As a black man I’d learned to fear the police. Then the police became my family.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
The day of the grand jury announcement that absolved Darren Wilson of any wrongdoing for the killing of Mike Brown, I noticed that one of my friends had updated their profile picture on Facebook to an "I Support Darren Wilson" meme. Having effectively purged from my social media most of the people I considered no better than Confederate flag enthusiasts, I was horrified by this turn of events. Who had I missed? Who did I now need to delete as a friend?
It was my sister.
As a black man, it had never occurred to me that anyone in my family would stand in solidarity with the murderer of an unarmed black male.
To be a black male in America, your constant state of being is Ignatius of Antioch, forever on deck to be devoured by a Colosseum-dwelling lion, and police are the felines in question, confined to an arena where their blood sport is not only encouraged but rewarded. I was raised in Milwaukee, in a single-parent home where I was an anomaly, the only man present. The men who came in and out of my mother's lives were troubled men, dangerous men; some of them emotional criminals, others criminals in the very literal definition. They ran afoul of the police often. From my perspective as a child, these men fully earned being targeted by the police.
And much like any victim who has been tormented, my mother turned to those who were her saviors: She joined the sheriff's department. Law enforcement may see the black male as public enemy number one, but to the black women who are often left in the wake of their men's struggle for freedom, it's very understandable that a black woman would play into the role of Michael Corleone, pulled into a world that is needlessly cruel and violent, yet also a safe haven and the only means of protecting themselves in this world.
There was a point when I realized as an adult that despite my privileges relative to so many other black men — a grandmother who drove me to a bookstore on the south side of town every month to purchase the latest Goosebumps book on its release date, a college degree in theatre, a graduate degree from the Tisch School of the Arts — this world was still not designed for me to succeed. And police were a constant reminder. Police who looked at me like a Yeerk, some alien life-form willing to infect and infiltrate the world they found precious. A man who would be so very easy to kill, whose death would have no consequences.
It was not necessarily my mother's career in law enforcement that caused our initial rift, but it was all tied in to how she had to use her badge as a shield, as a uniformly colored Dreamcoat to protect herself from anyone who could do her harm. Subconsciously, she knew that her black son could grow into a dangerous man, one who could bring pain into her life, or one she would be forced to eradicate with an American-bred bullet.
The thing about a cold war with your mother is that there's always collateral damage. I blamed my mother for picking my sister as her favorite, the one she would mold in her own image. In the absence of breathing room to be who I wanted to be, to find myself, I blamed my mother for the distance between us. I insisted that she had failed me as a mother and as close as my sister and I had been in our youth, I knew that she was destined to follow in my mother's footsteps. She was being groomed as the heir apparent.
So when I realized I was gay, that Milwaukee would smother me and burn every canvas I could ever use to paint a single work of art, I fled at the first opportunity — to Loyola University-Chicago, 90.2 miles from home, where I could fumble through my own personal Minos labyrinth and figure out whatever it meant to be a gay back male in America.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
"Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous." — Toni Morrison, Sula
