Sewanee Review

I don't like to write about politics. I don't like to write about politics because I don't care about politics. I do care, but not that much. Generally, I see people get angry and I think, Why can't I get that angry?

I pretend sometimes. I pretend because I'm a teacher and a writer and that means I'm supposed to be smart. Smart people are supposed to care about politics. But my confession is I'm oblivious. I didn't know what Mike Pence looked like until the vice presidential debate. I didn't know the New York governor's voice until I heard him talking about school closures. I don't know what Dick Cheney looks like. I know who Elizabeth Warren is, but not when I should have, and still her face is blurry to me. I know who Bernie Sanders is, but not when I should have. The same for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. During the primaries, my acquaintances drop the names of candidates and often I pray they don't ask my opinion. Other times, I am defiant in my mind. I tell myself, If they ask me about so-and-so, I will simply say, "Who is that?"

White people—the ones who didn't vote for him—are angry [End Page 319] about Trump. Sometimes, it's scary to watch. I'm angry, but not that angry. The Black people I know are angry too, but in general not as angry as the whites. The Blacks are angry. Don't misconstrue that. They are marching. They are on the bullhorn. But at my job, white people are more likely to denounce Trump than Black people are. Why is this? I've thought about it a lot. The world is going to shreds. Why am I not riled up? I've thought and thought about it and could only come up with one reason: because I'm Black.

White people, generally, get to live in a world they created. Black people, generally, live in a world created for them. A white person's anger is, "This is not the world I want to live in." A Black person's anger is, "Alas, this is one more fucked-up reality I have to face." They're two different sentiments. A Black person is angry, but she is also resigned because she has spent all her life living in a space she has had no input in shaping.

I'm from Boston. I'm from a neighborhood called Roxbury. It's the same neighborhood Malcolm X lived in. It's the same neighborhood Bobby Brown is from, and NBA point guard Shabazz Napier. I'm proud of where I'm from, but it can be a very rough place. The year before I started middle school, a boy was shot because he wouldn't give up his sneakers. When people think of Boston, they think of a milky-white city, but remember that there are always two Americas. My parents came to Boston in 1976 from West Africa, and they could only afford to live in one of three neighborhoods: Mattapan, Dorchester, or Roxbury. They happen to be the Blackest and the poorest. The three-family house I grew up in wasn't even a house before we moved in. Well, it was a house, but it was abandoned and gutted out. The mayor had this program that if you could scrape together five hundred dollars for a down payment, you could petition the city to fix the house up for you since nobody else wanted it. That's what my family did. When a white person moves to Massachusetts, they can move to Cambridge, to Brookline, to [End Page 320] Scituate, to Needham, anywhere they want. A Black person is constricted mostly to one of these three neighborhoods. It is not redlining but something more invisible and more insidious. To this day, when I meet a white person from Boston, it is almost always an awkward conversation. I ask them which part and they say Wellesley or Natick or Chestnut Hill. They ask me...