Roxane gay pass over beloved brother
In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates published an essay about President Barack Obama and the tradition of black politics that reached me in a vulnerable place. But in the twenty-first century, this relegating of black ambition to one month of recognition feels constraining and limiting rather than inspirational. We must be exceptional if we are to be anything at all.īlack History Month is important and a corrective to so much of America’s fraught racial history. Du Bois, who once wrote, “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” We ask much of our exceptional men and women. We say, look at what the best of us have achieved. Each February, we hold up civil-rights heroes and the black innovators and writers and artists who have made so much possible for this generation. It’s the month where we segregate some of history’s most significant contributors into black history instead of fully integrating them into American history. Nothing exemplifies black success and ambition like Black History Month, a celebratory month I’ve come to dread as a time when people take an uncanny interest in sharing black-history facts with me to show how they are not racist. I am thinking about success, ambition, and blackness and how breaking through while black is tempered by so much burden.
ROXANE GAY PASS OVER BELOVED BROTHER PROFESSIONAL
I have noticed that my e-mails to certain key people in my professional life are answered with astonishing speed where they once were answered at a sedate and leisurely pace. This is a lovely, lovely fantasy bearing no resemblance to reality. There is no more struggle, there is nothing left to want. Life orders itself according to your whims. The concept of a big break often implies that once you’ve achieved a certain milestone, everything falls into place. Many people of color, like me, remember the moment that first began to shape their ambition and what that moment felt like. Many people of color living in this country can likely relate to the onset of outsized ambition at too young an age, an ambition fueled by the sense, often confirmed by ignorance, of being a second-class citizen and needing to claw your way toward equal consideration and some semblance of respect. As a black girl in these United States-I was the daughter of Haitian immigrants-I had no choice but to work toward being the best. I never wanted to experience that feeling again. The driver, a zealous sort, found my crumpled failure and handed it to my mother when he dropped me off the next day.
ROXANE GAY PASS OVER BELOVED BROTHER CRACKED
On the bus ride home, I stuffed my shame between the dry, cracked leather of the seat and assumed the matter had been dealt with.
I had already begun demanding excellence of myself and couldn’t face falling short. I couldn’t bring such a grade home to my parents. Instead of the praise I anticipated, I received an F, which, in retrospect, seems a bit harsh for kindergarten. I had not, of course, “nailed it.” I was supposed to color in an entire glass. If it had been the parlance of the day, I would have thought, Nailed it. I diligently shaded in one half of one of the glasses and smugly turned my work in to the teacher. I suspect we were learning about fractions. We were instructed to color in one-half of the illustration. Each student had been given a piece of paper in class, bearing an illustration of two water glasses. I began to understand the shape and ferocity of my ambition when I was in kindergarten. Part of me recognizes that I am having a moment, while the more relentless part of me, a part that cannot be quieted, is only hungrier, wanting more. My friends and loved ones tell me that I am having a moment. Articles about me keep telling me that I am having a moment, my big break. The latter book has been on the New York Times bestseller list twice. Both books have received positive critical attention.
This year I published two books-a novel, An Untamed State, and an essay collection, Bad Feminist. I think I am having my big break right now. You write and write and write and hope that someone out there will discern what you believe is in that writing, and then you write and hope and wait some more. You never know when or if you’ll get a big break as a writer.