Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  And this unwillingness for anyone in the world, including me, to ask what you wanted, or to believe in the validity of protecting you in your journey to finding it, is what killed you, not anything you did. And this unwillingness to ask what Black children need or to believe in the necessity of protecting them, instead turning to carceral measures to punish the already punished, has always been the deadliest crisis we face. Black children should always be supported, not exploited or blamed. I know that now.

  I’m sorry it took me so long to get here.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TRIGGER WARNING

  A cursory study of feminism revealed to me a long time ago that I needn’t say no to be sexually assaulted. But I would require a deeper understanding of power, coercion, and abuse to accept that I could say yes and still be. “Yes” comes with critical caveats. A child’s consent for a sex act with an adult, for example, is impossible. It is dependent upon the manipulation and exploitation of the child’s trust that their best interests are in the hearts of those tasked by society with protecting them—as they should be.

  The terms of our existence include that adults are to prioritize children’s well-being, but those terms are broken whenever an adult’s selfish pleasures are prioritized instead. An agreement whose terms are disregarded is not an agreement at all.

  But what are the terms children have for the agreements they make with one another?

  As thick as the fog around the memory of my first sexual experience is, it has always been clear to me that whatever happened inside that tent of sheets at the home of my mother’s friend was not rooted in the older boy’s concern for my well-being. I could understand that I didn’t deserve for anyone to get off on my body before my body could get off on itself. I knew I didn’t deserve for someone who did get off on my body prematurely to then leave me to suffer through the devastating confusion of being used for pleasure and discarded without concern, support, or guidance. But it took me years to call what happened “assault.”

  I couldn’t reconcile my concept of assault with the reality that this boy, though significantly older than I was, was still a child, too. He certainly had a far better grasp of the consequences of what he was doing. But knowing that I had agreed to and enjoyed what happened, and was not much younger than he was, wouldn’t allow me to direct blame in any logical way.

  Who is guilty when the innocent harm one another?

  I always wonder whether that boy had older boys of his own lurking in the homes of his family’s friends, his own insatiable pranksters who made him choose between facing their sadness or sharing in a liberating euphoria—which is never really a choice at all. To my knowledge, both he and the other boy, the one who asked me to perform fellatio on him behind my garage, grew up to identify as straight.

  Were these moments born from curiosities they’d been denied exploring in safe and healthy ways? What is curiosity without safety measures if not a hunt? Were either of them asked during their first time, and like me, did they say yes? Like me, did they not fully know what they were agreeing to, which would necessarily encourage their loss of faith that childhoods could be protected in the first place?

  I’ll never know their answers to these questions, though not for lack of wanting. But in my writing and speaking about the topic, I have had the opportunity to hear many other experiences with childhood sexual violence. Sometimes, it seems as if I don’t know a single person who hasn’t experienced this trauma. In fact, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 20 percent of all adults experience rape or sexual abuse by the age of eighteen. Because of their vulnerability in a society that does not support them, queer and gender-nonconforming children may be at even greater risk.37

  A 2011 study found that over 50 percent of transgender people had experienced sexual violence at some point in their lives, and of those, 72 percent had also survived childhood sexual abuse. Relatedly, an ongoing survey by the organization Black Women’s Blueprint has found that 60 percent of Black women are sexually assaulted by age eighteen, which falls between the 34.1 percent in a Boston community sample and the 65 percent in a Chicago sample who have reported childhood sexual abuse.38

  The number of us who have endured this devastation in one form or another is astounding, proof of an undeniable epidemic of misafropedia and childhoods stolen. But numbers are the best secret keepers, and there are some stories even they can never fully tell.

  My experience defied the scripts through which the state generally reads and quantifies sexual violence. My harm-doers and I were all Black boys. The state primarily defines sexual violence through specific lenses of gender, race, and age, which is why assaults on white women (and particularly at the hands of Black men) cause the most institutional outrage, concern, and punishment.39 My harm-doers and I were children, when the state views childhood sexual violence through a punitive lens designed for adults, which is why child-pornography laws in many states have punished children who consensually send explicit pictures of themselves to other children. This is also why, combined with the racial element, the childhoods of Emmett Till and the Central Park Five were hardly considered by these same institutions of “justice.”40 So even though what I went through shaped debilitating anxieties around sex and an overwhelming shame about my sexuality—which will probably affect me for the rest of my life—“assault” still never rolls easily off my tongue.

  I can only imagine how many other Black boys and girls and gender-nonconforming children have withstood assaults they couldn’t or wouldn’t name because the carceral state’s language wasn’t created to name them, and are therefore left out of these already breathtaking statistics. It’s apparent that healing from the epidemic of sexual violence requires a fuller picture, and that itself requires a lens on Blackness and the new language it affords.

  Just before the COVID-19 crisis struck, I was sitting with my friend George at a busy café in Brooklyn. George was writing a book about his experiences as a Black, queer person as well, and we often met there to write together. This time, I found myself stuck while writing about my experience with childhood sexual violence. I was still struggling with understanding the love language I used to speak with before the violation. I still didn’t know how to write about the harm the state conditions Black people to do to one another, and I didn’t know how to write about it with the proper amount of care for everyone involved.

  George asked to use the charger that we were sharing between us, and I was almost relieved that he did. I handed it over, closing my not-yet-fully-charged MacBook.

  “This is hard,” I admitted. “I’m trying to describe my first sexual experience, but I don’t know if I have the vocabulary for what actually happened.”

  He perked up, setting one henna-like tattooed hand on top of the other on the small table between us. “Oh, who was it with?”

  I hated to disappoint his eagerness for what should be a cute gay coming-of-age story.

  “A family friend,” I said apologetically. “An older one.”

  I was equal parts relieved and disheartened that he immediately got it. He placed his hands back on his lap, sucked one corner of his mouth toward his full sideburns, and gave a knowing nod. I explained what happened to me at nine or ten, the things I could and couldn’t remember, and how I learned that my Black body was both queer and not fully mine at all, and he cut me off.

  At first, I was resistant to the interruption. George can be talkative, and though I love him for how easily communication comes to him, this can be disorienting when I’m really crunching to get through a piece of writing or in the middle of telling a story. But even when I have the strictest deadlines, I always ask him to join me at the café. Even if every moment went uninterrupted, it still would never feel like enough time to write everything that needs writing, and sharing the time I do have with someone who is also trying to combat the violence that shapes these stories makes it feel far more productive.

  However, in this moment
I quickly realized that George was simply talking through my story for me, picking up right where he interjected and filling in the details I couldn’t or wouldn’t recall with his own recollections. George’s story and mine were so similar that for once I forgot that mine is covered in haze. His memory was my memory, and my memory became that of my childhood self again, too.

  “I’ve also always been afraid to call it assault,” George said, his large brown eyes betraying a gravity his excited voice countered, “because I don’t think my harm-doer was evil.”

  “I guess that’s what I am trying to get at. How we might have healed more if we could address this without our harm-doers having to be evil . . . if addressing harms wasn’t the same as punishment.”

  I still wasn’t entirely sure what the alternative looked like, I admitted to George. The carceral state requires us to be divided into good/evil binaries, and sometimes that feels like all I know. When I name the violence that happens to me, the carceral state tries to force me to punish and blame someone for it. If I refuse to punish and blame, it pressures me to give up naming my trauma. Healing from an assault when my harm-doer, emboldened by a culture swimming in rape, is not evil nonetheless requires a complete rejection of the carceral thinking that conditions me, and a refusal to strictly adhere to its language when that’s the language I’ve been given.

  I used to think prison abolition was just a question of the utility of physical human cages. Abolition was just about whether prison ends abuses or only concentrates them within its walls (and concentrates them among the marginalized incarcerated populations especially). It was just about how prisons have no concern for rehabilitation, which is why almost half of criminal offenders in the United States reoffend.41

  But it was finally becoming clear that prison abolition was also about the way the punitive victim/perpetrator binary that undergirds prisons prevents us from having room to heal. Abolition is a rejection of a world in which punishment takes the place of that room to heal, a world in which blame takes the place of accountability.

  This world doesn’t give us words for alternatives, which makes abolition the Blackest language. Abolition asks us to consider not-yet-named realities, like one where we would rather lessen further wrongs than just harm the people who have wronged us. It asks us to look beyond good/evil binaries to truly reckon with the more complicated scripts Black lives actually follow.

  If prison isn’t the solution to social ills, then I have to consider my own role in solving them and rededicate myself to upholding the terms of a social agreement to prioritize the well-being of others—especially Black children—over punitive measures.

  Prison abolition is intrinsically linked to Black liberation, as both require us to think of harm as existing not just within the singular moment it occurs. Prison abolition requires me to fully interrogate both American history and its notions of justice that target and incarcerate Black people specifically. A history of five-year-old Kodi Gaines being shot by agents of the state in his mother’s arms. Of seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones being shot dead by agents of the state in her grandmother’s home. Of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice being shot dead by agents of the state while playing in a park.

  To heal from these harms would require I not be confined to believing that when these harms stop happening, the effects of them are done. Harm lasts. What happened to me and George and too many Black children is always happening. And it is happening to children everywhere. I cannot fix it by punishing individual people for individual actions in an individual past.

  I violated my ex-partner. It happened five years ago. “Assault” doesn’t roll easily off the tongue in this case either. He was drunk, a too-common state for both of us then, and though I had been drinking, too, I was more or less aware of what was going on. We had just come back from a party, and as soon as we got home, he went to bed while I took a shower. When I came to join him, he was lying still, looking as beautiful as anything that has ever belonged to me. I went to tell him so, whispered it in his ear as I kissed his neck, and then I went to show him. I want for that to mean I went to show him that he was beautiful, but in truth I went to show him that he belonged to me.

  Because my ex was generally the initiator, I don’t remember ever being turned down for sex with him, and I didn’t assume this time would be any different. It was. In this moment, his consent also came with a critical caveat, his “yes” slurred and busy with extra consonants because of the alcohol still working its way through his body. His consent was dependent upon the trust that I had his best interests at heart, but I had made room for only my desires. His consent was dependent on my willingness to step back and safely assess his level of consciousness, and I broke the terms of the agreement we had made in committing to each other when I did not.

  I usually start this story off with how I eventually stopped. With how my ex and I talked about it later and he insisted what happened was fine. Rather than a trigger warning, this is how I jam the gun. This is how I try to ensure that no one gets killed here, even though refusing to honestly acknowledge fully the dynamics of situations like this is exactly why I haven’t healed from my own sexual trauma, is exactly what stole away the child I used to be. I want readers to know that my ex laughed about me even bringing these concerns up, because a part of me still wants to summon enough laughter into yet another thing filled with sadness to make everything all right.

  I once told this story to a group of sexual assault survivors, and they pushed back against calling it the same thing that they had experienced.

  “Making your ex a victim when he said he wasn’t is razing his consent all over again,” a white woman told me dismissively. She had a point. This language is never adequate enough, and if my ex says “victim” didn’t describe him in that moment, then maybe it didn’t. And I wonder if she was pushing back against the patriarchal idea that, simply by virtue of my admission, I might be celebrated as one of the “good ones” without doing anything more tangible to rectify the harm I caused. But she didn’t acknowledge the ways people who experience sexual violence in a patriarchal society, especially Black people, are conditioned not to name the harms we endure.

  Even if my ex doesn’t claim to have been the victim of sexual violence in that exact moment, it shouldn’t mean violence didn’t occur or that my actions weren’t harmful, though the carceral state might determine otherwise. The lack of victim cooperation is a common excuse for prosecutors to not pursue sexual assault cases. And regardless of whether a conviction in court results in healing, it is telling that this lack of cooperation is a primary factor in why just 2 percent of rapes are estimated to lead to one.42

  Almost all the survivors of serial child abuser and former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar admit that they did not at first consider the sexual abuse he enacted to be wrong, because he wrapped up his assaults in the jargon of medical justifications. Just because a survivor doesn’t consciously know it or want their harm-doer to be punished doesn’t mean there is no harm to a pattern of exploiting others that must be addressed. What I did to my ex was just one example of behaviors I learned and affirmed over time, behaviors that don’t just affect a single person in a single moment but inform how I harmed others throughout my life—and how I allowed myself to be harmed.

  Exploiting a body that does not belong to us is never just about making someone else a victim in a point in time; it is also about claiming the right to use power and control however we wish throughout our lives, a right the carceral state upholds. I say I assaulted my partner not just to make him a victim but because I failed to prioritize his well-being, despite the way his words slurred away any possible consent, and because I know that I made myself just like the older boy who assaulted me in that tent of sheets.

  When I call what I did five years ago a violation, I mean to say that I was creating myself in my harm-doers’ image. I was finishing off the job I’d started long ago of grave-robbing the little boy from inside me and replacing him with
someone who knew no tenderness at all. Robbing Black childhoods is a job the carceral state has entrusted to me, entrusted to that older boy in the tent, and entrusted to all of us who accept living under the anti-Black project of misafropedia.

  My ex saying that what I did was okay is an old beginning to this story, a beginning I must work to reject if I am ever to help put a stop to this cycle of abuse. If I am ever to heal from my debilitating anxieties around sex and an overwhelming shame about my sexuality.

  Exploiting my ex’s body for my own pleasure was a culmination of the ideas I had internalized through years of carceral logics. Through binary ideas about guilt and innocence, good and bad, punishment and injustice. Ideas about who owns Black bodies, how the bodies of Black people, particularly of Black queer and femme and women folk, never belong to themselves and are always commodities.

  It was these carceral ideas that allowed me, as a drunk, gay college kid, to grab the bodies of female friends to whom I wasn’t attracted as a “joke” or to push up on people at bars just because I was attracted to them. There will always be an excuse for harm in a carceral state when we pretend the harms of a moment are about only that moment and not about the history of a state that intentionally targets certain communities. For a long time, I pretended that punishment was the only answer to individuals acting out a culture of violence, a culture that has been well established by the state. And if I go on pretending, I can never destabilize that violent establishment. I can never know better answers.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A PRAYER FOR FREEDOM