From Nyack to Chester: The Suburbanite-Born Black Was Never Safe
There’s nothing more deadly than Negro self-delusion that makes one forget that there can be no love without hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Aggressivity. — Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism
Sometimes I think about the fact that I was born and raised throughout the white suburbs and survived.
There were plenty of times that the people who were around me — the people who I was around — and the so-called “friends” I had at the time — and their families — really could’ve set me up to have me lynched and no one would’ve cared—known about me or met me.
Shit like this began to dawn on me when sometime after I moved to Brooklyn four some years ago when I’d come across headlines of Black people who had went missing or were with a majority of their white friends at their other white friends’ or family’s house to find out that they had killed them. It brings me to the disquieting story of Tamla Horsford, a 40-year old Black woman in Cumming, Georgia, who was invited to a slumber party amongst whites, some who went by the names Jeanne Meyers, Jose Barrera, Madeline Lombardo, Thomas Smith, Nichole Lawson, Bridgett Fuller, and six other whites who conspired to lynch Horsford.
Of course there are questionable nonprofit organizations like the BAMFI (Black & Missing Foundation Inc.) The stories never get headlined, let alone documented or reported.
Unfortunately, relocating to the suburbs is the survivalist route our Black caregivers are often compelled to take when our own spaces have been encroached on—destabilized—annihilated. What is even more disquieting, is that sometimes our caregivers believed that relocating to cleaner, “whiter”-looking places, was an ultimatum from which they could not turn back from.
As deep as the conditioning was—to put it contemporarily, to be engulfed in the sunken place, there’s still a sliver of them that rejects all this colonial backwardness. This isn’t an an argument—rather, this is more an epistle to us Black people who have also not only been brought up in the suburbs, but also for all of us to dispel those what I’ll call the disquieting myths. These disquieting myths are that safety is an illusion for the Black. The suburbs are just microcosmic police states —
• Having lived in Chester with my family, I have seen what looked like SWAT trot around the cul de sac.
• Colorism “jokes” (e.g: having lights turned off and other students telling me that they couldn’t see me.)
• Racist Dominican classmates saying amongst me and other Black classmates that he hates Black people and passing it off as a “joke.”
• Being told by other Black people who had also internalized whiteness to pose me not so much as a threat to suggest that I was not like “the others.”
• I’ve been to a former friend’s house to have his relative yell, “Oh my god, there’s a Black guy in here!”
• I’ve had the white “friends” who have said “nigga,” I’ve had a white call me nigger in middle school.
• Infantilized by white academics.
• I have walked amongst white roommates in college and soon as they turned their back, they didn’t see me not because their back was turned, but because like Ralph Ellison — though having only read the first page of his book, I was invisible.
• Fetishized (by white women and gay white men) policed (self-policing myself to extent that they saw me as good because I was nonthreatening), groped by so-called medical “professionals” who were both white women and white men.
From Monroe Woodbury High School to Orange County Community College to SUNY New Paltz to being in social justice circles and the Queer community—the same antiBlack cycle.
I looked to this book, Black Boy Feelings by Richard Bryan and Jeana Lindo that was released back in 2016. It’s an assemblage of poems, photos, Facebook posts, and artworks produced by Black boys and men. With reference to its title, the works within the book go without saying. What took me aback, however, was a Facebook post that said:
yooo im afraid of people being afraid of me
For some reason, that stuck with me for a while because even though I wasn’t sure of the context from which the original poster was talking about, I thought to myself, it would still make sense if the word white was placed before the word people, because that’s how I felt, aside from my generalized feelings of anxiety—constantly feeling as though I were walking on eggshells.
As I read Frank B. Wilderson III’s poignant, lyrical meta-memoir, Afropessimism, he makes revisit in me feelings — sentiments — emotions about myself—about antiBlackness (that we Black people as Slaves experience at every turn) that I not only already knew, but also needed to interrogate not as something to accept as a fatalistic axiom, but moreso in his words, a “metatheory that is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings.”
The phrase, “we’re all human” leaves nothing but vapid, assumptive gestures of equalism to be abandoned. Not one individual has the same twenty-four hours. Black people are not of this limiting category and time is not of the essence if it is, to paraphrase London-native lyricist MF DOOM, borrowed:
Living off borrowed time, the clock tick faster
Homogeneity is a dangerous concept because it essentializes the notion that the human condition is fundamentally the same for every human and sentient being. Not only does this ignore the complexities and nuances of human differentiation, it overlooks the incorrectness of humanism.
The more I think about it, humanity is just a cop out term to symbolically denote whiteness, as whenever we refer to humanity, we seem to rely on these blanket statements about duality—this binaristic good and evil—as if these terms were not arbitrarily applied by humans themselves to advance a pseudoscientific agenda of racial superiority and oppression.
With this in mind, Afropessimism allows for a thorough revaluation of who is allowed the designation of human. In an insightful dialogue between Emory University professor George Yancy and Frank B. Wilderson III titled, “Afropessimism Forces Us to Rethink Our Most Basic Assumptions About Society,” Wilderson explains that in addressing Black suffering, white civil society, its junior partners (the nonBlack) — life itself, is unarguably sustained by the predation, degradation, and annihilation of the Black:
The argument that Afropessimism forces everyone to address, is that in order to establish, fortify and extend the constituent elements of human subjectivity, there must exist (in the psychic and material room) a sentient being without access to those constituent elements of human subjectivity. Someone must be socially dead. Universal humanity cannot exist. Semiotics teaches us that that would mean the word human would have no meaning if every sentient being were human. Life requires death for conceptual coherence.
Wilderson’s memoir brings me to a point in believing that perhaps I was an Afropessimist and I was unwilling to accept it — pushing back against its pessimism because of the unconscious consensus of the many who repudiated the Afropessimist framework as merely being synonymous with Black nihilism, which it is not—unwilling to accept that, there was always this DuBoisian double consciousness — this pre-inclination to as Wilderson says, “make the [whites] and [nonBlack] people of color feel safe” as that was “the cardinal rule of Negro diplomacy.”
I already spoke about how I was a city hopper in my essay, “Friday’s Mr. Jones Was Right: An Anecdote On Black Children, Pugilism, Patriarchal Shame, And Learned Defenselessness,” but this is more to the point about how white terror follows:
Looking back on all this now, I feel like I never got into playfighting when I was growing up. I figured it was because of several things. One, I didn’t really grow up having multiple siblings. I was an only child for a minute. The other reason, I was born in Nyack, New York — about an hour north from New York City. I didn’t stay there long though. I was a city hopper. First it was Nyack. Then it was Nanuet. Then it was West Haverstraw. Then it was Blooming Grove. Then it was Chester — I lived in the Hudson Valley for no more than two decades. I vaguely recall my mother telling me that, before she birthed me, she used to live in New York City — Queens specifically.
I don’t live in the suburbs anymore and relocality is not the remedy to that.
In retrospect, I really can’t beat myself up for being brought up where I was brought up. All I can do is accept that that’s where I was born. There’s no point in feeling guilty or ashamed of this truth though for a moment I was. In fact, I always think about the scene from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Season 4, Episode 8, Blood Is Thicker Than Mud, where the brotherhood extends an invitation to Will to join the brotherhood, but not to Carlton because he isn’t “Black enough.”
I respect Carlton Banks particularly in this episode infinitely more than I dislike Alfonso Ribeiro in real life, because he was sincere—what he said to the leading member of the brotherhood was the realest shit I’ve ever heard:
Being Black is not what I’m trying to be. It’s what I am.
All this to say to my fellow Black people out there—and I am not being facetious when I say this, that predominantly white friend group you are apart of—leave it—immediately—as it will cause you physiological and traumatic damage in the long term.
Those white colleagues who generally make microaggressions toward you or those nonBlack so-called friends who cape for each other and protect the lighter skinned person in the group—or the white-person adjacent in the group—ghost them.
Setting boundaries is never a clear-cut act. It will be uncomfortable, but it will be necessary to rid yourself of all of the Negrophobes, Negrophiles, and Negromisiacs in your way. These antiBlack racists were never thinking about you in a positive light. Any validation or humanization that the Black ever thought the white or the nonBlack could ever provide or produce does not or cannot ontologically exist. For the white and the nonBlack, there is only their Negrophilia (desire, not love of the Black), Negrophobia (fear of the Black), Negromisia (hatred of the Black), and anything in between these three modes.
Though we learn at our own pace, it would be wise to come to recognize this sooner than later. You owe these antiBlack racists nothing at all. Block them. Delete them. Leave and tolerate no antiBlackness—from no one.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
