Douglass was an illiterate slave. Malcolm was a dope-dealing gangster. Douglass had a teacher who barely taught him phonetics, and he took it upon himself to become a voracious and critical reader. Malcolm went to prison, and his journey to literacy began with his decision to copy thousands of words and definitions from the dictionary. They were me. I, too, was enslaved by ignorance. I, too, wanted to be delivered from the prison of my inferiority. I, too, felt the nakedness of being unlearned.
Rage mounted in me as I devoured these books. A certain fire is sparked when you realize that you’ve been deceived. All my life I’d believed that Black scholars didn’t exist. Maybe they existed somewhere in the world, but not in mine. They weren’t in my neighborhoods. They weren’t on my television. They weren’t in the textbooks that teachers wanted me to read. All I saw was Black gangstas and Black drug dealers and Black athletes. So that’s what I wanted to be, because that’s what I thought Black people did. Representation is the lens through which we aspire. I saw Allen Iverson—with his cornrows and tattoos and urban swag—and I thought I could be him, because he looked like me. Sure, I had heard that only three of every ten thousand high school players ever make it to the NBA. But representation impacted me more than probability. When I saw Iverson, Stephon Marbury, and Vince Carter, I saw myself. And that was all that mattered for a kid who was learning how to dream.
Why is it that basketball was all I ever wanted? It’s because passion is born through exposure and affirmation. My mother had put a ball in my hands. She’d showed me what to do with it. Then she’d told me that I was good. But what if someone had put a book in my hands instead of a ball? What if someone had showed me how to read and then told me that I was smart? What if that book had exposed me to something great about my people and my identity that I could be proud of? What if it had showed that I was a part of a rich legacy of greatness? What if it had exposed me to my heritage and native land in a way that did not depict Africa as the quintessence of poverty? What if it had showed me something about my culture that is inspiring, not injurious, and that did not pretend that Black history began with slavery, or that did not relegate Black achievement to a four-hundred-year freedom struggle?
As I kept on reading, I soon realized that history is told by the victor. Told from the perspective of the person who wields the pen like a spoil of war. And the oppressed are left with a narrow study of their own defeat, left out of the story or indoctrinated with the fiction of inferiority. My life would have been completely different had I known these truths. But I knew them now. And I was ready to do the work of undoing my own miseducation.
My newfound passion consumed me like a flame. I was determined to transform myself. And I was willing to pay the price by any means necessary. The first step was my decision to trade my home entertainment equipment for a home library.
On that fateful day, I walked into the apartment as my roommates were playing NBA 2K on the PlayStation. I unplugged the cords in the middle of their game.
“Bro, what are you doing?” Stephon yelled, jumping to his feet like I had thrown a punch.
“I’m packing it up,” I said. I gathered the PlayStation, the forty-inch television, and every form of entertainment hardware I owned. I took pictures of it all and posted it for sale on Craigslist. I accepted the first bidder. I used the proceeds to buy a cheap desk, an office chair, and some bookshelves. The rest I spent on books, including a set of textbooks covering grammar and reading for grades seven through twelve. I wanted nothing else. I gave up games, sports, and girls (kinda) for over a year. Each day after class and my part-time shift at the campus bookstore, I shut myself in my room. I started with seventh grade and eventually worked my way up to twelfth-grade proficiency. Coach and Professor Nelson had laid down the challenge. And I trained to be a scholar with the same intensity that I’d trained to be an athlete.
I struggled at first. I couldn’t keep my eyes from tearing as I tried to understand the literature. But I wouldn’t let up. I grew weary and fell asleep, but I woke up and kept pushing. In a notebook, I wrote down the definitions of unfamiliar words. I practiced using them in everyday conversations until they were committed to memory. I kept pushing. I barely wanted to stop to eat. Over time, those big words stopped tasting like spinach. I became a better reader. The paragraphs that I once had to read three times to comprehend I could now understand on the first try. My stamina increased and I could read one, then two, then three chapters without giving up. I felt like a champion. And it hit me that maybe I wasn’t dumb after all. Maybe I was always capable of this. Maybe, all along, I was simply disinterested and disenfranchised from a world in which I never saw myself.
One day, I was reading when Walter interrupted my concentration. “Bro, you know those aren’t the only Black scholars, right?” Walter was one of my five roommates. We were all recovering dropouts, taking a second run at college while crammed into a two-bedroom apartment where we slept on floor pallets because we could not afford beds. The most any of us paid for rent was $150 a month, yet eviction forced us to move repeatedly.
Walter and I had something in common: back in New Jersey, he had lived the real nigga life and then dropped out of college when a knee injury abruptly derailed his football career. He’d moved to Lynchburg to start a new life and enroll at one of the other local colleges. But there was one distinct difference between Walter and me: he had previously attended an HBCU before dropping out. And there, at now defunct Saint Paul’s College, students were expected to know about members of the Black intelligentsia who were strangers to me.
“Listen to me, bro,” he continued. “Here’s who I want you to look up.…” His must-read list included W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke. I had never heard of these people or the Harlem Renaissance. “They will change your life,” he said. And he was right.
I read hungrily, consuming every book I could find written by or about Black intellectuals. One Black scholar led me to another. When Walter returned home from his work shift at Foot Locker, I ambushed him at the door.
“Bro, have you heard of Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson?” I thought I was teaching him something. But he sighed, shook his head, and said, “You PWIs.” I hadn’t known that this was shorthand for schools like Liberty, which were “predominantly white institutions.”
Each time I approached Walter with a new discovery, asking if he’d heard about Angela Davis or James Baldwin or Henry Louis Gates Jr., he chuckled in amusement and said, “Of course, bro.” Then he would add another name to my scavenger-hunt list of Black scholars.
“Look up Cornel West,” Walter said. “He will change your life.”
Walter was right for the second time. I found Dr. West’s books, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and I watched every speech and lecture that I could find on YouTube. He looked like a mad scientist and exuded charisma like I had never seen. I grabbed my pen and pad and became his disciple.
Walter and I had spirited debates that kept us up all night. I learned that Du Bois, Woodson, and West were graduates of Harvard. In haste, I concluded that Ivy League schools must be the apex of academic achievement and the ultimate destination for Black scholars. Walter weaponized Booker T. Washington to argue the contrary. He charged that while those schools have prestige, they do not serve the immediate needs of Black people, beginning with the urgency of teaching the Black man to love himself. I took the opposite position, thinking that studying at an Ivy League would place me in the intellectual ranks of the Black scholars I was growing to admire. I yearned to visit Harvard someday, just to walk the same halls as those legends had.
Walter guided me through the Black literary canon. He helped me understand the Black freedom struggle and the Harlem Renaissance thinkers’ brilliant use of art as an instrument of activism and abolitionism. I became passionate about everything Black.
There was a renaissance in me. I was being remade, reborn, reinvented. And it all started to make sense
why school had missed me for all of my life. When has anyone ever become passionate about something that wasn’t personal? I was conditioned to only see the imperialized forms of Blackness. I watched movies and television shows that commercialized our toxicity and commodified our culture and our traumas in ways that do not improve our social condition. I attended schools that saturated me with stories of white exceptionalism and Black conquest.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said that every man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. This could not have been truer for Black people in America. At home, at school, at church—I saw the links of chains that we did not create ourselves. And I was ready to free them. Carter G. Woodson exclaimed that teaching a Black man that his skin is cursed and his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. And as Walter spent hours with me, sharing in the gritty work of digging deep into the mines of my heart and mind and soul to undo my miseducation—it felt like he was doing more than teaching me. He was helping me remove the noose from around my neck.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE GREAT DEBATER
I wanted to be more than a scholar. I wanted to be an orator. I studied videos of Black orators like Cornel West and said, I want to do that. I wanted to electrify large groups of people the way he did. He had a voice that was rich in power and inspiration. He had a voice that I yearned for but had not yet found.
I consumed Black books and I watched Black documentaries and Black movies about Black orators. I watched the biopic about Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington. When I searched online for similar films, I discovered a bootleg version of a 2007 movie called The Great Debaters, set in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. I clicked the link, sat in my new home office, and was transported.
Denzel Washington plays Mr. Melvin B. Tolson—an avant-garde educator who was influenced by the same Black scholars I’d been reading about. His methods were unorthodox. His style was theatrical. In one of the opening scenes, Denzel enters a classroom of precocious youth. Dressed in his wide-legged suit, he drops his briefcase, plants one foot on a chair, and boosts himself onto a desktop. He surveys the room, and then exclaims:
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes.
But I laugh.
And eat well.
And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I will sit at the table when company comes.
Nobody will dare say to me, “Eat in the kitchen” then.
Besides, they’ll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed.
I, too, am American.
It felt electrifying. In the film, Tolson is a professor who teaches debate and moonlights as a union leader. The actor Nate Parker plays the supporting role of Henry Lowe, a drunken, sex-crazed teenager. When Lowe nearly stabs a man, Tolson intervenes, looks beyond Lowe’s delinquent behavior, and sees within Lowe the captain of the debate team he wants to build.
Watching alone in my room, I wanted to be Tolson. And in Lowe, I saw myself. When Tolson invites elite white institutions to debate his team at tiny Wiley College, he is largely ignored. Intercollegiate debate was highly segregated in the 1930s and Wiley College was too small, too poor, and too Black. But Tolson’s team wins almost all the matches he can line up and finally commands the attention of the school they want to face most: Harvard College, the undergraduate division of the university. The historic duel unfolds on the stage of the venerable Sanders Theatre. The place is packed, a national radio audience tunes in, and the Wiley College team wins.
I closed my laptop, stunned, full, and yet empty. I thought, Damn, if only debate were a real thing. In those short eighty minutes, I had fallen in love with the charisma and aggression of debate. Injury had ended my life as a basketball star and I had nowhere to channel my competitive drive. But then I thought, Wait a minute. I’ve seen debate somewhere before.
I snatched my keys and sped to campus, sprinting to DeMoss Hall—where I had once met with Professor Nelson. Darkness was falling and the cleaning crew was buffing the floors of empty hallways. And there it was. The trophy case glowed with rows of medals, cups, and plaques engraved LIBERTY UNIVERSITY, CHAMPIONS. And on the wall, above the case, were those four providential words: LIBERTY UNIVERSITY DEBATE CENTER.
I earned a position on the debate team, my athletic prowess translated effortlessly into masterful debate, and I became an undefeated champion. That was the story I imagined. In reality, however, that did not happen. Debate was not the sensational gladiatorial contest it appeared to be in The Great Debaters. And I was far from Henry Lowe.
I pictured myself on a grand stage, my words stroking the heartstrings of an enraptured throng who would burst into thunderous applause when I finished. Instead, I found myself in a small room with my partner, my two opponents, and one judge, having to argue about the role of nongovernmental organizations in foreign affairs. My sensational dream turned into a nightmare.
I joined the debate team in the early stages of my intellectual metamorphosis, when my wings were still too damp and weak for flight. Most of my reading had focused on Black intellectual history in the United States. I had drawn a color line around my own curiosity. I knew much about the Harlem Renaissance but nothing about Caravaggio. I knew of Frederick Douglass but not of Friedrich Nietzsche. Economic theory, international policy, and comparative government were areas beyond my ken. The only sociopolitical issues that engaged me were ones with obvious connections to me as a Black man, or at least to Black people somewhere. Unfortunately, knowledge of Black history, at the time, counted for nothing in the white-dominated world of college debate where the focus was on socioeconomic policy.
When our team gathered for practice, I knew I was out of my league: my teammates had been recruited because they were top-ranked high school debaters; I was a walk-on who had never been coached and who lacked fundamentals.
Nevertheless, I earned a spot on the novice team and we set out for our season opener at Binghamton University. The novice and varsity teams loaded onto a chartered bus for a seven-hour haul to upstate New York.
As we rolled through the night, I sat in the back of the bus thinking about the even longer journeys I’d made to basketball games and major tournaments. This bus ride was much different. I was traveling with teammates, but not with brothers. There were no freestyle battles, roasting sessions, or coaches yelling at us to stop cursing. There were no cheerleaders in the front to fraternize with. On this trip, my teammates spent the night pecking away at their laptops and exchanging research files.
When we finally arrived, hundreds of college teams gathered for the opening assembly. A quick scan of the auditorium revealed that no one looked like me. There was a smattering of Black students, but even they didn’t look, walk, or talk like me. A voice in my head hissed, What the fuck is your ghetto ass doing here? The haughty stares of the nerdy kids sizing me up seemed to be asking the same question.
I felt sorry for my partner because he deserved better. After we lost our third consecutive round, Connor was obviously tired of carrying deadweight. Our next stop was a lecture hall where the judge waited with our opponent: two Ivy League debaters with an undefeated record. One of them was a white guy with red hair, glasses, and freckles; the other was a Black guy who wore dress shoes with white ankle socks. A lectern stood between two tables facing the judge, who was armed with his timer and a notepad. We took our seats and opened the files containing our constructive cases. Connor started prepping, and I probably should have, too. But I was so distracted by those white ankle socks that I snapped a picture of them with my BlackBerry phone and sent it to friends, captioned “LOL.”
“Are both teams ready?” the judge asked as I pressed send.
He tossed the coin, we called for tails, and the coin landed in our favor.
“Will Liberty University take the affirmative or negative?” the judge asked.
In intercollegiate debate, teams come prepared with arguments for both sides. We had lost the first three rounds
with our negative case, so we chose the affirmative in hopes of a better outcome.
Before taking the podium for the first speech, Connor pulled me aside to make sure I knew our strategy.
“I’ll deliver the first speech and you do the second,” he said. Then he added, “And try not to screw up this time.”
Connor had a right to be angry. After all, he did the research, wrote the cases, and practically gave all of the speeches. I was like the kid in the group project who barely participates but smiles and nods during the presentation, hoping to get an A for showing up.
The judge motioned for the debate to begin. “We’ll start with the first affirmative constructive.”
Michael settled his laptop on the lectern. “Opponents, ready?” He received a nod from the other team. “Judge, ready?” The stone-faced arbiter followed suit. “Teammate, ready?” I gave a signal with my pen in hand.
Then he began. “We affirm resolved: The United States should substantially increase its democracy assistance for Egypt by providing aid for democratic elections.”
The ride back to Lynchburg, Virginia, was long and solemn. Connor and I didn’t talk to our teammates on the bus, and we certainly didn’t talk to each other. I had the entire back row to myself with several empty rows between us, because he didn’t want to be anywhere near me. Other pairs celebrated their success, examining the medals they’d received for speaker points and polishing their trophies for earning ranks. Connor and I were the only two who didn’t break through prelims. We had lost every single round and were not even close.
I sat with my head against the window, watching the night pass and wishing I could disappear into it. No one would forgive me for that final round. Everyone chokes or stumbles at one time or another, but I’d fumbled over words—or worse, had no words at all—round after round. The constructive speeches were written in advance—by Connor, of course—and all I had to do was stick to the script. I’d channeled my inner Henry Lowe and read the speech with all the passion I could muster. But when my opponent stood to cross-examine me, I’d frozen harder than a polar ice cap. I was not prepared to defend an argument I did not write or engage on a subject I did not understand. My opponent shot me a question that I couldn’t answer. Then he struck me with claim to logical fallacy. And after he’d bullied me into a fetal position, he finished me off with his closing statement: “Judge, it is apparent that my opponent lacks a fundamental understanding of his own case, and for this reason, they cannot win this debate.” All Connor could do was watch, like a trainer whose fighter is bleeding on the ropes.
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