In Too Deep

My fellow writers, have you ever gotten so deeply caught up in writing a story that you just can’t stop? Like, everywhere you go, there’s another salient example to use, another perfect voice to cite, another thought jotted down to add to the document that just keeps growing.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m writing about old boy. I submitted three drafts of my piece before the editor could get back to me with notes; the last of which was nearly eleven thousand words and I conducted two additional interviews after turning it in. This was not intended to be a long-form piece, until it was.

There is so much to say, and no, it’s not about mostly about dude, it’s about Black people. I have a lot to say to and about Black people, and I did, and that piece has the potential to be seen by a lot of people. I am terrified.

My therapist recently said something that I knew already, but that I needed to hear (which is essentially how therapy works): “You have a lot of trauma related to your writing, and people’s reaction to it.” I do, I do!

I’m so traumatized from fifteen-ish years of being accused of hating Black men on the world wide web—and the far worse things said as a result of that accusation—that I need thousands and thousands and more thousands of words to deliver a cultural critique of one brother. I need untwistable words, I need grafs to talk about how much I love Black men so that I might also be able to point out where one is doing something hurtful to other Black people.

Honestly, it embarrasses me how much that particular falsehood stings. It isn’t that I question my own commitment to my brothers; I have self-sacrificed more than enough for me to recognize the depths of my loyalty. Nor is it that I think that being a man-hater is the worse thing a woman can be; look at the material, look at how the sorting of gender impacts our lived experiences—how often are men the heroes in a woman’s story, and how often are they the hell and high-water that we have to overcome?

If we talk about men outside of racialized groups, the generalizations I have to make, based on experience, observation and study, are not good. Men are running the world into the ground. They are violent, they are self-involved and they are convinced that they deserve to be atop the social food chain. What exactly is there to cheer about?

But when you ask me about Black men, as a group? Despite the reality of many of my experiences, I think first of how much I love and want to be loved by them. I see the complicated place where they reside, between the racist oppression that stifles them, and the gendered privilege that advantages them, and I can process the both/and. I want that for them, too, so that we can engage with each other across lines of gender identity and sexual orientation and actually talk about everyone’s freedom.

Yet, there’s a version of me and my theory that exists in the minds of people who don’t know me at all, some who have chosen that intentionally. These are cats who don’t want to consider the both/and of racism and patriarchy, many of whom have a vision of liberation that looks like putting Black men in White men’s shoes and nothing more. Or, they just heard that this b*tch right here hates Black men, and that’s all they needed to go from.

Writing critiques of Black men is made deeply difficult by the notion that popular culture has reimagined critique as censure; critics aren’t the ones yelling about ‘cancelation,’ rather, we’re re-cast as an unreasonable mob looking to silence everyone’s faves. For Black women and/or LGBT persons doing this work, the fact that we’d merely like to be able to sit among our own brothers without getting fronted on majorly just seems to escape a lot of folks’ comprehension.

And so, we write a lot of words to get our point across.