I am a Black and Latino man. I wake up some mornings and read the paper. I close the paper and turn on the news. As I witness the myriad of injustices suffered at the hands of racist white Americans, I grow more and more disgusted by the hour. It seems to me that in this supposed land of the free, home of the brave, the white imagination still holds more dominance, more credibility while the black imagination is deemed one that is not rooted in reality. What exactly is the black imagination? It is a way of seeing that still heavily relies on the perception of the white gaze. It is a reaching imagination that searches for validation in white approval. It is a way of seeing that needs to be justified by white eyes in order to be deemed legitimate. It overidentifies with the systems that try and destroy black people. It demonizes black experience and sees it as defective, reactive, diseased and wrong. It is a place where we as black people are believed to always be “imagining” racism where there is no racism, assigning racist motives where there are no racist motives. It is an imagination that is interpreted as hypervigilant, trauma-induced and as a sickness to be treated with doses of denial, disbelief, rejection and suspicion. The moment we as black people tell our story, give language to our experience, we are seen as “playing the race card”, over reacting, reading too much into a relatively innocuous encounter. We are met with suspicion and accusation. Our experience? Often times invalidated and dismissed. We are made to think that our experience is all make-believe when in fact it is very real. But the burden of proof is always placed in our hands while at the same time annihilated by the white gaze. It is always the goal to protect the sanctity of the white ego at the expense of black experience. In this it seems that we as black people in America continue to live hand to mouth off the scraps of white perception. Our truth is only deemed valid if it is seen or heard or felt by white people. It’s like the ancient koan, if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Another interpretation of this ancient quandary is: if a black man falls at the hands of white supremacy, is it really racism or is it just the wild imaginings of the black imagination?
In the white imagination, black men and women are dangerous. They are deemed criminal, unsavory and uncouth. It is also the belief that despite these murderous notions attached to black people, white people are good, noble and without blemish. This is the lie that has been upheld for years thus absolving white people of taking full responsibility for their faulty perceptions as well as their crimes against black people. Black people are not safe in this imagination. In fact as verbalized by Claudia Rankine ‘the most dangerous place for a black person to exist is in the white imagination’.
In the black imagination, we as black people are not safe either as we have internalized the oppressors oppression. We have allowed their way of thinking to shape our own and have drowned in the kool-aid we have been forced to drink for centuries. We are literally not safe in our own minds as years of conditioning (often times for the sake of survival) has rendered us as pawns to be shuffled across a board in which we hold no real power. We still cling to the plantation for our salvation. We distrust our own experience and the experience of our black brethren. We have been talked out of our truth as some of us have gone so far as to deny the racial underpinnings of our interactions with the world. Under the spell of racial gaslighting, we operate under the assumption that color doesn’t matter, should not exist or be a factor when to deny such a reality is to be suspended in disbelief and thereby continue to be disbelieved. In the black imagination, we operate under the misconception that we are free. When truth is we are still slaves to past conditioning, existing on the meager nods of approval white people throw out.
Truth be told, I am tired of feeling like we as black people need the validation of a white person in order to exist in the world. I am tired of feeling like we as black people need white skin to vouch for our existence in order make our experience as Black Americans credible. This has become an unlivable paradigm, this standing in the white shadow for the sake of personal survival. This can best be illustrated in the case of Bree Newsome, a South Carolinian activist responsible for the removal of a confederate flag from the South Carolina state house grounds. She climbed a pole where the flag was held and just as police were about to taze the pole potentially resulting in her death, James Tyson, a white co-conspirator placed his hand on the pole in the way of a tazer as he knew that as a white man with privilege officers would not taze him. His hand is what potentially saved her life. Once again this goes to show that we as Black Americans are believed to need white hands and white saviors to rescue, vouch for, protect and preserve our lives. It is like we still live on the plantation of white permission, still relying on white hands to rescue our black lives. I asked myself: Luis, when will you know that black people in this country are truly free? My answer: When we can be believed. When we can stand on our own without having to be spoken for, validated, rescued by white hands. In the meantime, we as black people are not free. We are still caged in the white imagination where we are not safe. We have yet to stand alone. We have yet to reappropriate the black imagination and transform it into a place where we can envision a reclamation of our own power, a place where we can imagine futures in our own hands and not the hands of those who only seek to keep us in an eternal state of mental servitude. In the meantime all we can do is work towards that end hoping that one day it will be our shared reality.
