James Baldwin said it once, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

Here’s some background on this article and the author:

I had decided every fifth article of mine was going to be something fun for me to write.

But I forgot I was black.

So, then another case of blatant police brutality popped up.

I refused to watch the video.

The next day, I went around town with my mother and had a really good day. I sat outside of my house and read. I moved to the library, parked it on a bench, and let the breeze carry me into the words of “The White Boy Shuffle” by Paul Beatty.

I went home.

I got on Facebook.

These emotions followed: Pride. Anger. Frustration. Tearful sadness. More anger. And exhaustion.

And then from one of my best friends, a text: “I’m done with the world, I’m done trying to wrap my head around some sort of a solution or answer. I’m just gonna play this new Pokémon game till this year is over.” My response. And then his reply: “Like I’m actually just tired…”

We talked. We ended on disappointment, tied in with hopeful notes and a little bit more Pokémon.

Because as black people in America, who are relatively conscious, or “woke”, every day can be tiring. It can be so daunting to continually have people question your humanity, your very right to exist, and whether or not you have earned a place in society. It can even be more draining to have people put that same questioning to your friends, family, or others that you care about.

As black girls and boys, we grow up with the world and even our own communities perpetuating this notion of self-hate before we ever learn how to self-love ourselves. This self-love is so foreign in a world that does not want to see it that it comes across as radical when it does. Wear your hair the way it grows out of your head? Political statement (TBH my natural hair actually is a political statement, but I also really just love seeing it curl because I never knew it could do it in the way it does).

Any time we rise in pride, it is questioned.

Rightfully so. With all the messages that we receive of how undesirable our ethnicity is, I can understand how crazy it seems that we dare have any source of pride.

Yet, of course we do- we are black, baby.

Again, I say that this article was originally meant to be fun- until I remembered that I was black and angry and frustrated.

But then- I remembered again that I am black and nuanced and soulful and that I have every right to be joyful.

So, instead of choosing to write my lighthearted article or the article that I hashed out in exhaustion, I’m doing both.

Life as a black person in America includes both of those nearly every day, and I’m unsure if there has ever been a moment of our time within this history when it has not included this dichotomy of emotions.

A quotation book about the color line in America called “And Don’t Call Me A Racist”, compiled by Ella Mazel, shows me that it has always, always been a struggle to shift through emotions and our place within society.

I love, love, love quotes, and that’s how this article is going to be fun. For me. And because I’m frustrated with anything discussing race being seen as controversial, the quotes will be from that book. I was born with this skin tone. The freedom of speech that I have to discuss it shouldn’t be seen as controversial to anyone.

So, sit down, and let’s delve into the torn-between-two-worlds souls of black Americans.

“…Being a Negro in America
means trying to smile when you want to cry.
It means trying to hold on to physical life
amid psychological death.
It means the pain of watching your children grow up
with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies…
Being a Negro in America
….means being harried by day and haunted by night
by a nagging sense of nobodiness
and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness.
It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations
where hopes unborn have died.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. , 1967

“A social system in which ‘white is right’ presents a serious threat to the self-esteem of black Americans… There is thus abundant psychological justification for the new emphasis on black pride. Teaching children that ‘black is beautiful’ is a healthy corrective to the lesson long inculcated by white society that black is blemished.”

Alexander Thomas, M.D., 1972

“Conscious submission seemed to me worse than death. It killed a person’s spirit. It took a little from him each time he knew he should not submit- and did.”

James Forman, 1972

“‘I really don’t think of you as Black.’….The erasure of my Blackness is meant to be a compliment, but I am not flattered. For when I am e-raced, I am denied an identity that is meaningful to me and am separated from people who are my flesh and blood.”

Harlon L. Dalton, 1995

“‘Color-blindness’ is no virtue if it means denial of differences in the experience, culture, and psychology of black Americans and other Americans. These differences are not genetic, nor do they represent a hierarchy of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ qualities. But to ignore the formative influence of substantial differences in history and social existence is a monumental error.”

Alexander Thomas, M.D., 1972

“On occasion, people move from trying to ignore race to explicitly pronouncing it irrelevant. A typical claim is: ‘I don’t think of you as Black’… When I am on the receiving end of such a ‘compliment’, I am tempted to respond, ‘Really? What do you think of me as?”

Harlon L. Dalton, 1995

“The constant danger which enshadows the Negro American all his life- danger of small and great indignities, and of actual physical harm or outright destruction- is something that cannot be conveyed to those who have not lived through it.”

Margaret Halsey, 1946

“Malcolm X articulated black rage in a manner unprecedented in American history… The substance of what he said highlighted the chronic refusal of most Americans to acknowledge the sheer absurdity that confronts human beings of African descent in this country- the incessant assaults on black intelligence, beauty, character, and possibility.”

Cornel West, 1993

“It cannot be taken for granted that Negroes will adhere to nonviolence under any and all conditions. When there is rocklike intransigence or sophisticated manipulation that mocks the empty-handed petitioner, rage replaces reason.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

“We come from a legacy of people who, when they were told they were nothing and everything around them, every single experience in their life, said, ‘You are nobody. You are nothing.”… somewhere inside themselves, said, ‘I believe I’m better.’”

Oprah Winfrey, 1998

“Whatever the dramatic achievements in the lives of individual African Americans, those somehow were not credited to the group in general. Perhaps they should not have been, but they should not have had the opposite effect either… Underneath the fulsom praise was more than a slight suggestion that he or she was the exception that proved the rule.”

John Hope Franklin, 1993

“I am just me… I do not and did not and most likely will not ever feel that I have to justify that. I do not have to be a role model, a good person, a credit to the race.”

Nikki Giovanni, 1993

“We are not fighting for the right to be like you. We respect ourselves too much for that. When we fight for freedom, we mean freedom for us to be black, or brown, and you to be white and yet live together in a free and equal society.”

John Oliver Killens, 1964

“White people are quick to notice whenever black people are getting tribal. They are slow to notice that white people are still tribal, too… Black students sitting with one another is called ‘self-segregating’…White students sitting together is called ‘normal’. If self-segregation is not a virtue, it also must be remembered that, alas, students of color didn’t invent it.”
Clarence Page, 1996

“In those first days in the South… a white kid of nine or ten was hanging over the roof of the Royals’ dugout. Above the chorus of boos, [Jackie] Robinson could hear him shouting, ‘Atta boy, Jackie, nice try! Atta boy, Jackie!’… He knew that never in his life would he forget the face of this boy who was honest at heart, not yet filled with the poison of prejudice, who shouted a word of encouragement above the cries of the mob.”

Carl T. Rowan, 1960

“We have utterly ignorant conversations about race in which my feelings are as valid as your feelings are as valid as her feelings, because nobody is dealing with any facts.”

Roger Wilkins, 1998

“…God, how I loved America in 1950… I thought then that prejudice was an individual thing that would die in heart after heart after the Constitution and the true humanity of black people were demonstrated to the people of our country.”

Roger Wilkins, 1982

“It’s ‘them’ they’re afraid of. So if I come into their neighborhood to rent an apartment or buy a house, they still see ‘them’. If people could accept us as individuals, we would get a hell of a lot farther.”

Julian Jefferson, 1992

“I remembered the well-intentioned remarks of some of my white superiors: ‘Powell, you’re the best black lieutenant I’ve ever known.’ Thank you, suh. But inside me, I was thinking, if you intend to measure me against only black lieutenants, you are making a mistake. I’m going to show you the best lieutenant in the Army, period.”

Colin Powell, 1995

“We are a people determined to make it, not in spite of our blackness, but because of it.”

Charles H. King, Jr., 1983

“To live is to wrestle with despair yet never to allow despair to have the last word.”

Cornel West, 1997

“Jim Crow’s not law anymore, but it’s still in some people’s hearts. I don’t let it get me, though. I just laugh it off, child. I never let prejudice stop me from what I wanted to do in this life.”

Sadie Delany, 1993

“When you are faced with as many insults, big and small, as black people have to put up with, you learn to laugh or go crazy. Laughing off life’s lesser insults helps you to conserve your energies to cope with the bigger ones.”

Clarence Page, 1996

I already put this last one into action. I was going to bed, saw an article about Sarah Palin, and got upset. However, I decided that what Ms. Palin said wasn’t worth any of my energy, and I laughed about it instead.

And if you need to laugh today:

Check out #CareFreeBlackKids.

It was really nice to see.

Also, here's one of my favorite poems about the nuance present within the black community and how, as human beings, we deserve to be as varied as we want to be:

Look At That Girl by Julian Bond

Look at that girl shake that thing,
We can’t all be Martin Luther King.

Stay shaking up the status quo, black America. I'll be right there with you.