Can’t Hurt Me_ Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

KKK in Center Point in 1995—Center Point is fifteen minutes from my house in Brazil
Most, if not all, minorities, women, and gay people in America know that strain
of loneliness well. Of walking into rooms where you are the only one of your
kind. Most white men have no idea how hard it can be. I wish they did. Because
then they’d know how it drains you. How some days, all you want to do is stay
home and wallow because to go public is to be completely exposed, vulnerable
to a world that tracks and judges you. At least that’s how it feels. The truth is,
you can’t tell for sure when or if that is actually happening in a given moment.
But it often feels like it, which is its own kind of mindfuck. In Brazil, I was the
only everywhere I went. At my table in the cafeteria, where I chilled at lunch
with Johnny and our crew. In every class I took. Even in the damn basketball
gym.
By the end of that year I turned sixteen and my grandfather bought me a used,
doo-doo brown Chevy Citation. One of the first mornings I ever drove it to
school, someone spray painted the word “nigger” on my driver’s side door. This
time they spelled it correctly and Principal Freeman was again at a loss for
words. The fury that churned within me that day was indescribable, but it didn’t
radiate out. It broke me down from within because I hadn’t yet learned what to
do or where to channel that much emotion.
Was I supposed to fight everybody? I’d been suspended from school three times
for fighting, and by now I was almost numb. Instead, I withdrew and fell into the
well of black nationalism. Malcolm X became my prophet of choice. I used to
come home from school and watch the same video of one of his early speeches
every damn day. I was trying to find comfort somewhere, and the way he
analyzed history and spun black hopelessness into rage nourished me, though
most of his political and economic philosophies went over my head. It was his
anger at a system made by and for white people that I connected with because I
lived in a haze of hate, trapped in my own fruitless rage and ignorance. But I
wasn’t Nation of Islam material. That shit took discipline, and I had none of that.
Instead, by my junior year, I went out of my way to piss people off by becoming
the exact stereotype racist white people loathed and feared. I wore my pants
down below my ass every day. I ghetto wired my car stereo to house speakers
which filled the trunk of my Citation. I rattled windows when I cruised down