Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  “What do you mean?”

  I wasn’t sure I really wanted to engage, but we were heading to the same class anyway.

  “The other day he called me a nigger, and I almost tore his head off. I’m sure you just heard him call me a bitch.”

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “He’s always been like that. And no one wants to do anything because he’s, well, Paul. Hell, I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on him either. But he’s fucking terrible, and I don’t care anymore.”

  I would later hear from other students more stories about Paul being hateful, which had apparently been a regular preoccupation of his since at least middle school. His outbursts seemed largely reserved for Black women. Usually they just let him slide. Some even defended him, like I did.

  As the year progressed, it didn’t take long for Paul to begin crashing into me more in hallways, too, and he never said “excuse me” those times either. For a while, I still felt compelled to let it slide. But when I also began noticing his smug smirk when he did better on a test than the rest of us, how much he loved correcting us, I started to consider that maybe there was such a thing as doing too well at living up to my guidance counselor’s statement. That there was a damaging side to excelling in the way that I had, which seemed in such proximity to the way Paul did, too. The narcissism of regarding this violence as a problem only when it came down on me was real, but only part of my realization. The other part was that my reflection had become clearer than ever in his violence, and I did not like how I looked. Or maybe that’s ultimately just narcissism, too.

  “I’m sick of just letting that slide,” Betty reiterated, and as our friendship developed, I let her weariness wash over me. I was embarrassed that I had let Paul’s feelings—or what I’d perceived of them—wash over me instead for so long. I was embarrassed at how easily I could identify harms done to this white student who had no love for me, but not the harms he’d done—not the harms I’d done—to Black students who I’d never even considered might have some love for me themselves. I was embarrassed at how excellent I’d become at identifying with whiteness.

  I learned to be excellent at school the most from teachers like Mr. Smith, a white man who taught my Advanced Placement English class that same year. Mr. Smith was the kind of serious whose resentment for not working on the college level bled out of his grading pen. His appreciation for the work of the other old white men he taught in our class—F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, William Golding—was rivaled only by his reverence for rules, or maybe those are just two names for the same thing.

  Mr. Smith was one of those teachers who would make students feel foolish whenever they asked a question he thought they should know. One of those teachers who would not open the door no matter what after the bell rang, regardless of whether, it seemed, you had a death in the family, had broken a leg, or had passed out right in front of him. This inflexible view of timeliness is entrenched in our education system through capitalism. During the industrialization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it became more important to business owners that workers turn up at their stations at the same time each day. Workers learned to think of their time as belonging to the people they worked for, and schools became a prime opportunity to reinforce this idea.24

  When I made it through a stampede of students only to find Mr. Smith’s classroom locked one morning, I started wringing the sweat from my palms. I was convinced I’d lost track of time and somehow missed the bell, and was terrified of the consequences for my mistake. Then other students arrived, and we all just sat there. We were still waiting when the bell rang. It was so out of the ordinary that Mr. Smith wasn’t there that I was sure something terrible had happened, and my anxieties for being late morphed into worries about the white man who made me anxious in the first place—or maybe those are just two names for the same thing, too. But when Mr. Smith finally showed up minutes later, he didn’t even acknowledge his own tardiness to his class. He started normally, affirming that punishments for failing to follow these rules applied to us and only us.

  Mr. Smith’s punitive view of tardiness is inextricable from the legacy of white administrators’ and educators’ adherence to school-disturbance laws and zero-tolerance policies, which all lead to the accelerated incarceration of Black youth. According to a 2015 study, Black youth are five times more likely to be detained or committed compared to white youth, in large part due to how the enforcement of these rules fuels the school-to-prison pipeline.25 As schools impose more rules based on state-dictated standards, they create more ideals with which Black people in particular are incompatible and more punishments that apply only to us. It creates the reality education scholar Dr. Michael Dumas is referencing when he calls schooling “a site of Black suffering.”26

  A few weeks after Mr. Smith showed up well past his own bell with a shrug, Betty switched out of his class after being disciplined for being late one last time. I used to think she deserved Mr. Smith’s wrath for her tardiness, taking my own ability to be more punctual as another example of what made me better than her. But if her being late to these classes was an inherent disruption of learning, perhaps it was because Mr. Smith’s way of teaching inherently needed disruption.

  My way of learning to empathize with Mr. Smith and Paul over Betty, and even more so over the students who didn’t make it into these mostly white classes in the first place, required disruption. Only once it had been disrupted could I understand Betty’s weariness. Only then could I understand her unwillingness to let shit slide just because letting it slide was how she might find more success in a society that protects the Pauls of the world at the expense of others. Only once my way of learning had been disrupted could I understand that I needed to be unwilling to let Mr. Smith’s abuse of authority slide, too, even when it seemed to more often spare me.

  By modeling teachers like Mr. Smith, I had come to think of the tardiness of my peers and Black folks in general not only as inconvenient but as an indictment of their character. As something indicating an inherent failure. As justification for their disposability. My parents were always late, and adopting this politic of excellence by white standards meant that even though my father was available and willing to drive me to school (and generously offered to drive friends who lived on my street as well), I often refused his kindness just to avoid the possibility of tardiness he carried like the plague. I would ultimately be losing time by trading a five-minute car ride for a twenty-minute walk, but at least it wasn’t Mr. Smith’s time. In order to embrace the rules of the state and the school system, I had to refuse so much kindness that Black folks like my father had to offer; otherwise I believed everything would devolve into chaos. But there are other ways to live, and there always have been.

  Under capitalism, time is just another resource to be exploited, and it’s no coincidence that poor people—who are more likely to have multiple jobs and responsibilities and obligations they need to fulfill in order to survive—have less of it, any more than it’s a coincidence that poor people are also more likely to be Black. Being punished for lacking time is more likely to affect the poor and the Black, too. Even though my mother didn’t work a typical job outside the home, because my father’s salary was never enough to keep us above the poverty line, both of them still spent any “free time” they could manage working—teaching us, cooking, writing grants and giving classes and trying to find rest. Maybe Colored-People Time was only ever a form of resistance. A demand to retrain our responses to the “problems” caused when Black people don’t show up exactly when we are told to. A demand to focus on how we have been forced into insecure home lives, or into lacking food, or into having inconsistent transportation, by the anti-Black and unequal distribution of resources.

  Maybe Colored-People Time is a call to actually deal with the physical and mental health issues our communities don’t always have the means to manage because the world hoards those resources to protect the Pauls instead. Because it does so in
the same way that the state hoarded resources to turn the white faces of the opioid crisis into sympathetic victims while it made out the Black faces of the crack epidemic to be monsters deserving of their lot. There is no situation in which we can’t afford to give Black people who fail at state-sanctioned behaviors more care and grace.

  Of course anyone being late can lead to problems, and I’m not saying Black folks’ lateness never does. I’m saying that the moments when we are late or miss engagements or get high or otherwise disrupt institutions that uphold the master’s rules, that uphold respectability in an anti-Black, capitalistic society, are opportunities to think more deeply about where the problem truly stems.

  Instead of a smug smirk and a patronizing correction, Black folks who are late or who fail tests can and should be met with caring inquisition. Why are so many engagements in this society structured so that if we are late or don’t pass a test, we might lose everything? Would the stakes be so high if the old white men Mr. Smith revered so much weren’t making money off everyone else doing everything on their schedule, if the tests weren’t based on what they call skill or a schedule to which they themselves don’t have to adhere to still find protection?

  “You remember when you called me a homeschooled jungle freak?” I asked Betty as we caught up over drinks. I count her among my closest friends now, and she had just moved to the New York City area.

  “I’m sorry, but you were so annoying,” she laughed. “You knew you were d*mb smart, and always thought that meant you were better than the rest of us. I was just over it that day. But thank god we moved past that.”

  It would have been so easy to settle into a capitalistic idea of Black Excellence that helps perpetuate the punishing of Black children for not meeting white-supremacist standards for success, and in many ways I did. But it was having friends like Betty, who were generous enough to hold me accountable and challenge me on my anti-Blackness, even when I didn’t understand it as generosity, that kept me just aware enough that I didn’t lose myself completely on the condition that I was at least willing to grow. They, along with the far-from-inconsequential Black teachers and coaches who refused Mr. Smith’s way of teaching, ensured there was always a way back.

  It was easy for me to use my weird name and odd religion and homeschooled-jungle-freak past to shield against any critiques of my behavior—to claim my tensions with Betty rested only on her inability to accept my differences rather than on my ability to use any difference from her as a bargaining chip for proximity to whiteness. But she, and the many other Black students who might have had less regard for the rules of this school but often still possessed more intelligence than I did, didn’t let me. I am eternally grateful for that, and I have a responsibility to them for it.

  It’s magical the things Black people create out of the scraps thrown at us. How we have taken the discarded parts of what’s left after the masters finished eating and turned it into soul food. Hateful language meant to demean people with disabilities turned into signifiers of feats antithetical to demeaning—“d*mb smart,” meaning “smart as fuck.” Relationships molded by loathing and scorn turned into lasting friendships of accountability and understanding. We stay breaking the line between binary distinctions created to punish some for the sake of others. It’s magical, but that doesn’t mean how we create these new worlds doesn’t take work.

  As a person who’s managed some proximity to whiteness by meeting the respectability standards of academia, acquiescing to the lived experiences of those who don’t meet the same standards has required work, too. It’s easy to say that those with less proximity to whiteness have agency and that their lives matter, but what does it mean to honor their capabilities, knowledge, and agency in my everyday life?

  How do I rightly regard the Black children society calls “demons” or “no angels” just because they don’t follow its rules, knowing that the state uses disregard for these children to avoid pushback for mowing them down in the street? Do I follow the lead of the Black man who is arguably most proximate to whiteness, President Barack Obama—the man who lectured Black people who fall short of white standards for not “taking full responsibility for our own lives” and succumbing to “despair or cynicism” in even his most famous speech to purportedly take on anti-Blackness?27 Or do I consider that these children might be responding from a perspective I do not know and can learn from?

  Finding excellence in the respectable ways I learned from teachers like Mr. Smith would always mean losing community with those who resisted this anti-Black system, but for a while I tried anyway. I tried even though I knew I needed this community just as much as Mata needed it before me. I tried because I believed, just like Mata believed, that with some postracial god’s mercy, I could afford to lose my wholeness. That’s why I never asked Mata what price we paid for this more respectable life. I did not believe there could even exist a god who wouldn’t ask such a steep price for deliverance. But here Betty was, thanking a god who didn’t.

  CANTO II

  Queer

  CHAPTER SIX

  A PRAYER FOR LIMITLESSNESS

  Hari-Gaura,

  Have you met god yet, or is that just something that happens when you’re taken from this world in myths and movies? Do you know for sure whether god even exists? If you do, don’t tell me. I think I’d rather not know. What’s the point of believing in anything if you don’t have doubts sometimes? What would you have confronted and overcome to make having faith worth it?

  I don’t know what I believe anymore. When people ask, “Are you religious?” and I respond, “Not really, but I’m spiritual,” it feels trite and indecisive, like I am desperate to hedge my bets. I set up an altar to my ancestors, but I don’t study any scripture. I am exploring African traditional religions, but I haven’t been initiated by any teachers. I know that I’m trying to have it both ways, and for some odd reason you’re not supposed to eat the cake once you have it lest you be seen as gluttonous. But this is still the best answer I can muster, so it’s the answer I must give.

  I guess it’s like how Daddy believes Allah and Kṛṣṇa are just two different names for the same being, despite Islam’s injunction against sacred images and Hinduism’s reliance upon them. “People get too caught up in what they call god, and what he does or doesn’t look like, with too little concern for all that he does,” he rationalizes.

  But Daddy still believes god is a “he.” I ask him why, ask him how this isn’t just an example of getting too caught up in god’s gender—in the binaries we force ourselves into at the expense of what god can do to expand existence limitlessly—and he says something about it being a problem of language rather than one of his beliefs, then changes the subject. I hate when he changes the subject after being presented with his contradictions instead of acknowledging the doubts that have been raised. Like last year when he claimed he was only trying to be health conscious in making an offhand comment about a woman’s weight as we drove by where she stood on the sidewalk, minding her own business.

  “You couldn’t possibly know how healthy the woman was just from a drive-by observance of her body, and body-shaming has a proven detrimental effect on folks’ health anyway,” our baby sister Kiss admonished in the driver’s seat, shaking her head.28 I can’t believe she’s now old enough to drive. We were headed from Vegas to the Grand Canyon for Daddy’s seventy-ninth birthday. He had been talking about how badly he wanted to see it for years. Kiss figured then was as good a time as any to start scratching items off our parents’ bucket lists, and I didn’t blame her.

  “Look at that beautiful sunset over the mountains!” Daddy replied, staring out the window at the landscape the disappearing rays were merging into a gradient of purples, yellows, and reds, as if it were a melting box of crayons. I almost fell for the deceit. To not have to reckon with harms perpetuated in your presence is an enticingly comforting thing. Until you realize this only means you’re now forced to deal with harms that are hidden from you or that
might not even exist.

  Daddy is still a conspiracy theorist.

  “Don’t fall for anything they tell you,” he advises me often, pointing to instances of the government covering up dastardly deeds against Black communities that are only exposed later. The assassination of Black Panther Party deputy chairman Fred Hampton by the Chicago police and the FBI. The government’s involvement in the destruction of Black Wall Street during the Tulsa Race Riot.

  “These people have been liars since the inception of this country,” he says.

  He still doesn’t believe in saying “hello,” replacing it with “heaven-high” whenever he greets anyone.

  “It’s their way to keep your mind centered on hellish thoughts,” he says. You trusted him on this, but I once tried parroting it to a less conspiratorial person, and they politely laughed at my hereditary obliviousness and explained that the word actually comes from the Old High German “Halôn,” which means “to fetch” or “hail,” as in what you do to signal a cab.

  Daddy believes 9/11 was an inside job. He believes Black people in America are secretly indigenous to this country, and that we are only told we are from Africa so that we won’t have any claim to this land. I point out that actual Indigenous Americans don’t have their claim to this land recognized anyway, that there are Black diasporans all over the globe, not just here, and that colonizers are still stealing the lands of Indigenous Africans to this day, too, but he just changes the subject to you, Hari-Gaura.

  “I always let your mother do her thing with you children, but I wish you all had come to the mosque more when you were little,” he says when we reach our hotel in Arizona. He’s been recounting the story of when he became a Muslim more recently, as if I need to really get it to understand why he does the things he does. After moving from Tennessee to Cleveland, he joined the Nation of Islam, a Black American Muslim movement founded in 1930, in his twenties. That was where he met Mother Bhūmi, who was exploring the religion, too. Mata was only a child then, and he wouldn’t connect with her on any deeper level until many years later, after they had both been through three marriages each. By then, he and Mata were active in various multifaith initiatives together, and after observing how he moved within them, she asked him to be a mentor to her boys.