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For growing up in Omaha in a mostly suburban school district, my friend group wound up weirdly diverse. My first big crushes were a Latina and a pair of Korean women. My best friends were one Black kid and off/on his older brother, one Afghan refugee, one mixed-Black kid, a South Vietnamese girl and a third Korean girl. My favorite athlete was Ken Griffey, Jr.
I list the Black kid first, Andre, because we got to a point where we did literally everything together. Madden all afternoon long, coaching each other through long phone calls with cute girls. He arranged the one weird under-the-bleachers meet up I had in my life, where he got a brief handjob and I just wasted the other girl's time talking about the girl down the street I actually wished was there instead.
When he briefly dated that girl down the street, I still to this day don't know WHERE it came from, how I learned it. Maybe it was the porn he was introducing me to, usually black men like Shane Diesel blatantly reinforcing the Mandingo stereotype down to what the white women he worked with screamed at him during their scenes. My dad was a union construction worker, voted Democrat down the line...but he still worked construction, drank like hell and ran in a crew of Harley-revving big white dudes with beards to their navels.
Andre and I were standing in my driveway playing 21 with his basketball on my hoop and I called him a Nigger for going on a date with this girl. Again, this was the 6th or 7th grade, maybe the summer between specifically, so we were full of hormones and weird emotions. He choke-slammed me onto the trunk of my mother's white Saturn SL2, began crying as he continued to choke me for several seconds, let go only to place the ball on my stomach and punch it as hard as he could. He picked up his ball, I lay on the ground gasping for air, and he told me he'd see me tomorrow at school.
I wish we'd been able to grow up and process that together. We remained good friends, though I started going through a Chevelle/Breaking Benjamin sort of phase and dealing with a lot of un-addressed anxiety that had me retreating from social situations, plus I couldn't go to parties without parents attending so I became less and less entrenched in what was "cool" while Andre, in an era of Dave Chappelle and Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, was the epitome of cool. I began resenting him a bit, thinking he was supposed to be bringing me along for the ride, like he owed me something.
Andre collapsed from a brain aneurysm while taking a drink of water from the fountain outside of the music room before 6th period in 8th grade right in the middle of football season. We used to play the "knockout game" in my basement, and he played running back for the Varsity team with an unbelievably violent, Fred Taylor kind of style (though Warrick Dunn was his favorite). I started blaming myself for what happened, his mother wouldn't allow myself or any other non-people of color to visit him in the hospital (I was also never allowed in his home, pre- or especially post-driveway incident, and only recall even seeing his mother a handful of times) and yet when he came out of his coma after 2 months, he asked his brother to push his wheelchair down the street to my house, and then my father lifted him out of his chair, carried him up the stairs from my basement to the entertainment room, and we tried to play SSX Tricky.
Andre couldn't remember my name, fluctuated in and out of remembering why he was even there, but we sat there for hours. It was the last time we spent any significant time together, and most of that time was spent crying, holding hands, hugging and being silent.
I met up with him for a cocktail several years ago with the girl we'd fought over all those years ago, who I had continued on-and-off (mostly off) dating for most of my 20s.
He still didn't remember most of our childhood together, but he immediately brought up the basketball and the car.
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As I've grown up, I'm still a pretty hermetic kind of guy. I hate making plans with people, am not much of a traveller, have spent a not-insignificant amount of time marinating on big ideas only to hand them off to more motivated or ambitious people. Like a lot of guys with my diverse-by-chance upbringing, my friend group has looked more and more like me as I've gotten older, and like a lot of super-anxious individuals that friend group is actually mostly just co-workers and the people I've stumbled into getting along with for several years at the same bars. It was the same circumstantial form of friendship as I'd had as a child, only I was increasingly becoming surrounded by white people the older I got. I sold weed for a black man for a while, and eventually he was about the only black guy I interacted with anymore. I didn't consciously make that change and as I began listening to more canonized hip-hop, particularly KRS-One and LL Cool J and The Roots, it bothered me.
I especially became aware of that in college, where I very accidentally became an African-American studies major by way of a chance meeting with the Dean of the school, Dr. Omowale Akintunde, when he substitute taught a lecture during an Antebellum South course I was taking at random for a mandatory cultural credit. He happened to have been given a paper of mine and immediately attached to my writing - it had something to do with De la Soul and the rebellious act of having fun in a music industry that encouraged self-violence and -hatred in both white and black popular music, or something college-y like that - so he fast tracked me into a 400 level hip-hop course he taught when I was just a sophomore. I essentially wound up being his TA for that class, helping translate his big ideas about Snoop Dogg's self-mythology in the "Murder Was tha Case" video and things like that to an audience that, even with all its exclusionary pre-requisites to taking the class, seemed full of people who thought they were just going to get an easy Senior year A while talking about how much they unironically liked Akon.
Over the two years I was closely associated with him, he became my surrogate for Andre, allowing me to process and hear the hurt that kind of action from a friend can cause in a young Black man, and I became his eyes into a generation of white kids raised on hip-hop and R&B, who recognized the power of racism but were unsure exactly how or why we were weaponizing it or fetishizing African-American culture. He walked me through his days in Georgia, his awakening through Public Enemy and Big Daddy Kane in the 80s, his choice to attend the University of Missouri while changing his birth name (which he made a point to rarely remind me of, so I don't remember it) to OMOWALE AKINTUNDE and to walk tall in daishikis and other traditional dress on the campus of the University of Fucking Missouri in the late '80s. We talked for hours in his office, and later late nights on the weekends at his apartment, about all manner of race, religion, music. We definitely had the incredibly annoying, 21-year old white kid and 50+ year old black man pontificate on the academic veracity of Gucci Mane's Wilt Chamberlain series over a blunt and some cognac more than once.
When he told me point blank that I could be a powerful speaker for change, a professor of African-American studies myself, a traveling salesman for white people to see the unintended evil they'd inherited and let fester in themselves unknowingly, that I could be an "ally" - I balked, dropped out, and got a job delivering sandwiches for Jimmy John's.
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Both of those stories are to say that I am very, very aware of what my place in society is, but I just don't feel like the person to make much loud, material change. I have been very vocal about the killing of a local man, James Scurlock (here is a powerful summary if you're so inclined, not by myself: https://medium.com/@ryandwilkins/if-you-die-no-one-would-blink-an-eye-7664c5d63f51), in my community during the first days of protesting because it involved my industry. I've actively pursued people of color to work on my restaurant's new staff, though it is of course really hard to find such people with the right amount of training and experience (or, frankly, confidence to learn quickly) in this kind of city where the smartest thing to do as an ambitious young Black man is leave as soon as you can.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've done bizarrely well for myself during this pandemic, and I've tried to recognize that by donating a lot of $24 and $34 increments to bail relief and urban children relief groups where I can. I try to amplify the local black voices I think are doing the big, important work right now via Instagram Stories and my Facebook timeline, while I mostly just Like, listen and share occasional protest music. I tried to correct my step-mother on her All Lives Matter / I'll take my flag down when you pull your pants up / I Don't See Color rhetoric early on, but when she called ME ignorant for suggesting her own hardships in life should illustrate to her how much she's still benefitted for passing as white (she claims Mexican heritage), I just gave up.
Anyway, you asked me to share. Now I'll go back to mostly listening.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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