by Hari Ziyad
To hear this white police officer tell his account of Brown’s murder, the young man was angry for no discernible reason, just as Roberto seemed to me in my recollections. Angry without cause. Beast, not boy. Bloodthirsty and devious. His violence was constructed as inevitable, regardless of whether it actually occurs. His violence was manufactured as perpetual, even when a pattern can’t be established. Because if you construct the story like that, then a Black child deserves whatever comes to them. Both Wilson and I were raised in the same America. The America that demonizes all Black children—and the Blackest of them will always be caught in the gun’s scope when you don’t question where you are pressured to point it.
Like me, both Brown and Roberto were Black boys from what are still some of the Blackest neighborhoods in this country. It doesn’t just so happen that both Wilson and I could uncritically imagine them as flat caricatures any more than it just so happens that those neighborhoods are today home to some of the Black communities most criminalized and incarcerated by the state. It was as easy for me to refuse to recognize the complexity of the Black children like Roberto in my past as it would be to refuse to recognize the complexity of the places we called home.
When I was growing up, Cleveland was almost always listed as one of the ten poorest cities in America according to census data, and it usually made it into the top two.21 (It is listed as the second-poorest city today.) There were system-wide anti-Black practices in housing and water distribution that led to more than a quarter of kindergarten students screened in the city having a history of lead exposure at or above the level considered dangerous.22 And just as this demonstrates that Flint, Michigan, wasn’t the first Black city to suffer through a lead water crisis, mine wasn’t the only house in Cleveland lined with exposed asbestos. We live in a world of unresolved Black traumas and a society where our response to trauma is punitive violence rooted in inflexible perspectives about the people who experience them, and those inflexible perspectives can never make room for our children to exist freely.
This is a culture where state vengeance is lauded as the solution to any problem, where we so regularly send to prison the Black and poor people whom capitalism excludes from accessing resources, punishing them for trying to survive inside a state-designed and anti-Black scarcity model. A culture where any conflict or interpersonal discord that arises from the simple fact that different people are living among each other in the same place is made indistinguishable from oppressive violence. Poor kids fighting over poor-kid things is met with the same punitive gaze and disinterest in accountability as adults fighting to exploit and capitalize on each other’s labor and bodies. On the few, but still too frequent, occasions that I came home to that little yellow house to see one of my older siblings crying because one of his Black friends had been killed, I was always already armed with a plethora of reasons for why and how they might have deserved it by the time I reached my door. If I chose to bear those arms, I was also choosing to live in a specific version of the present defined by the state. I often did.
I don’t recall many other details about Roberto beyond his large body and our ordinary childhood conflicts. But my refusal to see Black children outside of the worst stories the state writes about them was more a matter of not giving room to a Black child’s full context than it was of not having access to that context. Misafropedia is a choice—a refusal to recognize the many rich stories that make up the whole of Black childhood, even when those stories have been told to us. It is important to make different choices, to make space for Black children’s stories, not because theirs are always perfect but because Black children demonstrate how to exist in a world where no one has to have a perfect story. Because Black children hold perspectives with the necessary flexibility to account for living in community with other people. I spent so long refusing to recognize and protect Black children, refusing to reject the state’s inflexible story about them, that I could not write a story that gave room to other narratives even if given all the tools to do so.
By the time I was twelve, in the thick of begging to be sent to a “real” school, I had again made friends with most of the kids on my new street. It was one of the Blacker streets in a suburb that is still far more segregated than it likes to put on, although many of the middle-class Black folks who lived there clutched tightly to whatever superiority they could hold over those of us from Cleveland proper. Tierra and Titi (two neighbor girls I pretended to have a crush on because my best friend next door, Miguel, did) lived across the street from us in a small but dainty orange house that somehow managed to always have its grass cut the same length.
“She’s so fine,” Miguel said, waving goodbye to Tierra after we’d run her tiny Chihuahua back to the orange house following its escape, having just saved it from the jaws of Miguel’s German shepherd, who was chained up in his backyard. We did not tell Tierra how close to death her excitable pup had been when we handed it back to her, its eyes bulging and bony body shaking wildly.
“Thank you,” she’d said, blinking her long lashes at us.
Tierra was a year older than me and Miguel, and glided around with that video-girl look: shorts always mad short, hair always just done, baby hairs greased nice. Some of the parents on our street called her and her sister, Titi, who was my age, “fast” because of how grown these parents regarded them both to be—although, at the time, I still knew to question why that wasn’t a problem on the part of the people doing the regarding.
“She is fine.” I nodded in agreement as Miguel and I walked back across the street toward his house to finish our workout, trying to convince myself I was attracted to Tierra, too. I certainly thought her pretty, but if you were to ask me then about a girl I’d want to spend time with, it would have been her next-door neighbor Sarah. Sarah had always been kind to me and loved a lot of the nerdy shit I was into, too. Spending time with her, however, always meant spending time with her sister, Marissa, as the two were inseparable.
At first, Miguel and I got along with both sets of sisters, but they despised each other. If the story on our street was that Tierra and Titi were fast and bougie, it was also that Sarah and Marissa, who were hardly concerned with looking like anyone’s video girls, were envious, with their less manicured lawn and older clothes. This story, of the haughty versus the envious, was the one told to explain their constant clashing, but Miguel and I had learned from both sets of sisters that the actual story was much more real. Much more childlike and tender. Much more complex.
Titi and Marissa had been best friends a long time ago, but Marissa felt that Titi had betrayed her trust. Titi had never apologized, thinking her action—something small enough that all of them had forgotten the details—should be forgiven by a person who claimed to love her. The hurt became an avalanche. And Sarah and Tierra got involved to defend their little sisters.
“Aw shit, here the fuck they go again,” Miguel said, shaking his freckled face and throwing his hands dramatically into the air.
“Bitch, what did you say?!” Tierra screamed at Marissa, who had been sitting on her porch, talking on the phone.
“Why, god, why?!” Miguel pleaded into the sky as I laughed, turning around to witness a sight we’d both seen so many times before.
“Everything isn’t about your nasty ass!”
“Who you calling nasty, dirty bopper?!”
Tierra and Marissa hurled obscenities back and forth for only seconds before Titi came out of her house, face coated thick with Vaseline, putting her hair up in a bun. I grabbed Miguel’s arm when Tierra took out her earrings, and he sighed reluctantly as we headed toward them. By the time Tierra and Titi had made it down to their lawn, Sarah had come out to back up her sister, too. Within minutes, all four girls were tumbling around the grass, hair being pulled, faces being scratched. The jaws of Miguel’s German shepherd suddenly seemed welcoming as we reached down to pull our friends apart.
When we finally succeeded in wrenching the four girls off one another, they y
elled at each other for a few more moments, then finally stormed back inside their homes.
“Jesus,” Miguel said, nursing a scratch he’d caught on his cheek in the fray.
“She’s fine,” I agreed again, “but ghetto.”
For the first time, I summed up their feud the way some adults on our street did. Over the next few years, I came to act toward them like those adults did, too, avoiding my friends for their problems and ignoring them when they tried to tell us what their fights were really about. Ignoring them instead of helping them end their fights the way we knew everyone involved deserved to have them ended.
Whatever stories those adults on our street looked down their noses to tell about Tierra, Titi, Sarah, and Marissa, they all had the same ending: these girls were ghetto. And as beautiful as Miguel found Tierra, as warm and compellingly quirky as I found Sarah, as understandable as we found each of their stories about why they were angry with each other, ghetto meant I would learn to keep my distance from them more and more as I got older. I would have to if I wanted to find my place in a society that has always been violent toward the ghetto, lest I continue to be dismissed as just a ghetto kid from Cleveland proper, too.
Even in high school, when their fighting had completely subsided, I kept my distance from Sarah because of the way her struggles with her sister’s former best friend had been reduced. I had seen it not as just the ordinary conflict that it was but as a representation of a kind of Black—too loud, too assertive, too poor—that the world was teaching me to reject in both myself and others. Sarah and I remained friendly, but we would never be as close as we could have been. As I wanted to be, even after I understood my attraction to her was not romantic.
“I was just trying to protect my sister,” Sarah repeated at track practice one day during her senior year, my junior, after a classmate brought up the well-known story of her constant fights in order to dismiss her in an argument. I began to walk away, even as Sarah turned to me and said it again, so clear, heartfelt, and intelligible: “I just have to always protect my sister.”
It’s a beautiful thing to me now, how, without question, as young girls they would almost teleport to each other’s side when one felt threatened. At the root of their fighting, at the root of all our “ghetto,” was always love, a love that first drove two families apart, then drove sisters closer together. And though you could argue whether there are healthier expressions of this love, whether every urge to protect the people you love has to end with shedding blood, you could not deny that the love was there. You could, though, ignore it. And I did.
Struggling against the limitations of my current perspective of Roberto and recognizing that my younger self might have had a different understanding of him and his motivations than the previous, clearly harmful one I held on to without much basis for so long has also helped me to realize that I owe Sarah an apology. If my love for Black people is real, acknowledging that I hold and have held anti-Black views means being accountable for them, and that requires me to apologize for the way I flattened Sarah and her story throughout our brief friendship and to make amends.
It’s not that my younger self would have had some objective view of her or Roberto. But my younger self might have told a different story, and that possibility inherently challenges the narrative I’d used to define my past, a narrative I mistook as objective. Because I can’t ever truly know my younger self’s perspective fully, working to reclaim my childhood opens up vast possibilities for other perspectives and allows many narratives to exist at once, with some given more appropriate validity and others given more appropriate criticism and reflection. It allows me to acknowledge that I once reduced Sarah and Roberto to anti-Black caricatures of themselves and that the history of my doing so will always be a part of me and something I must reckon with, even as I explore more affirming perspectives that might stop me from ever reducing Black children in this way again.
Working to repair the fracture caused by my carceral dissonance helped me to realize that the story of my last summer in Cleveland proper, before we moved to the Cleveland Heights suburb, never had to be a story about a boy who blew up my childhood. That was just the story I’d learned to be comfortable with. It could instead be a story about how my childhood being blown up by the same misafropedia I wielded against him had helped me reduce Black children to terrors for years since.
By understanding the power dynamics in how we tell the stories of our experiences in any particular time, I can better recognize Black children outside of the flattening descriptors the world places on them. I can better learn to see my own childhood self outside of these pathologies, too. Giving space for Black children to be complex and multidimensional, and that leading to offering an apology to someone who deserves it and should have always been a friend, feels as freeing as I remember the piles of Nowalaters in a backyard clubhouse feeling as a kid. It feels like the imagination Mata worked so hard to safeguard in her children.
Though we certainly learned a lot during those years, I realize now that Mata insisted on her children being homeschooled primarily so that we didn’t unlearn critical aspects of ourselves. It was the slow unlearning of a more tender care, one that allowed room for other stories, that kept me from regarding the Robertos and Sarahs in my life with the kindness they deserve today. It was replacing the openheartedness of a Black child with something else—something judgmental, self-policing, and punitive—marked by fear of how the outside world might respond to us.
Ironically, it was Mata’s steadily intensifying policing of my gender expression that most exemplified this unlearning. As I grew older, her increasing vigilance around the femininity in how I dressed or walked or spoke suggested that the protection she sought for me by refusing “this material world” was limited, at least in critical aspects, to only the beginning of my life. This limitation is also a question of whose timeline we follow and why.
There are many different perspectives on when “the end of childhood” arrives. The end date that we cling to, and the meaning we ascribe to that end, also matters. There is the version the state promotes, where immediately after a child hits an arbitrary age, it is suddenly legal to manipulate them into fighting unjust wars. In this version, this same age indicates a time when society will condone people much older and with much more power manipulating these teenagers into sexually exploitative relationships. And I believe these rigid ideas about when protecting childhood should be honored and when that protection should be withdrawn influenced Mata when it came to my gender.
In Mata’s version, immediately after hitting another arbitrary age, queerness was suddenly no longer an option, even though my queerness was so linked to what she had been safeguarding in me before. And since I wasn’t discerning enough to distinguish between homeschooling itself and the lens it had fostered in me, the lens through which I could view myself and other Black children with care, I rejected them both, especially when being at home longer seemed to buy me the safety I required.
Imagining how a younger me might have had more space to love and be loved is liberating, but it can also be discomforting. Reclaiming freedom often means exploring again how I lost it, and all the things I lost with it. Things like my hair.
It was more than just hair, when I had it. It was that getting my hair braided brought me near to the people I cared for most. It was the affection my sisters and mother could put into the top of my head that they sometimes could not put into words. When Mata would braid my hair, she’d sit me between her legs as she watched the latest Oprah or listened to her favorite bhajans, and everything was all right. I was proud of the way my hang time dropped past my small shoulders, curving at the ends like snakes at attention, as if I knew Medusa had never been the villain either, that she didn’t ask to be cursed. But more than that, I was proud of my relationships with the women who gathered me to them weekly to leave my hair as fly as they could manage. For five years, my hair was a part of who I was. For five years, I was allowed to determin
e that, and I loved who I had determined myself to be.
Not long after the final time Mata did my hair, she told me, “You’re becoming a young man now.” It was only a few weeks before my fifth birthday, and what did I know about being a man? A melancholy bhajan about a woman longing for Kṛṣṇa might have played in the background on a tape player. Mata’s own hair was certainly covered, as it always was, in a head wrap that matched her Punjabi.
“Young men don’t have long hair,” Mata continued.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Long hair is for young ladies,” she said, as if she hadn’t previously encouraged me to think critically enough to know that this was no real explanation. “Why don’t we celebrate becoming a young man on your birthday by shaving it off?”
I didn’t want to become a young man, but I didn’t have a choice. The world demanded it, and in contrast to her resistance to the world in so many other examples of my life, now Mata demanded the same. A part of me refused cutting my hair for as long as I could. That part had to be the same one that I’m desperately trying to find now.
The day of my haircut, Mata bribed me with presents and my favorite food, a creamy Indian-inspired potato pie dish called Gauranga Potatoes, bartering with whatever she could to make me buy into my own rupturing.
“Can I at least save it?” I asked, holding back tears in our living room. My older brother Mohan’s hand rested on my shoulder, his other hand buzzing in the air as it clutched the clippers, sounding like I imagined an electric chair might. At some point during their childhoods, all my brothers, in one form or another, had similarly been told it was time to be men. Mohan might not have known that he’d been enlisted to help take from me the same thing the state had been trying to take from him—his own tenderness. I’d go on to replace my sisters braiding their affection into my head with him cutting his into it, and like every boy who’s thrust into manhood too soon, I would learn to call this love.