.
In the second state, they do escape, but where do they escape to? Some mythical “north” where they enter the capitalist urban bustle as second-class citizens and slaves of a new ilk. They are “free” yes, but when have they ever seemed so on the long-scale to the field niggers who see the “sweetness” the house offers and creates. No one ever feels Sam Jackson’s character is actually ok in Django and he isn’t. Very few people actually want to drive Ms. Daisy or help Matt Damon with his fucking golf clubs.
Even amongst themselves, their generational trauma and vulnerability scars see them embracing a myth of their internal toughness. Will Smith, escaped from Philly, still feels compelled to slap Chris Rock senseless. Chris Rock, super wealthy, still feels he must respond to it in a stand up special and is right if he wants to keep a black fanbase. All that said, though, Frederick Douglas died at 77. All the black billionaires are either entertainers with fashion lines (i.e. minstrels and mandingo fighters or profiting off the $19K of the field niggers) or elite house niggers who worked for Goldman Sachs.
For me, though, I think we don’t talk about runaways because we overtly recognize they haven’t really run anywhere, and because we secretly realize we’re not in control. Both of these are why both house and field niggers feel pain when George Floyd is killed, no matter how far away they are from the types of struggles that particular field nigger endured before death, or how vehemently they disagree on whether fire or MBAs are the solution to that particular problem. We see the beaker. There’s no running.
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Part 3: Confession that I am a runaway field nigger, now house nigger
A vast number of the people who I loved as a child and young adult are in jail or dead, mostly dead. They weren’t all black or even mostly black, but they were definitely field niggers. Manners of death range from drug overdose to suicides to murders – I am too young for their deaths to have been natural, for the most part. Falling trees aren’t much of an urban problem by comparison, you know?
Maybe half to three-fourths of the dead were dead before I fled. For every one of my dead babies, there were at least a couple dead babies belonging to somebody else. I expected at any moment to be one, estimated my own life span at 21 years. I fled and abandoned the still living with the myth that I’d build a railroad for them to take out, but barely scraped by by myself most of the time since. They died, not running themselves, or got caught by the hounds and torn to bits. Also, sometimes what kills you is just the slavery. Life expectancy of African slaves in the U.S. was between 18 and 38 years. That’s an eerie number to me given the ages of my dead friends at death and our collective prediction for me.
I was a field nigger among field niggers. I found honor in their veneration of me, and in the attention of the field nigger girls. Like most niggers in general, I had sports dreams and pursued them – as a professional fighter since the mandingo fights of my youth suggested that made sense. I used to say that if the modern colosseum involved weapons ala Rome, I’d be the first to sign up. Toughness was the prime ethical value. My fellow field niggers would have sung my praises.
Now I what? Am a salaryman? Write stupid essays in an unread blog? Build Legos as PTSD medicine as recommended by my cognitive behavioral therapist? Buy art from galleries because it “speaks to my experience” and because I want to “support the artist” and so I can show my runaway house nigger personal trainer? I’m viewed as an expert in my field and, for some reason, have pivoted to being the type of nigger who tries to explain niggerdom to non-niggers because they think I’m eloquent. I’m supposed to be some sort of Frederick Douglass dude, now. My estimated life span is probably 77 years.
I couldn’t be more ashamed.
See, by being here I have proven that I am not the Nat Turner I fantasized of being in the field. My field niggers died on the plantation; I ran through the river and escaped the dogs. I went from being a guy that venerated “going in through the front door” and saying things like “sure, there’s a few of them, but you know I can’t run. Wink wink” to literally, actually fleeing the fate associated with all that. I discarded my prime value to survive. I did not actually Killmonger and die at sea. I ran from bondage. That’s shame 1.
Every memory of every witnessed or participated in moment from being from where and when I am from is shame 2. I was in bondage; bondage itself carries shame. I was born semi-helpless. I was made in and of that stuff. What thing can I be but helpless trash?
Shame 3: I know that the prime value I lived by was fucking stupid in much the same way as this Royal Marine with PTSD: Royal Marine breaks down on camera and reveals his PTSD nightmare – YouTube. Being a tough body, fighting in the streets, being willing to destroy and be destroyed (especially by each other) for scraps that fall from the King’s table isn’t honor. It’s a different type of cowardice that accepts the status quo expected of us in the vein of “They Cloned Tyrone.” Also, very few field niggers ever actually Nat Turner. For those that are, Nat Turner led his slave rebellion and freed exactly 0 slaves except through the mercy of death. Slavery rolled right on and into the modern-day horror that means calling us, arguably non-slaves, house and field niggers still likely resonates to every black person in America and half the whites that don’t mind tossing around that word. My current value set which wants to heal and be whole looks back at my actions while I was young – however reasonable and limited in options – and sees them as ignoble, malformed and misdirected, specifically representative of what slaves do when they accept the field.
Together, I feel shame for having been a slave, not dying a slave, and having “escaped” slavery.
Shame 4: That I’m not tough enough to feel nothing about these things. Shame 5: That I care about being tough about these things when I just said the need for toughness is stupid. Shame Loops are central to PTSD, and, as far as I can tell given that they won’t say so, central to the fragile egos of black people.
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Part 4: The dissonance
This is the dissonance I discussed with the artist in the gallery: on the cognitive plane, neither he nor I give a damn about being tough. On the plane of emotional connection while meeting a stranger, we are still compelled to express that we can be tough when we must or came from tough places so can obviously manifest it. We outwardly acknowledge that we’ve been set up to take only a few roads and that we find no freedom in the need to take those roads but cast our “vote” toward “success” rather than “freedom” with the sense, because we are aware of the choice, we have some moral control.
Being labeled black, like womanhood for a great many, like being LGBTQ, very probably like being a white person in a room full of an academically minded group of the folks listed, is a masterclass of Catch 22s, helplessness, and being entirely incapable of stating that helplessness.
I show up to my job and display my subject matter expertise and code switch every single moment. I’m good enough at my role where the actual work comes naturally and is pleasant so the code switching is the stress. The active knowledge that 50% or more of the words out of my mouth or emails from my fingertips are a “yes, Mr. Master” to no particular master, and that no one actually wants to meet the unadulterated me, so full of shame, sadness, disgust, violence, and sightlines into the darkness of the human condition, is a monster that eats me from the inside. Occasionally, I will crack to some combination of interior and exterior pressures and fail to code switch, ever so briefly, and the fear will slide across my peers. These peers can sometimes get drunk in the back office for depression or kick concrete columns while red-faced for anger but my mere expression of frustration in those terms – “I’m feeling a bit frustrated” – so slides me from quiet magical negro to angry slave nigger in their cultural estimation that I now need to have talks with management with advisement on improving my emotional intelligence.
This, of course, turns my frustration and stress to anger. Emotional intelligence? I wonder what would happen if people had the empathy and emotional intelligence to see the level of emotional intelligence that is required to code switch successfully enough for two decades to wind up the level of house nigger that I am. I wonder if its not code for “you want to stay in the house, right? Go back to magical, Bagger.”
So, anger and shame rise in equal measure: “Who can Nat Turner better than the nigger you let live in the house who still has the back and toughness of that field nigger artificially selected into him by your 400-year fucking breeding program? I’ll fucking dare your double standard. I’ll fucking…. shut up now. Channel my inner F. Douglass and get back to work before I lose my job and wind up back in the field where I remember in my bones I don’t want to be. Also, I don’t value this anger; I’m just not that person and if I actually had been in the past I wouldn’t have the PTSD you don’t fucking see…. Yes, Mr. Master… please promote me again. Have my check after the minstrel show.”
Shame loop – what the fuck have I become?
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Part 5: Igbo Landing and the way out
This pattern occurs in social situations as well, specially with well-intentioned white women who fear me, want to understand me especially for the beautiful darkness in my past, and no doubt empathize because being a woman sucks in basically the same ways. It occurs when I’m alone in my apartment. It occurs in my nightmares. It occurs when I try to think fondly of the dead. It occurs whether I talk about it or do not talk about it. This set of feelings and beings grows the further I walk away from my past selves and storms in amply when I return to my homeland, see the familiar locales, dine with the few relics still alive to dine with.
In 1803, at a place called St. Simons Island in Georgia, a group of about 100 Nigerian slaves revolted and took over their slave ship. They drowned their captors. Then, for reasons lost with them, rather than run away or try to do what the Maroons did, they accepted how horribly stuck they were and, in unison, singing songs in their native language, marched into the creek and drowned themselves.
Every day, I look at various means and methods and automatically think of using them to end my life. This is a solution I’ve tried enough times to be scary – one indication of someone who will kill themselves is someone who tries to, more so for someone who then tries again. I lose maybe 20% of my sleep and productivity to the measured acts of distracting from these sensations, employing TIPP skills to reduce my “dysregulation”, and counter-arguing the prevailing narratives that suggest suicide as my “best option.”
I think, though, tonight, that I am mistaken about what is needed.
Tonight at least, the things that fellow slaves, struggle allies, probably well-intentioned bosses suggest I need, I do not necessarily think I need. I do not need feedback on my communication strategy; my muteness is wise given the appetite for the reality of dead babies I have to share with the world– I do not need greater mindfulness; I am acutely aware of the horrors as they dance through my brain and the shame smears they leave as they make their way – I do not need additional toughness or even a push to “heal” or “feel better”; as in any band of soldiers and survivors, the toughness and the expectation of “healing” and “making meaning from suffering” drives us all to drink, self-hatred, and trauma transmission.
What I need, and why suicide is so alluring, is a collective spiritual, aura-matic reset to this whole cursed project.
Suicide, of course, is also useless. As praiseworthy and powerful as I see those folks at Igbo, that shit was 60 years before the emancipation proclamation, and the idiot kids in my neighborhood are still shooting each other – their own bastardized play of water-walking, flying Africans, black people choosing to “die together” rather than live through the prescribed channels or some new ones.
But I found some solace tonight. One of the great chains placed on black and brown people that still lingers by our own reforging is composed of two types of metal. Some of the links are made of the toughness requirement we’ve already discussed. The other links are made of distrust of each other – not at all illogical give the killing, the patterned mistreatment of black women and the Queer community, and the merciless judgment of black men from those populations.
It was a rare gift to discuss the trials of blackness and bi-raciality with a stranger who endures them, to see their attempts to express those struggles with paint, to relay my own struggles in my medium, to be open about the reality in the ways of PTSD support groups: “this happened, this is, we can’t change it, I don’t want to be it anymore, in many ways I still am.”
There are songs about PTSD written by young black people now (one of them is dead at 21): G Herbo – PTSD ft Juice WRLD & Chance The Rapper & Lil Uzi Vert (Official Audio) – YouTube I couldn’t have imagined that even ten years ago. White boys in hard areas around Boston where I’ve also spent time are doing it too: Slaine (feat. ILL BILL) – When The War Ends (Official Video) – YouTube
It doesn’t actually change our helplessness. There’s not enough trust in me to actually ally and work with people who I am blessed to commune with in this way, and even if we did, I’ve no illusion we’d make any more dent in the problem than Fred Hampton (dead at 21) or Nat Turner. It is very likely we’d still march, willingly or unwillingly, into the hands of cruel overseers, through the waitstaff stairway, or to the cool waters of Dunbar Creek.
But one strong medicine in trauma healing is the sensation that you aren’t the only one trying to do it. It’s a small consolation, but small consolations are strong medicine when your memories are full of dead babies, trust me.
It just feels cool not to feel alone for a minute.
I think there’s an implied open call there that extends well past niggers and into the rest of the rats in the beaker, but I’ll make it explicit to try and end somewhere in the vein of not full hopeless, so in alignment with how I felt on the drive home:
All that pain you feel, that rage, that shame and sadness – there’s no “but” to any of that stuff. It just is. It has no grand meaning probably. Most of the stuff that went into it already happened and you can’t unhappen anything that’s already happened. You can do new stuff and try to repair, but every repair attempt is on top of the stuff that’s already happened – like patching a sweater with frayed threads.
So, I humbly recommend telling somebody about it matter of factly, listening to their pile of shit without judgment, and shaking hands or hugging in some vague hope they realize they aren’t the only jackass on the ship and aren’t the only person who has had the spark ripped out of them (whether or not it comes back.)
Tell two somebodies after they agree to tell you– somebody who seems like you to you and somebody who seems the opposite. Funerals have always been for the living. Being together while sad sucks, in however small a way, incrementally less.
The Drowned Rat Gospel Choir 