Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  I might never see many of the family members I love again in this world. The carceral state intentionally draws a hard line between the world out here and the one inside its prisons, and that will never be acceptable. But there are things that can allow me to still have something to live for even while knowing this. There is something that can allow me to still find joy despite the likelihood of never seeing so many of the people I love again, and that is understanding the possibility of other worlds where those inside prisons are free.

  The love given to me by the people I have lost and am losing to carceral logics doesn’t have to stay gone just because they are, and I should never give up on it. I should never stop believing in the ability to see my family in other lights, knowing that we are worthy of care regardless of how deep into the hole of criminality we are forced. The state can never take something far enough away from me that it doesn’t matter anymore—that it cannot exist anymore. There are always other universes where reuniting is possible, if I fight for them.

  And this fight feels like my mother must have felt at the family reunions I haven’t attended in too long, following the examples of you and Tiger and Black children everywhere to remaster the simple steps I am embarrassed to have forgotten.

  Teach you, teach you, teach you, I’ll teach you the Electric Sliiiiide.

  CHAPTER NINE

  REPRESENTATION MATTERS?

  “Now we’re cooking with gas!” my dad announced in the parlance only he knows as we took off from the Beechwood house toward New York City, where I would soon be attending New York University’s film school. I huffed as his curls, already fully slate gray then, billowed in the wind that vacuumed through the windows of our van while we inched along the highway well under the speed limit. I’d be lucky if the typically eight-hour trip stayed under ten.

  I was going to live away from my parents for the first time, but I had little hesitation to go off for college. In a way, I had already lived away from them, if you considered how much of myself I kept secret in the midst of my rebellions or in the invisible worlds I’d imagined for myself as a child. I thought of New York as the place I could finally explore my queerness unencumbered. I could finally leave Cleveland behind. Leave my father’s plodding and corny sayings and hoarding behind. Our poorness behind. The unimaginable smell of Lake Erie polluted by the environmental destruction wreaked by capitalism. The snow the lake caused. Or at least I could tuck it all away, like old, stained clothes you won’t throw out because deep down they mean too much . . . even if you never plan to wear them again.

  “Don’t lose yourself out there, now,” my dad warned. “New York is too much. It’s just too much.”

  “Not for us,” I assured him. “Not for a Ziyad.”

  But I hadn’t before been surrounded by so few Black faces as I was at NYU, which assisted in my forgetting who I was, despite my assurances to my father. It had been a long time since I’d known the joy of disappearing. I had seen the ways being Black and visible in a misafropedic world intent on harming Black children could be dangerous, and had begun to see that my own recognition in high school always seemed to come alongside harm for my peers whom the institution considered undeserving. But I didn’t fully understand the implications: that recognizing the harm that can accompany visibility also means questioning the idea of representation, on its own, as liberation. Instead, now I was the student who was considered undeserving of recognition, and gaining that recognition was supposed to be a solution to all my problems, harms be damned.

  Before starting college, I committed to the idea that if I could only tell my story, only make the Black, queer boy I used to be appear on as many screens as possible, all audiences would be forced to believe that he mattered without doing any difficult work. I myself wanted to be able to believe that the child I used to be mattered without putting in the effort to show myself that he did, without repairing the fracture caused by my carceral dissonance and caring for him the way he deserves to be cared for. I thought that if I could just make my presence known in the midst of all the violence directed at me, those who enacted it would find it in their hearts to direct their violence elsewhere. Instead, they only gained clarity on where their target was.

  I tried to create what I told myself would be the Blackest, queerest films and scripts in my film classes. In my freshman production class, I wrote and directed a comedy about Arielle, a Black, genderqueer woman who turns her white partner’s guilt-inspired fears of being seen as anti-Black on their head by accusing him of calling her a nigger in public after catching him cheating. In my sound class, I recorded an audio-movie re-creation of the life of a Black Chicago boy before he was killed in an act of “senseless” violence. I was sure that my Game of Thrones–inspired take on the Greek gods’ competition to rule Mount Olympus, where the gods were all people of color and many were queer, was revolutionary.

  As my peers did with all final film projects for that course, I screened the short about Arielle in a large studio in front of my entire class. Just before my film, another student screened hers, which featured a story line I don’t recall except for one scene showing a character bathing in a tub of milk.

  “It took a hundred gallons of dairy,” the student director explained as she came up and stood behind the lectern in front of the massive screen to respond to feedback, laughing behind huge circle-framed Ray-Ban sunglasses that rested underneath her meticulously unkempt blonde hair. Even with the studio lights up, it was no brighter than the inside of a car with tinted windows parked under a streetlight after dark.

  My fellow Black classmate and friend Kristen nudged me and rolled her eyes, and I laughed knowingly. As if on cue, the director took a sip from her Starbucks cup while one of the other students began telling her how “brilliant” the film’s cinematography was.

  “I shot it on an Alexa,” the director replied, referring to a state-of-the-art camera that wasn’t provided by the school but that many of the well-off students in the program would sometimes rent out with their own money. Those students could afford a hundred gallons of milk and more for their student films. Kristen and I could afford only to roll our eyes if we wanted to go on being tolerated by them.

  The lights went down for the start of my short. The blonde director went back to her seat, sunglasses firmly in place. The film began with a close-up of the freshly painted nails of the actor playing Arielle, which I boorishly—but rightly—assumed would provoke humor when she was revealed as being played by one of the male students in our class. Before the camera panned up, the character started talking to someone off-screen. It immediately became clear that it was her boyfriend, and he was breaking up with her after falling for someone else.

  The audience’s laughter crescendoed as Arielle morphed into an unhinged woman scorned, with more than a few hints of an angry-Black-woman caricature thrown in for good measure. I soaked in the roaring as it reached a fever pitch with the reveal of the actor and exceeded even that when Arielle started to scream, “You called me a nigger!” at her white boyfriend in the middle of a crowded park.

  So many flaws with the work I was creating in college could have used careful critique. In this film, for instance, not only did I have a cisgender man play Arielle, but he played her in crude stereotypes of transgender and Black women for white, cisgender people to laugh at. The audio movie I created in sound class was based on a true story, but I had made no effort to reach out to the people involved and had almost entirely fictionalized what was a very real trauma for a whole community just to reify the myth that “Black on Black” violence is its own especially heinous and irrational form of intracommunal strife. The main conflict in my Greek-god story was too similar to Thrones, and I’d mostly just copied the characters and added more diverse identities. But when I got feedback from my classmates and students, these were not the primary critiques.

  “I think something like this would need more diversity to sell,” a white student who had laughed the loudest at Arielle’s �
�nigger” moment said when it was time for him to comment, pointing out the very different audience demographics of similar shows the professor had asked us to research the week prior. “You want it to reach the widest audience possible. People want to see themselves in it.” I could have easily deduced then that I wasn’t “people” to him and stopped trying to get him to see himself in me, but I didn’t want to.

  My reality—my motivations, wants, hopes, dreams, and life—was too foreign a concept for many of my largely white colleagues and professors to comprehend. But I kept trying anyway, rather than working to more carefully and intentionally comprehend my own life. Even when they did enjoy the Blackest, queerest work I produced, these colleagues and professors often missed what I was trying to say. And because I thought all I wanted was for them to understand what I was saying, I edited my ideas to suit them. “Diversified” the Greek gods by adding back in more white characters. Made my stories more “universal.” Less about me. Stripped them of their Blackness. Stripped my stories of myself. Stripped myself of my stories. The same thing I had already done to my Inner Child.

  By the time I discovered communities of Black and queer people off campus, discovered where all the mirrors were hiding—or rather, where I had been hiding them by not seeking them out—there was hardly anything reflected back in my face. To make your body seen in a world that finds your light too bright, you must first put it out.

  “I don’t know why I expected to just graduate and immediately start working on real films,” Kristen laughed as we caught up over lunch at Dallas BBQ in Chelsea. She is queer, too. She laughs a lot at the fucked-up things in her life, but it’s in a completely different pitch from the sound that escaped from the white kids at the word “nigger” in our class. Like she isn’t turning our shared pain into comedy because the transformation brings her joy but is expressing it however it comes out because otherwise the pain would simply fester.

  “Because they taught us film as if we all had money and could finance our own shit,” I replied. “They taught film for white people.”

  “You went straight into the field, though!” she pointed out.

  After graduating, I was accepted into the page program at a major television network, a yearlong fellowship that was sold on the fact that it was more selective than Harvard, accepting less than 2 percent of its applicants. In reality, this meant not so much that those who were hired were highly skilled but that we were likely to have significant industry connections, or had been lucky enough to take advantage of rare opportunities to make lasting face-to-face impressions on the recruiters. (I’d attended a fair at NYU, where I was able to do the latter.) Of course, Harvard, which admits legacy students at five times the rate of students without university connections, could be accused of the same, as could any “exclusive” institution in a capitalistic world where even our favorite celebrities regularly bribe their children’s way to success.29

  “But the industry I went straight into was for white people, too,” I told Kristen, explaining how Black employees were routinely disciplined for speaking out about anti-Black experiences, and that the page program paid only twelve dollars an hour (less than the current minimum wage) in a city with one of the highest costs of living in the country. This was almost as unworkable for me as any other fantastical dreams we had for our careers, as it would be for most people without a significant amount of money to fall back on. I scraped by that year only because my partner at the time supplemented my income and offered me a place to stay at an otherwise impossible price, and because I hardly ever ate.

  Supposedly, pages have access to many exciting “assignments” that last for a couple of months in different areas of television. This is alleged to help them build skills and set them up for jobs with the company. The reality was that these assignments were often dependent on one’s relationships with hiring managers or older pages who had worked the assignments before, and of course these relationships were usually made much easier if you shared a cultural background (i.e., if you were white).

  While more than a few pages made it through the full year without getting an assignment, I managed to acquire two of the less coveted ones working in news production. This helped me land my next job as an assistant to a talent agent whose clients were mostly news and sports personalities, which was admittedly a little closer to the idea both Kristen and I had once had of “working on real films” just after college.

  There were only two other assistants at the small talent agency. They sat in cubicles at different parts of the office, so I interacted with my boss and the office manager, Morgan, most regularly. By industry standards, we were as low-key an office as they come. I had expected work at a TV agency to be as cutthroat and cruel as the television show Entourage portrayed it to be, but we managed to do our jobs without many of the abuses that I soon found were in fact regular in quite a few other agencies and management companies we did business with.

  One day in 2015, I came into work to find Morgan with the volume on the TV that sat on her desk turned up to the point that it couldn’t be ignored. The bystander video she was watching intently on the news was damning and clear, the newscaster implied, as I turned on my own TV to listen in curiosity.

  The footage replayed over and over, like another police body camera recording of an unarmed Black person being murdered that never leads to a conviction. But this time a jury would convict, even though this time no one died. No one even went to the hospital. By far, it wasn’t the most brutal fight I had witnessed, even just counting the ones in high school. But, the reporter insisted, Bayna-Lehkeim El-Amin hitting Jonathan Snipes over the back with a chair—at the same Dallas BBQ where Kristen and I would meet for lunch, four years later—was one of the most disgustingly hateful acts he’d reported on.

  “What a monster,” Morgan agreed, still watching the footage on her screen behind me. “I don’t know how a person could be so homophobic.”

  El-Amin was a six-feet-six Black man who would later be called a “hulking brute” in a New York Daily News story about his conviction. Like the language I’d used to describe Roberto from East 128th Street. Like the language that Officer Darren Wilson used to justify killing Mike Brown. This is the standard description for Black people who experience conflict in a carceral state, and sometimes Black people absorb the media’s messages about ourselves, even without knowing.

  Jonathan Snipes, a white, gay man, said the Dallas BBQ fight escalated when El-Amin called Snipes and his boyfriend, Ethan Adams, “white faggots,” and derided them for “spilling [their] drinks.” Snipes admitted to being drunk and hitting El-Amin first, and video from the scene corroborated this. But prosecutor Leah Saxtein, a white woman, still argued El-Amin was motivated by animus against “these girly men (Snipes and Adams),” an argument supported by a torrent of reporting that framed the incident as a “gay bashing.”

  When I first saw the breaking news story, I knew immediately that something was off. This particular Dallas BBQ is heavily frequented by Black, queer people, which was what made Kristen and me choose it that day for catching up. Morgan, who was straight, may not have known this, but regardless of whether El-Amin was queer himself, he likely was comfortable in the midst of queerness if he had any awareness of the establishment before going. I started asking around about the case, which eventually connected me to Mitchyll Mora, a founding member of Freedom 2 Live (F2L), a volunteer network aiming to support queer and trans people of color facing felony-level offenses in New York City.

  Mora, whose organizing around the case helped establish El-Amin’s defense, confirmed what I had suspected: not only was El-Amin queer himself, but he was actively involved in the LGBTQ community in the city. Many organizers focused on the issues of Black, queer people worked tirelessly to bring this information to mainstream LGBTQ organizations in an attempt to rally the community to defend El-Amin. Instead, a group of these mainstream LGBTQ organizations partnered with city council member Corey Johnson to hold a rally agai
nst “anti-gay” hate violence just after the incident. Instead, the New York Daily News put a photo of the “brute” El-Amin on the front page above the story of this imagined “gay bashing.” And instead, the NYPD, under the guidance of LGBTQ liaison Tim Duffy, publicly announced they were investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

  As a budding writer who had just launched my own publication, RaceBaitr, I joined a collective of activists and other Black journalists coordinating responses to illuminate El-Amin’s queerness and the fact that he was attacked first. I had some of my first major bylines at Mic and Slate writing about the case, but the narrative would not be changed. It was not ours to change. Councilman Johnson never returned my repeated emails and phone calls. To him and many others in the city, El-Amin could only be a brute. That is the story that reaches the widest audience possible, and so that is the story that sells. These most popular stories are also the ones that build prisons and that built this country.

  El-Amin’s sexuality, as well as the reality that he acted in self-defense, was visible from the beginning, and we made sure it remained so. But in September 2016, the judge agreed that El-Amin’s attack on Snipes was egregious and hateful. Even though hate-crime charges were never filed, El-Amin was sentenced to nine years in prison.

  “It is uncomfortable for me to discuss,” El-Amin told me in a letter recently, the weight of the whole ordeal raining down on him in his fourth year behind bars. He pointed out that Islamophobia likely also played a role in how the case proceeded, but “it has and could happen to any other Black man.”

  El-Amin’s presence as a queer person, and a victim of an attack, was made known in the midst of all the violence directed at him. But our stories don’t evoke sympathy from the carceral state, and so making them visible does not cause the state to direct its violence elsewhere. In El-Amin, in his “hulking” body, in his “brutish” Blackness, the visibility and representation of his full story could not save him.