We’re all familiar with the ‘black burden wince‘.
You know, the one you give while watching the news and they introduce a particularly damning story and you realize the person responsible is black. Or worse, the on the street interview where you sit wondering why in Heaven’s name the wildly inarticulate person on the screen is the one they chose to speak to. Or the way you try to shrink into yourself while out somewhere and a black person does something particularly ratchet. Each time it is common to hear some variation of, “Damn, they’re making us look bad!”
I have been a card-carrying member of the Black Burden Wincers for some time now, but then I read something last night that made me reconsider everything. It was a seemingly innocuous Facebook post about a man who had beat his girlfriend shuttled onto my newsfeed through some intricate web of ‘friends of friends.’ This is obviously terrible in any circumstance and I had no intention of watching it, but the way it was introduced gave me pause. The original poster (clearly a person or people of black descent) introduced the video by saying “Smh, this gives black men a bad name!” Not men in general or boyfriends or whatever else, but black men specifically.
It bothered me greatly that this singular fact was what they focused on in this man. That’s when I realized the pathology of our reasoning.
Our shame is so great and our need to prove ourselves so intense, that we shame others, not for their crimes, but for having the audacity to perform those crimes as a black person. We’re always saying that the mainstream media/white people/The Man lumps us together, yet we willingly attach ourselves to others’ crimes by being especially ashamed by the bad behavior of black people. We can’t ask others to dissociate the crimes of the individual from the description of the whole if we cannot do the same ourselves.
Yes, I know that there are structures in place that will continue to try and create a public perception of us that is unsavory. However, we cannot allow our fear of how others might blanket the race to allow us to commit the same crime. We’re creating an unwarranted burden that only further perpetuates the misguided notion that the actions of one define the many. We have to rid ourselves of the shame we may feel in these instances and remember that these stories are not representative of who we are as whole. Our tapestry is rich and so varied. We are more than the sum of our parts. If we don’t highlight and publicize these situations as universally disgraceful, then we keep fostering this belief that they define us.
Let’s stop being complicit in the fracturing of our communities. Instead of highlighting shame, let’s highlight the factors that may have led to these things. Instead of shaking our heads in shame let’s shake our fists at the subpar schools in our communities, redlining and poor environmental conditions or the plethora of other elements that contribute to the ghettoization of our neighborhoods.
I’m ridding myself of the ‘black burden wince’ and I think that if more of us did we’d come to a more fruitful way of dealing with these things.