On Kindness

I am made more uneasy by a rage that rests itself beneath silence than I am with something loud, stomping along a house and making glass rattle. Growing up, my father was a mostly calm man, even in anger. Instead of spankings, he preferred long, drawn out lectures, often peppered with stories, to get his point across. My mother’s voice, naturally loud, did most of its work when joy was afoot. Her laugh was the type to echo through walls. She was a woman with a loud personality, loud smile, loud walk, the type of presence you could feel coming from miles away. In a largely black neighborhood, I grew up around parents who were not all like my own: my friend Josh, for example, had two parents that were both loud and stern, laying down strict rules and enforcing them at all costs. Other friends had relaxed, playful parents. These were my favorite. The ones who appeared to let all things slide. Video games played until all hours, basketball dents in a garage. One such set of parents, always gentle and thrilled to see me and my brother, split when we were just teenagers. The mother stayed, the father drifted miles away. We never saw him again. The mother, wrecked by grief, grew more and more silent as the years wore on. She stopped laughing, barely smiled when she recognized me on a bike going past her house. A few years ago, I’d heard that after her youngest son went to college, she stopped leaving the house altogether.

In temperament, I am more of my father’s son than my mother’s. When I was 16, I was in a car being driven by two of my white friends when we were pulled over on I-270 in Columbus. We were speeding, tearing down the highway at least 15 miles over the speed limit. When the police officer arrived at the passenger window, where I was sitting, I was laughing loud, as my mother would, at a joke a friend in the backseat told to loosen the mood. None of us had ever been in a car that was pulled over before, and joking seemed like the right thing to calm us. The officer snapped at me. Asked, of course, if I thought anything was funny. Demanded to know what I was so excited about. This, before even addressing the white driver for his infraction. High school was the first time in my life that I had white friends I considered close to me. All of my black friends growing up were loud, sometimes quick to emotion. Among ourselves, among our neighborhoods, it all felt like it was the same volume. A low, and safe hum. Kept within, away from those who may wish to dull it.

Through high school and my playing time in college, my scouting reports for soccer all read the same. The highlights: speed, agility, instincts. The lowlights: balance, focus, work ethic. Toward the end, all of them that I recall had reads on my personality that felt odd. Words like “passionate” and “fired up” and “emotive” would hang in the closing sentences as compliments, I imagine, but uneven ones, given my play. I played sports as I imagine my father would have: all business, the occasional burst of outward emotion, but nothing startling. My freshman year of college, I played for my university as the first American-born player of color. I stepped onto the field for a preseason match, in a sea of white jerseys, white faces, white coaches, white fans. I got a yellow card for clapping in slight frustration, in the direction of the sky, after I allowed a ball to roll out of bounds.

What I am told most often now is that I am kind. I am told this more by white people than anyone else, but I am told it often by everyone. That my kindness is a blessing. People who don’t know me particularly well talk about how they can see a kindness in my eyes, or feel a kindness that I have deep within. I generally laugh, shrug uncomfortably, and give a small thanks. I know, particularly when it is by people who aren’t familiar with me, that what they are actually complimenting is an absence of that which they perceived, perhaps expected.

I often joke about how I don’t wear anger well. To a very real extent, this is true. I didn’t see anger translated well growing up, so it isn’t an emotion that I have worked through enough times to push outside of myself. Another element of that is rooted in the distance between my anger and the trouble it might cause me if taken in by the wrong audience. I read about a black man in the Columbus suburbs not far from where I went to college. His neighbor called the police on him because he heard the black man raising his voice to a level that the neighbor wasn’t used to hearing. He feared that something dangerous was happening in the house.

When the police arrived, it turned out the man was just singing. Practicing for his church choir. The stakes are high and the capacity for mercy is not. When I yell, I feel an immediate sense of guilt afterwards. Shame, sometimes fear. People aren’t used to my voice pushing above a joyful monotone. In the rare times I am confronted with anger spilling out, I wish to collect it quickly, before it grows all over everyone in the room. Before I become just angry and nothing else.

What I’m saying is that I’ve been thinking a lot about black anger lately, and what we do and don’t do with it. The relief that people have when a protest centering on black lives aligns with their ideas of peace. The relief that I have when there are no pictures of police pushing protesters to the ground. I am interested in what we afford each other, in terms of the emotions that can sit on our skin, depending on what that skin might look like. This makes me ask the question of who benefits from this, our eternal façade of kindness? Is the true work of kindness owed to ourselves, and our sanity?

This is not saying that I, personally, am waiting in a rage at all times. I’d like to think that people are largely correct: on any given day, I imagine myself a kind person. Or, at least, a person who is trying. One who reaches for the well of empathy before all others, even if I come up empty at the end. What possibilities would black people be allowed if their anger, and all of the ways it manifested itself, could be seen as a part of the human spectrum. The way we cut a wide lane for riots after sports games, for punk rock and metal bands fronted by white anarchists who wish to overthrow all unjust modes of government. Our fights aren’t going to be equal in the world, but if we are pushing our backs against the same barriers of injustice, I would like my anger to live in the world as your anger does. Reasonably, with expectations that it doesn’t make me who I am. It is a task, some days. To think about your consistent kindness as, instead, a product of restraint.

Black women, sitting at the intersection of race and gender, experience this more than I do, more than their male counterparts. Tabbed as angry, and only angry. I think, then, of my mother. How she always made sure to laugh louder than anyone in the room. How in every picture, she smiled with all of her teeth. How in the markets by our house, she would call everyone by their first names. Warmly touch them on their shoulders and ask about their families. How, even then, on a day where she was exhausted, I remember walking into the store with her. She was not smiling, but kind to the white man behind the register, offering short but polite responses to his questions. When handing her back change, he looked at my mother and said, “Everything okay? You just seem so mad today.”

And I can’t be sure, but I think I remember a smile, forcing its way along the edges of her mouth.