Dear Baratunde Thurston,
Growing up first-generation West Indian in the U.S. is a lot like being a ghost. A ghost lives in this shadowy, borderlands region where it doesn’t quite exist. American media cobbles West Indian culture and history into an upbeat, ramshackle collection of
drum-infused party music, marijuana, and Kingston, Jamaica’s flag colors. Depicted in this way I ended up a ghost, truly being left unseen, but still trying to make my presence known. This striving to exist while being told by implication I did not was debilitative.
You make it clear in your book How To Be Black that you endured the same pain of feeling unseen and stereotyped growing up Black in the U.S. You reference “[the] popular concept of blackness: hip-hop, crime and prison, fatherless homes, high blood pressure, school dropouts, drugs, athleticism . . . all of them limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness. The ideas of blackness that make it into mainstream thought exclude too much of the full range of who black people are.” You do an excellent job portraying how race, heritage, and ethnicity can all be dangerously simplified to thin black and white lines, instead of the bold myriad of colors truly inherent to each. I relate to you on that level.
I once heard that if you want to teach someone something or make them listen to you, that you should make them laugh first. Psychologically, that makes sense. Laughter releases all of the feel-good chemicals in our brains. Laughter biologically primes and mollifies us to be receptive, as it delivers a reward in advance of the challenge. Many people are unaware that daily micro-aggressions unconsciously directed against bodies culturally different from their own is actually racism. They refuse to see themselves as prejudiced, even to a small degree. Which makes sense. The word “racist” carries the same clout as a word of profanity. That word shuts people down by delivering a punishment in advance, which does not generate feel-good chemicals in our brains. And thus, we are no longer receptive.
You surprise me in this recounting of your history by incorporating humor as a key component of your narrative. You use humor as a tool to exemplify exactly how messed up covert and obvious acts of racism are. On another level though, you explicate how you used humor as a way to save yourself from the pain of the situations you underwent and observed. You make it your duty in such chapters as, “How Black Are You?,” “Have You Ever Wanted to Not Be Black?” “But I Don’t Want To Kill People” to transform your life and relay to the world how completely funny your experiences of racism, ignorance, stereotype, and aggression against you can be interpreted to be. For example, your sarcasm is at its best in your chapter “How To Be The Black Friend,” when you say “By having a Black Friend, white Americans automatically inoculate themselves against most charges of racism and capture some of the rebellious spirit that has made this country what it is. They become cooler by association.” Humor became your lens.
In How To Be Black you commit yourself to sharing this lens with the public, entering your voice into the media in a demand to be seen. You mention “This is a book about the ideas of blackness, how those ideas are changing, and how they differ from the popular ideas promoted in mainstream media and often in the black community itself.” Humor thus becomes your psychology to approach this mission. In doing so, it becomes your engine to relay the true message of the cruelty and inhumanity at the heart of racism to those who may be less willing to listen.
You have found a different way to approach this problem, making people want to learn how to be anti-racist: To recognize the racism and prejudice we are each conditioned with to some extent from birth and act to correct it as advocates. To build a culture of people who seek to continue to connect across borders. So that none of us continue to live in these borderlands. So that we can truly become seen, instead of remaining insubstantial as ghosts. Reading your book changed my perspective and challenged me to seek, understand, and connect with those who would have silenced me.
Watching my own thoughts change for the better gives me hope that the mindsets of others can change positively as well. I have spent much of my life being “ghosted” by the U.S. Our relationship has been rife with red flags ranging from a staggering lack of care for Black and Brown bodies, the continued xenophobia of immigrants and non-Blacks-or-Whites, as well as the general lack of respect and acceptance for other cultures. Still, I am committed to building a loving relationship with this country. And I know that might sound like the classic case of a love story gone wrong. That I’m just the naive romantic who simply cannot fathom that their gaslighting and narcissistic partner is maybe not the healthiest for them. But, I’m going to maintain a sense of humor about it, the way you do in this book. I’m going to tell my story, like you have. And I’m going to turn it all into lessons, too.
Your fan,
Jay Aja
