I am under the influence of many things in college, including:
Malcolm X: teaching separation over integration as the way to our salvation, as adamant about the need for separation of the races as any racist white man.
Amiri Baraka: mocking me in “Poem for HalfWhite College Students” … when you find yourself gesturing like Steve McQueen, check it out, ask / in your black heart who it is you are, and is that image black or white …
The Stanford Review: spelling out my enemy’s blueprints and battle plans. But why the annual subscription when I could pick it up from a newspaper kiosk? I tell myself it’s because I believe in free speech and their right to exist. But years later, when I can finally interrogate this self, I realize I subscribed because I was scared to death of these unhooded whites printing their disdain for our existence. I thought well if I’m on their subscriber list maybe they’ll leave me alone.
The Mormon Church: preaching a different kind of salvation. I visit every Sunday morning by walking out of my dorm and turning left, a twenty-minute walk to a building where I learn how to pray to a God who discriminated against Black men until 1978 and I learn the Missionaries’ lessons (although I stop reading the Book of Mormon on page 66 where it says a tribe of people were cursed with a skin of blackness) and when they ask if I am ready to be baptized I say yes and in spring of 1987 I am baptized in a full-water immersion ceremony and at Christmas later that year I will announce to my parents and half siblings that I have joined the Mormon Church and their jaws will drop and their mouths will fill with silence and for once in my life I will have this family’s complete attention.
I am an island.
I am on an island.
My family abandoned me on this island.
And I will not be judged.