Nineteen Fifty-Six Vol. 2 No. 5

to craft himself into a national champion in this event. To
tell him that everything he will endure from that point on
until now, will be worth the endurance.
I was supported by my community but I never felt as if I
were connected to its roots. I was supported by my family
but I never felt as if we shared the same blood. It took so
much work, participating in this event. I had to combat
an identity crisis while taking on other people’s identities
every weekend. For those of you that dont know about
interpretation events, it’s all about character pops and
dramatic page turns. My classmates would call me white.
My teammates were white. My friends were white. My
partners were white. My community was white. Speech
& Debate, when I started winning, allowed me to evade
discrimination and become naive to the very same stories
that I would spread in speech rounds. Police officers knew
who I was so I never fit the “description.” My teachers
would follow my speech success so I was always presumed
to be a “good” kid. When I would put on my speech suit
and rack in speaker points, I lived a cookie cutter life but
when the super suit came off, I was poor, Black, obeese
and queer. It took work to survive the identity crisis that
both the speech community and the Black community
had put me through. Living in a society that makes you
feel as if you are a stain on an all white t-shirt. Where
no bleach products such as, prison systems, glass ceilings
and police brutality can get rid of you made me feel like
being a successful Black man, granted me white privilege.
For me, it was never a glass ceiling, there was never just
glass above me. Glass surrounded me, It trapped me. It
made me feel like an artifact on display, an exhibit in a
museum where my body didn’t matter, only my voice,
because my Black body was never deemed worthy in an
event such as speech, it was only a case containing my
“proper” voice that made me competitive. So here I am,
a beautiful sculpture that is supposed to be happy to be
in one of the most competitive well known art museums,
but I still feel as if society is only fascinated by my voice.
Learning to love your body and the skin that you are in
takes work. It takes overworking yourself to turn the
pages in a Black book that carry your insecurities. It takes
work to pick up the pieces of you that you tossed to the
floor to make room for everything that society takes away
from you.
So I work effortlessly sacrificing sleep and my mental
health and humanity hoping to be heard before seen and
listened to before corrected by society, or supremacy or a
ballot. To be Black and in speech is to be like John Henry,
yes the one from disney. It is to drill every ounce of hood
out of you because presentation is everything.
So I work effortlessly sacrificing sleep and my mental
health and my humanity hoping to be deemed acceptable
into a presumed safe space. When I tell you all that burnout
is real, will you actually believe me? Will you hear me
when I say that I am referring to my mental health, or will
you be like most judges and assume that the only thing
I talk about is my skin? To be Black and a competitive
speaker is to be an artifact, a rarity and in some minds,
white. I worked hard because at a young age I learned
that being Black meant carrying the assumptions of my
people around with me wherever I went.
Whether it be the classroom or the competition,
working hard is never a choice for me, it is a survival
tactic resulting from living in a world that wanted me
uneducated, voiceless, and dead. A world where you
are your generation’s John Henry. Except this time, you
aren’t dying from overusing a tool, you’re dying from
being that overused tool. Except this time, the white
man isn’t peer pressuring you into making yourself out
to be an overused tool. It is the man that you see in the
mirror, that is making you overuse yourself. Day after day
after day, sitting there, on display, inside of a glass case
watching success surround you but never being able to
break through the class to touch it. Most sculptures are
crafted out of marble, but you are different. You are as
black as charcoal and crafted out of obsidian. So sit there,
in a now cold room and bathe in all of your Black beauty,
breathe in and remember, When america catches a cold,
the Black man breathes his last brea-.
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