What "The Talk" is about: It’s pragmatism for a society that doesn’t consider you fully human.

[kpete]

The Talk
How black parents prepare their young sons for life in America

By Bijan Stephen
Illustration by Skip Sterling
https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1200/1*FVYrcdxZnrEV08AlPnvyow.jpeg


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It’s odd to grow up not really believing that the various protections enshrined in law apply to you — or rather, that they only apply to you when it’s convenient. That’s really what the Talk is about: It’s pragmatism for a society that doesn’t consider you fully human. James Baldwin notes something along these lines in “Stranger in the Village” — my favorite essay from his 1955 collection Notes of a Native Son — when he discusses the reasons why American blacks, unlike the other black men who live around the world, don’t and can’t fit anywhere but America. It’s because these histories end, inevitably, in a bill of sale.


My family immigrated here, but it’s not as though we went untouched. My ancestors were slaves too, and after a certain number of generations my own history disappears into the ether. In any case, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, here. It’s the inescapable fact that, if you happen to have dark skin in America, you are immediately and irrevocably trapped in the narratives of race that swirl about this place. Death, destruction, despair. We are here and we are here to stay, was Baldwin’s sentiment. Yet I, along with every other black person in America, live with fear every day. We are human — why does that never come to light until we’re forced to show our animal pain grieving another dead child? I’m tired; I am so, so unendurably tired.

It’s tough to believe in anything other than the present when you’re forced to fight for every inch of ground you’ve got; it’s harder still when you’ve got to question most of your interpersonal interactions. Is this why I didn’t get the job? Is this why my lease application was denied? Is this why I got into college? Is this why this person keeps following me around the grocery store? And when you ask, you’re looked at like you’re crazy, met with denial — because it’s always plausible, deniable.

My story is not unique. I could have been Michael Brown, or any of the other murdered ones. I’ve grown up enough now that I know when things could devolve, when I might have to run, when to avert my eyes and cloak myself in blackness — that is, in the body language of utter submission, of chattel.

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MORE (amazing mho):
https://medium.com/matter/the-talk-92371a1c0ae5

[bbgrunt]

1. k and r. very powerful.

[lunasun]

2. +1million

[Mnemosyne]

3. K&R, because it matters. nt