It was accidental, and it was little by little, but at Columbia, I stopped being “good.” When it became purposeful and more sudden, the only way I could understand it was to look at it from the outside, like fiction. Like it wasn’t happening to me. There’s this scene I can’t shake from the title story in ZZ Packer’s book Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. The main character, Dina, is attending college orientation. She’s a black woman who is maybe probably queer. She’s starting at Yale after growing up in a lower-class Baltimore neighborhood. To say that Dina and I had something in common back when I read the book the summer before freshman year would be an understatement. But you couldn’t have told me that then. I literally had no idea. I didn’t even drink coffee back then. Honey, I was about to go through it.
There were moments I thought to myself, Oh, baby, you are gay. But I didn’t say it like that. If anybody had spoken to me like that then, I would have set my hair on fire. Instead it was like What if I was…gay? Which is not a “good” thought for a churchgoing, pious, straight virgin to have. So I didn’t have those thoughts. I thought about other things. I thought about Dina.
In the story, Dina is at an orientation icebreaker and is suddenly, awkwardly, aware of herself. The orientation leader asks the students, “If you had to be an object, what would you be?” Dina’s answer: a revolver.
There’s a moment of silence. The words hang in the air like a vulture. Dina, in her narration, confides in us, “I don’t know why I said it. Until that moment I’d been good in all the ways that were meant to matter.” Even though I didn’t have a real conscious awareness of how closely my narrative would follow Dina’s when I set off for Columbia at eighteen, her summation of her precollege life hit home.
I had been good in all the ways you were supposed to be good. My only predominant personality trait was “good.” I wasn’t sporty; I wasn’t cool; I was good. I was smart enough, I guessed, but not as smart as I could be. After all, I’d been wait-listed at Harvard, so essentially I was a moron.
Like Dina, sometimes I’d step outside myself and wonder why I was even entertaining the notion of not being “good.” I didn’t work so hard to leave Baltimore just to come to New York to turn gay, I’d think. Which is hilarious because that’s the reason 65 percent of people leave home and come to New York. That’s the city’s slogan: “Come here and tongue kiss a boy or whatever. Then write a solo show about it. BTW, the L train isn’t running this weekend.” Anyway, I was pressed. And my grades started slipping, which wasn’t good, and I started drinking, which wasn’t good, and I was sad, like, all the time, which seemed kind of normal, to be honest, but also not good. And then, at the beginning of the second semester of my junior year, I received a letter that said, “Hon, you’re a mess. Take a minute, go for a soak in a tub, buy an olive grove and rediscover yourself like Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun, something. Just. Like. Stop.”
Actually it just said, “You’re on academic probation.” And told me to make arrangements to spend the next semester elsewhere.
So, suddenly, at twenty years old, I was home again, in Baltimore. And I was sad and I was tired and I was maybe probably gay. And I was no longer good. I began to suspect I was a revolver.
In the absence of good, what is there? I felt I’d disappointed my parents. And my church. And my whole race, actually. Isn’t that the prevailing narrative for people in oppressed groups of all kinds: your ancestors suffered so you could achieve, so you better achieve. Rosa Parks didn’t sit on that bus for me to go to New York and turn gay.
I was living in my parents’ basement, and I had started taking classes at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). I was unable to figure out how to be good again after failing my family and my race. And in the midst of all that, I accidentally pointed a spotlight at myself by going viral on the early internet. Don’t get me wrong—I wanted to be famous. But I wanted it to happen when I was R. Eric Thomas, Ivy League success story, not R. Eric Thomas, basement-dwelling internet troll. But you get what you get, I guess.
In 2002 the internet was still in its Wild West days—there was no Twitter, no YouTube. It was a lot harder to go viral back in those days. Which is my way of saying you should be impressed.
I should say my experience at UMBC was very different from my experience at Columbia. I didn’t make many friends, I didn’t live on campus, and I was sad and I was tired most of the time. I worked an early morning shift at the Baltimore Sun in their delivery complaints department—you called me if your paper didn’t arrive. But sometimes people called if they were angry about an editorial. Or sometimes they called if they were lonely. I worked from 5 A.M. until noon and then I went to class. I didn’t do a lot of socializing. Mostly I just went to lectures and wrote movie reviews for the school newspaper and went home.
I went viral in the middle of February. I was in the school bookstore one afternoon when I noticed a Black History Month display. The sign on the display read, “From Bondage to Books: Black History Month.” It had a picture of Harriet Tubman and a picture of Colin Powell. And that was it.
I looked at it; I looked around. Was anybody else seeing this? The bookstore was this big, glass-encased two-story structure. It was overcast outside and so inside everything was gray. There was no one else around. Maybe a cashier up front. I was alone. Me and the sign.
I gave it a Clair Huxtable raised eyebrow. This sign was trying it. The sign infuriated me. To me it said, “Oh, the history of blacks in this country can be boiled down to the Middle Passage, slavery, and whatever it is that Colin Powell means to you.” Which was complicated then and remains “interesting” now.
Now, yeah, you can’t fit a lot on a sign. But you can fit more than that. I felt three things in quick succession: I felt a raw exposure in the middle of that empty bookstore. Then I felt trapped, stuck standing where I was. And then, as I turned on my heels and left, I felt powerful. The sign didn’t have to have the last word.
I marched straight across campus into the newspaper office and announced, “I’m writing an editorial.” They were like, “Aren’t you the movie review guy?” I was like, “I’ve changed!” Because I wanted to talk about the sign and the sentiment behind it, I decided to write my editorial as a satire. (And this, dear reader, is a moment where you might quietly wish the hero of the story had another instinct. But he did not.)
For my part, I wish, for the sake of good storytelling and for my progress in therapy, that I could explain why I chose satire. I think my goal was for people to read it and say, “You are very funny, and racism is bad.” I remind you now that you are holding a book in which I have written funny things. Perhaps you have spent money for it. Or perhaps you are sitting on the floor of a Barnes & Noble, nibbling on a date and chuckling to yourself. Whatever you’re doing, you’ve somehow come in contact with this thing that I wrote, fifteen years after I sat in my student center and wrote an editorial that I considered satire. And in the intervening years I’ve learned how to be more, what’s the phrase? Successfully funny. I didn’t know that then. I thought if you wanted to write a satire, you just said everything very sarcastically and called it a day.
I called it “An Idiot’s Guide to Black History Month.” The article takes the caustic position that Black History Month is unnecessary, since the history of African Americans is unremarkable and, as the sign says, is really about slaves learning to read and becoming Colin Powell. It started off:
Another February has passed and another Black History Month is behind us. Good riddance. That whole Underground Railroad bit is going to get old pretty fast. I mean, honestly, how much Black History is there, really? We all know about “Black History.” Africa, slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow, Aretha Franklin, Civil Rights, MLK blown away, what else do I have to say?
It went on to talk about the sign in the bookstore before circling back to more incendiary thoughts on black history. I sent it in, and the crazy white people on the newspaper staff published it. It went to print and was published online on a Thursday with my email address at the bottom for praise and compliments and my name at the top with no accompanying photos. The online component was new; we’d just redone our newspaper’s website and were committed to putting all of our content up.
It’s important to note: my full name is Robert Eric Thomas; I go by R. Eric Thomas in print so that you can more easily google me. (I kept the “R.” because there’s a motivational speaker in Michigan named Eric Thomas who would very much like to be left out of my bullshit.) Robert Eric Thomas is an intentionally racially neutral name, as my parents didn’t want others to be able to see my name on a job application or résumé and discriminate against me. It was a beautiful and sort of heartbreaking gift. And, as far as I can tell, it has helped me in my life. I’ve had a lot of job interviews with racists.
It was, however, a problem here.
When you see an article on the internet that is maybe a satire but also not so well written, an article that says Black History Month is unnecessary, and the name at the top is, well, white, you might get your feelings hurt. That’s the thing, there’s no neutral.
By Saturday, I had more than a thousand emails in my inbox. And the number grew as the weekend turned into Monday and the article was passed around to the National Association of Black Journalists listserv and other mailing lists. I thought I was famous.
What was remarkable, I remember, was the speed at which it all happened. Nowadays, something going viral over a weekend is normal, to be expected. When I publish an article today, I usually know within thirty minutes whether it’s going to do well based on the reaction of my Facebook friends. Back then, the speed was stunning. At home, I worked with a 56k modem, which felt like racing through time and space. Plus, there were sound effects. This was an event. I was shewk.
I had written my editorial for the school paper, emphasis on “paper.” I thought I’d start a conversation on campus between scholarly people with ink-stained fingers or something. I could never have conceived of thousands of people screaming at me online, which is hilarious because that’s what most of the internet is today. I mean, it’s not that for me; I’m sensitive (FOR OBVIOUS REASONS). Today, I go out of my way to avoid anyone being mean to me online or assuming I am a white person. Most of the time, I don’t write for websites that have a comments section, because I’ve learned the hard way that even if there are a hundred comments that are like “LOL, you’re hilarious. You’re my favorite person. You’re the hero of this story,” all it takes is one person to write “Meh” to send me spiraling into despair. I am serious.
The email responses to my editorial were sharper and more jagged than anything I’d ever received. People were not playing around with me, which is great for justice but was very bad for my feelings. People were writing things like “Dear White Devil” and “You are a Klansman and you should die.” At one point, I got an email inviting me to speak at an ultra-nationalist rally in Kentucky. Because I have a real problem, I wrote back, “Hey, I’ll be happy to speak if you’ll fly me out and pay for my hotel. Also, I’m black. Does that make this weird?”
They didn’t respond. I’m not proud, but I’m also not trying to pass up a per diem.
I wrote a follow-up, which was non-satirical and said, “Lol, I’m black.” But the newspaper was printed only once a week, and we didn’t know you could just update your website anytime, so we had to wait until the next Thursday, when the printer ran again, to publish it. We literally did not know how to use the internet.
On campus, things were fraught. You remember, no one knew who I was, so everyone there thought there was some Nazi Youth running around in their midst. The Black Student Union announced that they would be holding a town hall to talk about the imbroglio. I hadn’t joined the Maryland BSU, like the one at Columbia, so they didn’t know I wasn’t white either. I really need to start joining things. I was a little shirty that they didn’t extend an invite to the town hall through the newspaper. I really am a trip; like my faux-racist ass really thought this group of black people should’ve sent a telegram or evite or something.
It was held in the late afternoon, and because it was February, the sun had already set. The campus was empty and the light was blue, and I stood outside of the building where the meeting was being held and tried to will myself to just go home. What was I going to do? Burst in like it was a courtroom? “Surprise, bitch! You’re out of order!” No, I was not. It had been a long, hard week of having mean things said to me on the internet. But I watched people stream in, mostly black people, in groups, and I felt those three things in quick succession again: I felt alone, I felt trapped, and then I felt powerful. I didn’t need an invitation. I could go wherever I wanted. (I was embracing my white privilege.)
These were my people. I went because, although I didn’t know anybody, this was my community. We all wanted the same thing, right? We all had to walk by the sign every day. That’s what this was really about. The internet hated me, but this room was full of people who believed what I believed. I felt like I belonged there. I felt like I was supposed to be there.
I stood in the back and I listened. Everyone who stood up to talk mentioned this white racist, R. Eric Thomas. Everyone was furious. Everyone was angry at me. That was not the intended effect. They wanted something. They all wanted an apology. From my white ass.
I was shocked but I stayed silent, which is uncharacteristic. I have never in my life walked into a room with a microphone and not planned on saying anything. Speaking, whether anyone wants me to or not, is one of my spiritual gifts. But in that auditorium, I was speechless. I got defensive all of a sudden. None of these feelings were what I intended. My intentions were good! It was incomprehensible to me. I wrote a satire! I turned to a guy standing next to me. This tall, light-skinned black guy. Attractive. I said, “This is really something, isn’t it?”
He said, “Yeah, this R. Eric Thomas is a real asshole.”
I was like, “Well, he’s got some good qualities. His grammar is impeccable.”
I looked around that room full of black people, my people, and I felt angry and isolated. Again. The town hall continued, but I felt myself getting flushed. I gathered my stuff and left. I wasn’t feeling the way I wanted to feel. I wrote what I wrote because I wanted people to laugh with me. Except I wasn’t laughing. Walking off into the night, boarding the bus I resented, and traveling back to the basement apartment my own actions had forced me into, I realized that I was furious. Had I ever been laughing? The words that I’d so gleefully dashed off ran through my head, colored now by the pain and frustration I’d heard from my classmates. I had to admit to myself what should have been plainly obvious. I didn’t write what I wrote to make people laugh—I wrote it to make them angry.
Alone in the bookstore, I had read the sign that had hurt my feelings. And that hurt had acted as a flint, igniting an anger that had lurked beneath the surface for years, directionless and formless but now suddenly powerful. And aimed. I wanted someone, anyone, else to feel the way that I felt. And so I turned to the computer, and I started typing. I was the revolver.
The second article was eventually published, which quelled some of the in-person anger, though the Black Student Union did censure me, which is this sort of public rebuke. It feels like it should come with a certificate but it didn’t. I received hate mail for months but I never heard anything about the sign. Anyway, it came down the first week of March because Black History Month was over.