FEAR IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY

     There is a word for practically every fear. Fear of spiders is arachnophobia, fear of snakes is Ophidiophobia, fear of heights is acrophobia, fear of open or crowded spaces is Agoraphobia, fear of dogs is cynophobia, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.

There is a word for practically every fear but the fear of being black and doing black.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates opens his book with a lengthy dialogue about fear and its effect on black people, specifically in the hood of, where he is from. The fear he is talking about is rarely discussed, it is usually hidden in the styles of dress of young black males in the hood.  

“The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered 'round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away."

"The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired,” to the fighting styles and the customs of the girls in the hood, “I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. "

"And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. "Keep my name out your mouth," they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other." 

 He saw fear in the whippings parents would give their kids, “...Either I can beat him, or the police."

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Coates continues to describe this fear in the music we listen to, in the way gangs would run their streets, just in everything the black people around him did. Black people are scared. Usually when hearing that we are the first to yell “I am not afraid”, “My ancestors…”, “I’m just doing me” but after all that when you see flashing blue and red lights you can not help but think “I hope I’m not a hashtag”. The very fact we feel the need to act differently around white people should speak to our fear. The fact I have heard " You know we can not act like that, you see all these white people in here".

Black people are constantly dialing our blackness up and down. We on a teeter-totter of social acceptability. If we are "too black" we'll be ostracized as ghetto and hoodrats who no one should have let leave the corner. There will be side-eye and shade everywhere we go. The mere acts of white lips unwilling to learn the unfamiliar names ending in -eshia, or -anna, but are quick to say Tchaikovsky without so much as a stumble. Also the worry about not being black enough "You talk white" " Why you so bougie". It doesn't just stop with "acting black", but being black "you so black you blue" "team light skin" "if she not foreign she boring" "you pretty...for a dark skin girl".

They hate us so we learned to hate ourselves.

We grew scared of ourselves so we'll praise them and damn us all in the same breath.

Our fear is not always a white hood and a rope, not always a person in blue yelling "Put your hands up!!!!"

Our fear is not always a screaming dramatic one it is more of a silent scream.

One that we hope someone hears but no one ever does.

It is the sad hopeless, helpless scream of an unfound victim.

Our fear is not a gaping wound, but more of a slow steady bleeding from a cut on the arm of a hemophiliac.

It is steady unwavering and it is surely deadly. Our scream is one of shame.

Changing ourselves, our naturalness to become what should have never existed.

It is the mutation of our original selves, the unnatural transformation of a Queen into a peasant.

Quite often our fear is ourselves. They fear us, so we fear ourselves.

But throughout our fears black people still, defeat the odds and hope, what for? We are never really sure. Maybe we’re hoping for another Martin Luther King Jr. or maybe another Malcolm X or maybe even a Huey P. Newton. We might even be waiting for the one thing we prayed for silently in our hearts Black Jesus

(He had to be black y’all I don't care and yes, I know black does not equal African American, but anything is better than that pasty prince of peace they slap on everything semi-religious).

The very fact we hope proves we are scared. People who are not scared don't hope for a savior. They have absolutely no need for one. Those who induce fear are scared of nothing except perhaps the consciousness of the people who fear them. That is the kicker about fear it’s crushing.

I am not the first to be afraid and I'm certainly not the last.