To the handful of folks who have subscribed to this project, whatever it is, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I regret to inform you that I have no idea what I'm doing and there wasn't a plan. For 17 days in February, I authored something that still feels incoherent and hard to track. I'm not sure what to do with what I've written. Maybe I'll edit it a bit, leave it up, maybe not. If you're reading this and have any ideas, reach out. I don't suppose William Jewell College is going to invite me back to campus to deliver an oration on why the college should cease operations and re-open as a Black-serving institution under the management of Clay County African American Legacy, Inc.
It's not a serious proposition anyway.
For starters, nobody wants to own a college. They're not profitable, only a massive building maintenance liability. What a terrible idea to saddle a people with an "asset" only after the underlying idea can be determined to have little to no market value. But it's not an accident that I've suggested something that is both practically and theoretically impossible. I really wanted to call attention to the centrality of the land-as-resource and intergenerational economic wealth transfer. I see what I've done as perhaps more performance art than monitored and intentional inquiry. The premise that "Jewell should go out of business" is one that I do believe, but its simplicity allowed me to toy with the idea of why my parents were always so proud that I worked there as a professor in the first place. And it caused a boatload of Jewell people —trustees, former colleagues, etc.— to look at my LinkedIn, which is hilarious.
I stopped publishing in February when I finally sat down and poured out onto the page the defining racial story of my lifetime: When I was 4 years old, I remember hearing my mom scream the N-word at a group of men trying to kick in our front door, armed with two long guns. I remember opening my eyes from a nap on the couch to a loud banging on the door. "Someone is in here," my mom yelled. "Go get the gun," she shouted to her mom. Then the yelling started and in an effort to save me, she yelled some horrific things. That's where I'll leave the details for this telling.
This event is important because it's my first memory on Earth, which is another way of saying I can't presently recall earlier memories at this time. But because of that, I've always known the racial thoughts bouncing around in my head are like everyone else's. They were complicated. Very little direct hate, but paranoid fear and gross characterizations of others to an extreme. I grew up in a home where racial slurs were the norm, including by all my grandparents, and despite both of my parents going to work every day interacting with very diverse people, they used slurs in the right company or with enough drink.
It's incongruent.
I knew it while it was happening.
It's how I know everything of the whiteness scholarship I read is true.
White people are all frauds and liars because my people are.
It's defined 39 years of my life.
It's why I've studied what I studied.
It's why my friends are my friends.
It's why my mom is who she is.
It's why I sometimes embarrassingly rely on drugs to sleep or just to get through the day.
It's why I am quick to yell, escalate, and run away — my fight-or-flight instincts have been dangerously in control of my life for the last 39 years. F*ck everyone and everything, I am fine alone, I think — except obviously not. It's not like I haven't told this story at all before, it's that I haven't told it publicly in a place where my mom could ever find it or in a way that doesn't make her seem like a completely unredeemable racist, because it doesn't matter if she is. At least I don't think she is. But it's also my story.
My mother is a person who also experienced a violent home invasion when she was a child. That story is one that's detailed in some separate writing. For this version, I'll furnish the chilling detail that the man who broke into her home in the middle of the night with a gun sat and smoked a full cigar while she and her mom slept. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who wasn't there. He died when she was a teenager.
As a four-year-old, even I knew what my mom using racial slurs was weird — it wasn't how she openly lived her life. But what does that type of extreme stress do to a person? It's important to me because my bedrock understanding of racial difference was trauma, which, of course, because that's all race is. Is it possible my mom was saying what was really in her heart? Or maybe she was just trying to scare them because, as we know, "Karen with a gun" is a terrifying proposition. Maybe she didn't even know what she was doing and it just happened. I will never know, because she still won't talk about it with any significant depth.
Anyway you cut it, my mom wouldn't go to therapy after my dad died and she wouldn't let me speak to a mental health practitioner as long as she paid for my medical insurance, which lasted until I got married (thanks, Obama). Her trauma became my trauma. It wasn't a choice. She didn't want me to tell a doctor what happened in our home, not now or ever. And when she started abusing me for acting out verbally by holding my head over the sink and shoving bars of Zest in my mouth, she didn't want me to tell anyone that either, so it continued until junior high and I could properly fight back.
One of the most important (if not the most important) operations of whiteness is the ways that white people hide secrets for their family members. All kinds. Big ones, little ones, funny ones, sad ones, irrelevant ones that seem like they're just for sport. Whether that be simply omitting details from certain family stories or concocting entire alternative social realities and economic systems such as capitalism to make it seem as though merit wins in this life, white people experience a washed reality — an observation I wish would be the origin of the phrase "whitewashing," but isn't.
This happened to me and I'm also trapped in this thing because I can't ever tell anyone about it because to do so would admit that my family is white trash — to tell the whole story would be to include the fact that, growing up, the adult members of my family openly used racial slurs. And that admission is a no-no among polite and properly monied whites. I know it sounds insane, but I thought I'd tell people about this part of my life when my parents were deceased.
When I tell people this story, they're either in shock that I'm the person they know or they intuitively understand the branches can reach further than the trunk. No matter — under the guise of unconditional love, white families ask participants to smooth over racism that had actual consequences for the people who lived it, especially if the people it has consequences for are their own white kids. Put differently, the ghosts of racism past are always haunting us. My mom and dad's racism is their parents' racism. Their racism, their parents'. And so on. White racism in America is intergenerational trauma backed by land deeds and C-notes, which trace to our founding story — which is exactly that: a story.
As I've grappled with all of this, in trying to figure out how to tell any portion of this story (or if I even wanted to or if it mattered), I struggle to understand how one event can be so responsible for a heightened state of alert that has been a hallmark of my life. Once you can recognize and treat it as PTSD — you end up on the other side feeling robbed of the life you've missed out on. It matters a lot.
So what's next?
Allah knows best. My plan is to keep writing, praying, and loving the people close to me.
I'm less mad at other people than I've ever been and I think that's to my benefit.
Thank you again for reading.
Your Friend,
Kyle