by Hari Ziyad
El-Amin’s case illuminates the specific failure of visibility and representation at the intersection of Blackness. For years I stewed on the injustice of his case without any logical way to explain it, until a doctoral student friend referred me to Frank Wilderson III’s book of film criticism, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. In the book, Wilderson revisits James Baldwin’s essay “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in which Baldwin explains the dynamic with his friend and white writer Norman Mailer as being one where Mailer “still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose.” Wilderson argues that the “something to save” that Black people lack is the relationship an owner has with interchangeable objects: the relationship white people have with Black people within a slave system.30 Reading Red, White & Black, along with Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, most powerfully illuminated for me the reality that for visibility to effectively improve the plight of marginalized people, empathy must be evoked, and this world is specifically designed not to empathize with Black people.
For empathy to be activated, a witness has to interpret someone else’s pain and see it as similar to their own. When Black pain not only is seen as dissimilar to the viewer but also gives them pleasure—when our bodies have been defined as inherently criminal—it’s no wonder that police body camera footage of an unarmed Black person being murdered so rarely leads to a conviction. It’s no wonder that news stations replay it over and over again anyway. It’s no wonder that our retaliation for being attacked and killed is so consistently made out to be unconscionable.
Even for the mainstream organizations and politicians that claimed to protect and defend LGBTQ people, only Smith’s queerness registered as in need of defending, while El-Amin’s, if it even registered at all, did not. Hardly any of the politicians who called for El-Amin’s head set the record straight or came to his defense when he was named queer or when video showed he was attacked first. The media organizations didn’t issue corrections. None of these truths changed how the prosecutor classified El-Amin’s act of self-defense as hateful or how the judge agreed. Pushing back against what seeks to destroy us almost always gets Black people labeled as bullyish brutes by the actors in this carceral system, no matter whether our being destroyed is represented and seen or not.
This truth informed my mission for RaceBaitr and all the work I have done as a journalist and editor at publications like Black Youth Project since El-Amin’s case. If Black people are to have honest responses to our experiences, we will necessarily be attacked as “race baiters” by those who wield a carceral gaze and witness our bodies as inherently criminal.
My work and the work that the RaceBaitr editors feature on the site are not an appeal for those who wield the carceral gaze to change their minds. They are to provide a place for us to work through the dissonance the carceral gaze creates, without conforming, appealing, or pleading to it. I believe that providing this space is all that our writing can do. I encourage Black writers to write like writing won’t save us. Like only what comes after will. Like something must come after. And if others want to call that race-baiting, if they want to call us brutes, if they want to call us undeserving of recognition, fine. The work is not in trying to transform the carceral gaze; it’s in trying to destroy it.
“Remember El-Amin?” I asked Kristen, looking around at the crowded restaurant and the multicolored Texas-size margaritas lining every other table. It was still filled with Black and queer people, as if the restaurant hadn’t shown us they didn’t want us here. My friend and I were still sitting there as if we hadn’t seen the antipathy for us that they’d made visible, too. Kristen just laughed that sorrowful laugh of hers.
“I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she howled.
“I fucking hate Jonathan Snipes and Ethan Adams,” I told her. “I fucking hate how many Black people have been taken away, one after another, because we aren’t ‘people’ to them. I hate how long I tried to suppress that feeling. How easy it is to try and suppress it now, in an effort to be seen by them.”
“We should try to find Snipes.” She laughed, but she knew this wasn’t funny.
“I don’t know what I would do if I saw him.”
“You don’t have to,” she said, more serious now. “You shouldn’t have to always contain your anger before you can feel it.”
I think I get it now. When I was a child, disappearing to steal jam from the fridge, I didn’t worry that I might end up separated from my parents forever. To be unseen doesn’t always have to mean that I am erased. We don’t need to see ourselves on their screens to know that we are not monsters. We know this before we learn otherwise. We have other platforms, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities, that show us this naturally. We don’t need to be seen in their media to be valued. We just need whatever is seen not to be used to erase our value. We need whatever is represented in their media not to be shoved down our throats and internalized. Yes, representation matters, but we don’t need our own versions of their propaganda. We represent ourselves in how we show up in our relationships with one another every day.
I had forgotten that a story that doesn’t involve a person is different from a story that precludes their existence. The carceral state wants me to believe that I can matter only if I am the hero of its stories, because if I believe that, it still gets to tell those stories. Because then we have to keep begging to be let in, to not be the villain, to not be the criminal of their tales. We have to put our faith in “diversity” and changing the colors and genders of people on-screen without changing what is being said about those colors and genders. The carceral state wants us to believe we can’t tell stories differently about how Blackness is criminalized, or tell those stories to other audiences, for purposes other than to communicate with the state, on its terms.
While reading Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe’s groundbreaking book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, I found further clarity on what makes this essential: “I am not interested in rescuing the Black being(s) for the category of ‘Human,’ misunderstood as ‘Man,’ . . . both of those languages and the material conditions they re/produce continue to produce our fast and slow deaths. I am interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, and refuse it.”
Sharpe argues that the work is not to increase our representation in media to try and humanize ourselves for the carceral gaze but to participate in what she calls processes of “Black annotation” and “Black redaction” in this media landscape built on carceral logics. She describes Black annotation and Black redaction as work “toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame.”31
Like Sharpe (and, indeed, in part because of what I learned from her), I am no longer interested in telling my story to those wielding a carceral gaze. This story is not exceptional, and those who have told something like it to the world before me have not been spared. Those who have told something like it to the world are often stepping into the line of fire, being made to strip their Blackness from those stories, to put out their own light.
I no longer need to see myself in their tales to know that I can exist outside the world the tale describes. To know that it is not the only tale there is, just because it is the only tale they advertise. I no longer need to tell them our stories because their advertisements make it feel like “no one is talking about” those stories. To believe that is to erase the very people those stories pertain to, who obviously talk about their own lives, loves, struggles, and triumphs, sharing these stories among their own communities.
Transgender women whose sisters’ deaths don’t get media attention aren’t “no one,” and they are talking, even without being represented in films like the one I made about Arielle. Black, queer folks like El-Amin aren’t “no one,” and they tell their stories even when the media doesn’t listen. Black, queer C
leveland boys like I was aren’t “no one.” They are real people whom we should love and care for and learn from regardless of whether they are given a platform to be represented to this world. And we can learn from them only if their platforms are made sacred—platforms that are not meant to advertise for this world. Platforms that don’t always look as fancy as what we see on TV, platforms like the community center around the corner or your auntie’s house down the street.
I no longer need to see myself in the tales told by and through the carceral state, but I have to be able to imagine myself outside of them.
The question isn’t how to tell the stories that the carceral state’s media isn’t. The question is much bigger: How do I put Black annotation and redaction into practice to go beyond this limited way of telling stories? How do I understand the stories beneath the lies this world tells? How do I embrace and embolden those who stay away or are forced out from under the scorching limelight of the carceral gaze? How do I use any distance from carceral gazes to my advantage? What can that distance teach me about myself that I would never know otherwise?
CHAPTER TEN
A PRAYER FOR CHOICE
Hari-Gaura,
I still hate wearing button-down shirts. It’s not just that they make my body look as boxy as if it were being rendered on an old Nintendo 64. I hate how they feel like stiff cotton hands itching to tighten fatally around my throat when fastened all the way up, threatening every next breath. How the top button sometimes pinches my Adam’s apple when I manage it through its hole, calling to mind the excruciatingly long wait I suffered for the lump to develop, thinking I needed it to define my manhood. How that pinch almost feels like it did when Mata would squeeze your skin between her bone-thick nails if you were acting up in public, but hers left scars much easier to heal.
There are other scars all over this body reminding me of how you were lost. The gash above my left eyebrow from losing a fight at the basketball court, trying to prove myself tough and unafraid of other boys. The one on my elbow from scraping the ground while winning a fight trying to prove the same. Each carries within its lesser regenerated tissues a memory of how Black children who claim freedom to be themselves are discarded when they are allowed only to be what they are told. I don’t own much formal wear because their typical gendered limitations only draw attention to the marks left behind from all these cotton-picked pinches I’ve endured to become who I am today, marks that together compose a map showing just how far I am from you now. Marks that remind me how, as a queer person in this world, I have been struggling to breathe.
But last summer, I had to buy a button-down shirt for our brother Syama’s wedding because the formal long-sleeve I brought with me instead would have been too hot in the ninety-five-degree Houston heat. It was so hot in the city that if you stepped outside, you’d instantly crave to fight, either to prove yourself or not. I said I would wear it only that one time. But a month after Syama’s wedding, there I was, choosing to put on that damn white button-down again. Forcing this body into discomfort for the sake of looking presentable again. Failing at bringing you back again.
I’ve been mostly successful at staying away from churches and temples and mosques since graduating high school and leaving choir, but a few months ago Aunt Cheryl passed away unexpectedly, and I flew back to Cleveland for her church funeral. You didn’t know her well, and I never really got to know her much better after you left. She struggled with addiction most of the time you were here, but when she was around, she was always kind and generous to her nieces and nephews.
Aunt Cheryl was the type who would give us a few crumpled dollars from the bottom of her purse when she saw us and had it, and a prayer when she didn’t. She didn’t often have money, and so she was usually praying. A true God-fearing woman, like all Mother Bhūmi’s children. All pillars of the same churches I now take great measures to avoid but somehow always seem to find my way back inside anyway.
I wasn’t sure I would go to Aunt Cheryl’s funeral. The insides of churches aren’t always as hot as Houston had been just days prior, but when you’re queer, they tend to make you feel the urge to fight, too. Funerals tend to tighten up in your throat like that button-down to remind you of what you’re lacking, too. But I felt like I had to show up on Mata’s behalf.
“It happened so fast,” she told me over the phone as she drove back to Cleveland from Gita Nagari, the Hare Kṛṣṇa commune in Pennsylvania. I wondered whether she had been crying, and I wasn’t sure whether it would be more comforting if she had been.
Mata couldn’t make the funeral because the church where it was held wouldn’t change the date, and she couldn’t reschedule a previously set engagement with the Vaiṣṇava community in Toronto.
“Isn’t that a shame?” she told me. She explained that Aunt Cheryl had given all her money to this church. “Basically funded it!” Mata exaggerated, shaking her head at their inflexibility. At how little a God-fearing woman gets in return for all her dollars and prayers, without mentioning the possibility of inflexibility on the part of a god who would have her miss her sister’s funeral.
You wouldn’t believe it, but Aunt Cheryl’s daughter Taylor is a full-fledged evangelist now. To the point where it wouldn’t be her mother’s funeral if she didn’t get up and preach. My fiancé, Timothy, is a slam poet, and he says half-jokingly that Black church preaching isn’t that much different from spoken word: the performance gets a person more points than the substance. I half-jokingly agree. At the funeral, Taylor started her poem with a verse about how we give more energy to our favorite celebrities than to God and discussed how her mother’s death was a reminder that we need to rectify this problem before it’s too late.
“We stay up all night—amen—waiting for the new Jay-Z album to drop—praise God. But how long—amen—do we stay up for him?! Praise God!” she shouted, spinning on a single red heel, the other foot kicked up in front of her to cap off the show.
The judges held their hands up, snapped their fingers, and shouted—a perfect score of 10. But all I could think about were the things our aunt didn’t rectify in life. All I could think about was how spoken-word scores are inherently biased against marginalized people because they rely on the reactions of random audience members—who, even though the spoken-word community is diverse, are still unlikely to share the most marginalized experiences with the most marginalized performer—and how I never did like the scoring part of the process all that much.
During the repast, Taylor came to hug me and remarked on how handsome I was in that ugly white button-down.
“You make sure to tell them girls no unless they are saved!” she said with a wink. I forced a smile and told her sincerely how sorry I was for her loss—our loss—and she earnestly thanked me. But I am almost positive she knew I was queer. She follows me on Facebook. She once warned my mother after I posted a picture of the tattoo on my back depicting a scene from a Hindu myth in which Kṛṣṇa takes a half-man, half-lion form that I was worshipping demons. It’s the natural next step on the gay agenda, I guess. Mata told me afterward that she was actually worried by Taylor’s message until she saw the picture; then she laughed. I was surprised at how quickly Mata would have believed it.
After Taylor’s sermon, Auntie Grace went up to the lectern behind large black sunglasses that swallowed half of her face. She has always had a thing for flair, and I have always loved her for it. I am still closest to her of all Mata’s siblings, and like all of them, she is still anti-queer in a “hate the sin, not the sinner” kind of way. I’m used to it. It’s one of the reasons I wore this button-down, to look less like the sinner I was. Distance from myself allows a type of proximity to the people I love that sometimes doesn’t feel like closeness at all.
“I can’t see,” Auntie Grace said in her Kansan accent, which had been watered down only slightly by a decade of living back in Cleveland. After fussing with the glasses, she huffed and finally tossed them aside. All the congregants laughed, making
a sound like bubbles pushing through boiling water, hissing sniffles left over from crying just the moment before.
Auntie Grace shared with the congregation how the family was so focused on Mata after her cancer diagnosis that the death of her other sister felt like being blindsided by a truck, and everybody laughed again at how funny God is. But if God stays reminding us to look both ways before crossing the street and we stay limiting his messages so that we can focus on just one side or the other, I think that makes us the funny ones.
Daddy says you were ambidextrous. He says it with such pride.
“Your mother and her mother didn’t like that, though.” He shakes his head at their inflexibility. I vaguely recall Mother Bhūmi slapping your fork away once when she saw you eating with your left hand, disgust bleeding from her shiny eyes.
“The left hand is unclean!” our grandmother said, pointing to scripture and using a term I would later hear Mata repeat to describe my sexuality. The two of them joined forces to pressure you to stop using your left hand all the way up until you were gone. Sometimes, I try to write with mine to bring you back, but the words just come out shaky and unfocused. The words just come out as this bizarre attempt at explaining away why I am still wearing a shirt that you never would have worn, while claiming to want you to return.
Most of the family showed up to the homegoing. I had seen our cousins only a few times since moving to New York nine years earlier, and at Aunt Cheryl’s funeral, I told them the same thing I said at Mother Bhūmi’s, the last time I saw them: “We have got to do a better job of keeping in touch!” But ever since losing you, the deaths of other family members have been the only things that have managed to bring everybody back together.