99 Problems Finding the 1 | Apogee Digital, Issue 19

From 99 Problems Finding the 1

G’Ra Asim

99.

Why should anyone take anything my father has to say about anti-black racism seriously if he has a white wife? On its face, it’s a reasonable if perhaps dogmatic question.

The race of a given black person’s romantic partner is not a perfectly reliable index of the person’s pro-black solidarity. But it is widely presumed to be one, and in that respect it doesn’t surprise my mother when the question comes up. My dad is a writing professor and the author of several books. When he appears in public, he is often asked about race and racism. His responses invariably invite some version of the ok-but-what-about-your-white-wife retort. Sometimes someone brings it up one-on-one, when my father is signing their copy of one of his books. Other times, a person in the audience raises the question during the Q&A session at the conclusion of my dad’s remarks.

I’m amazed at how much attention this spectral white woman generates. Faith in her presumed existence is so strong that it can overshadow my mother’s observable presence at my father’s side.

Though she is often mistaken for a white woman over the phone, my mother is unambiguously black in person. On a 1-10 scale of identifiable blackness, if 1 is Rashida Jones and 10 is Stacy Abrams, Mom is at least an 8. My clearly black mother has been married to my clearly black father for over thirty years. Mom, a homemaker and theatermaker who has not worked outside of the home full-time since I was in elementary school, doesn’t always accompany Baba during his book tours and speaking engagements. But he’s questioned about a phantom Caucasian companion even when my mother is in the audience. It’s mostly other black folks who jump to this conclusion out loud, probably because they believe they can level this accusation from the moral high ground. Non-black people may be prone to similar assumptions, but not having that “righteous” outrage, politely hold their tongues.

I take the persistence of this charade as an indication of how tightly we cling to racial and gendered stereotypes. It’s an intersectional counterpart to the old riddle about a father and a son in a terrible car crash that kills the father. The son is rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon exclaims, “I can’t operate. That boy is my son!” Research shows that most are stumped by this riddle, likely because they can’t imagine that the surgeon could be the boy’s mother.

Somewhere in the collective unconscious, there’s a tablet bearing a commandment that surgeons are men. Etched alongside it is a rule that indicates that successful, articulate black men are married to white women, and that brown-skinned, unassuming black women aren’t married at all. We don’t commit to these ideas based on evidence alone. Often, our commitment to these ideas invisibilizes evidence that plainly contravenes them. Basic legibility eludes those whose existence and experiences run counter to these schemas. The mother who becomes a surgeon and the black woman who sustains a loving partnership with a black man both triumph over what sociologist C. Wright Mills calls “the problems of history, of biography and their intersections.” In all the discussion of sexism and racism as “systemic” phenomena, it’s easy to lose sight of their more mundane perils. Like how stereotypes about the groups we belong to shape the contours of our interpersonal relationships.

This difficulty synthesizing woman with surgeon and blackness with love points at a confluence between heteropessimism and Afropessimism, two discourses with rising purchase. These glass-half-empty takes on anti-blackness and heterosexuality, respectively, frame each as problems that by their very nature defy all possible solutions. Heteropessimism holds that warm relations between men and women are structurally untenable, and that straightness itself is a pathology. Afropessimism is more of a philosophical school than a viral meme, but it holds that the condition of the ex-slave is subject to a similarly unchangeable predicament. As Afropessimists see it, anti-black racism is the mortar with which human societies are built. Colonialism, racism and the echoes of enslavement are not only endemic to American life, they are foundational to it.

As Frank Wilderson, the writer and scholar sometimes known as the godfather of Afropessimism, puts it, the theory highlights an “essential antagonism between blacks (Slaves) and Humans (masters).” Heteropessimism conceives of women and men as beset by differences no less intractable. Both heteropessimism and Afropessimism are performative in the sense that they involve using language as a form of social action. The dour forecasts on straight people’s pursuit of love and black people’s pursuit of humanity are meant to emphasize the scale and resilience of the impediments to those pursuits. A non-exhaustive list of those obstacles, in the latter case, would include things like the school-to-prison pipeline, high rates of discrimination in primary health care, and voter disenfranchisement. Literal hopelessness is not quite the point of Afropessimism or heteropessimism; it’s more that the seductiveness of hope tends to skew analysis. In his essay “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” University of California at Irvine African American Studies professor Jared Sexton argues that Afropessimism illuminates the consequences of trying “to delimit the ‘bad news’ of black life.” Heteropessimism is guided by a similar conviction, namely that to delimit the bad news is to misrepresent the conundrum. All of this resonates with the disinclination to recognize my parents as a couple. Where love is concerned, does one truly see more clearly by taking their rose-colored glasses off?

Here’s where Afropessimism and heteropessimism are interventions against different kinds of understatement. Soft pedaling anti-black racism plays into the hands of racism’s beneficiaries, which means refusing to soft pedal it has at least some empowering benefit for black people. We might be tempted, then, to conclude that tamping down the bad news of straight life serves the interests of sexism’s beneficiaries (that is, men), and that refusing to tamp it down specifically empowers women. There’s something to this. Heteropessimism raises collective consciousness among women that bad romantic experiences with sexist men are reflective of a larger social problem rather than isolated incidents.

98.

But there’s a reason heteropessimism—and not something more like genderpessimism—is a robust online subculture. The idea that misogyny is baked into heterosexuality is a tremendous coalition builder. A number of identity groups who might not agree on much else can get behind it. Straight men buy in because we can claim that our backward ideas about women are normal. Heteropessimism gives queer men and women license to believe they’re more enlightened about gender just by virtue of being gay. Accepting that romance and sex between men and women is necessarily dysfunctional allows straight women to downplay their own agency and responsibility. A heteropessimist stiff arms heartbreak, attenuates the pain of rejection, eschews the burden of self-scrutiny. Straight romantic destiny is fixed, and once you’ve absorbed the permanence of this bad news, you don’t have to bother getting your hopes up. In a digital landscape that rewards snark and ideological purity, fatalism about heterosexual love thrives because it dulls feeling and absolves blame.

97.

It seems wonky to compare straight people as a group with black people as a group. Far more than straightness, blackness is determinative of the structure of your family, where you live, your health, wealth, and your relationship to the justice system. The list of things straight people share on the basis of their sexuality is much shorter, and most items on that list are privileges. A grim outlook is no real revelation to black folks, a group of people whose survival has depended on making a way out of no way. Muting feelings of rage, indignation, hurt, and weariness are already long-standing black cultural imperatives. And blame tends to find us regardless of our chosen affective stances. Social media groupthink would have us believe heterosexuality is a prison, but blackness is actually shaped by various forms of ongoing unfreedom.

So what do you get when you combine the hyperbolic “imprisonment” of straightness with the factual reality of structural racism? If straight culture is unconducive to love, and if the Earth is inhospitable to black life, then black people face a doozy of a double bind. The foreclosure of romantic possibility is costly even for black people who are not straight, as we’ve historically been stigmatized because of our perceived misalignment with normative family structures (e.g.: The Moynihan Report).

For all that they might make visible when taken together, the latticework of Afropessimism and heteropessimism and the conditions that begat them push my parents’ relationship out of view. As a black woman happily married to a black man, my mother has gotten the drop on the twin foes of misogyny and anti-black racism. These foes are so formidable that folks are often unable to recognize that my mother and father have bested them.

96.

Which makes my own genesis, as a product of this seemingly implausible and ongoing black love, an unthinkable event for many people.

Naturally this is a topical concern for me as a childless, single black person in his thirties. At some point I would like to have a happy marriage of my own. Thanks to my parents I’m fortunate to have grown up with an excellent model for how to do so. But it’s a model that strains credulity to many of the people I would hope to replicate it with. Practically anybody single and dating in their thirties has absorbed their fair share of the conventional wisdom. They have developed the armor they are told is requisite: Thickened skin and narrowed eyes and hesitance to suspend disbelief. They tiptoe toward romance with their inner drawbridges raised. The desires I would hope to fulfill by dating are scarcely recognized as extant.

In the dating world, heteropessimism and Afropessimism work together like that old medical school adage: If you hear hoofbeats behind you, think horse, not zebra. Just like doctors are taught to focus on typical possibilities rather than rare ones when making a diagnosis, single people are encouraged to see rules and not exceptions when assessing their suitors. This is prudent in a coldly mathematical sense. But allowing the social equivalent of autofill and predictive text to dictate your love life is painfully unsexy.

It could be the sole credible defense of the much-maligned “not all men!” rejoinder. If you accept that men who aren’t unbearably misogynist are so uncommon that they aren’t worth mentioning, can you even recognize an exception when you see one? Of course, men interested in women are no less prone to using generalizations as a crutch. The self-pitying black male “nerd” narratives have their own misogynoir talking points. These, too, contribute to why my parents’ relationship is seen as unlikely on multiple fronts: Black women like my mother, are presumed to only go for thugs, and black men like my father are presumed to prefer white women. Taking any of these stereotypes as gospel makes the heart a less than supple muscle. Love thrives in particularity.

Heteropessimism and Afropessimism, for all their uses, don’t lend themselves to what the influential cultural theorist Stuart Hall calls a politics without guarantees. “If you think that race is a fixed biological characteristic, and that a whole number of other things: cultural qualities, intellectual qualities, emotional and expressive qualities follow from the fact of being genetically one race or another,” says Hall, “…you will think then that the very fact of race can actually guarantee a whole range of things.” Protecting the very possibility of indeterminacy seems critical to any feminist and anti-racist project. And even more vital to any credibly romantic one. Love needs ellipses. Ambiguity nourishes intrigue. What is intimacy without open-ended questions?

As I type, my father is reading Dickens until he falls asleep. My mother reclines in bed next to him with her headphones in, a science fiction TV show flickering on her laptop screen. The sight of them together is domestic bliss personified. They don’t just enjoy each other’s company; they luxuriate in it. Two zebras were ingenuous enough to notice each other and team up, and to remain ecstatically teamed more than three decades later. If either of my parents had heard the other’s approaching hoofbeats and thought horse, I might not be here.

95.

In early 2020, I landed a job as an assistant professor at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. The job offered relative economic stability for the next six years, and possibly for longer if I managed to earn tenure. Since moving to New York City six years before, I had spent two years in an MFA program, two as a graduate teaching fellow and eighteen months on staff at a gender and race justice think tank. I’d long since resolved to make a living writing, reading and thinking, but I also racked up six-figure student debt in the process.

The professor gig was the break I had been waiting for. It felt like a level up moment for my entire genealogical line. My parents had children young and came from blue collar backgrounds. Though my father was a prolific author and eventually became a professor himself once I was an adult, our family lived below the poverty line for a significant chunk of my childhood. My future children would be the first generation born into the middle class. There was, of course, one hitch in the plan I had not considered: I was 33 years old, single, and childless. Taking the job meant that for the foreseeable future, I would spend at least nine months out of the year in a freezing upstate college town that was only 7% black. I had finally secured a level of income where having a family wouldn’t feel irresponsible—in exchange for landing in a milieu unlikely to harbor a partner in starting one.

My parents’ marriage had always been the prototype for the eventual emotional centerpiece of my own adult life. I’d had only a few girlfriends you could call serious, but had dated casually often enough to have a decent sense of the New York City singles scene. None of these experiences seemed to portend a loose simulacrum of what my parents modeled. Was it something I’d been doing wrong?

94.

Cassie, my best friend from grad school, predicted that we’d become best friends—and not romantic partners—early in our acquaintance. Or rather, she relayed a theory that a white professor in our MFA program had devised based on years of experience presiding over an elite academic environment with few black folks in it. Having dated a number of black women, the professor fancied himself an authority. Though she regarded him as more of a mentor figure, he appeared quite smitten with Cassie right away. Maybe this was his way of deterring some of his competition.

The professor’s theory went like this: In a predominantly white setting, black women and men intuitively look at each other like family rather than as potential paramours because they have such few reliable allies. The sight of another black person among the alabaster throng is the sound of sirens to a house on fire. The urgent need for intraracial social contact and limited opportunities to have it encourage a scarcity mindset. We prioritize forming resilient, mutually protective and affirming connections with one another rather than taking on the risks that accompany romance. For black folks in the rare air of elite professional and educational spaces, the appeal of dating non-black people might stem from the calculation that they are people we can afford to alienate. This chimes with heteropessimism in that the ultimate result is that black women and men in such contexts don’t link and live happily ever after. It’s a departure from heteropessimism because the professor’s theory posits familial comity rather than enmity as the impasse. On the other hand, it’s classically Afropessimist that racism truncates the spectrum of social possibilities for even ascendant black people.

Naturally I bristled when Cassie summarized the professor’s hypothesis. Who was he, I thought to myself, to play armchair sociologist with lives he couldn’t possibly understand? Whatever the worth of his theory overall, my and Cassie’s case in particular played out much like he predicted. In his essay “On Heteropessimism,” heterosexuality theorist Asa Seresin cites the podcast why do i like men as the rare example of an outlet for heterosexual enthusiasm. On it, guest and filmmaker Theda Hammel offers the following answer: “The reason that a woman likes men—or a trans woman maybe in particular likes men—is not necessarily because men are all that likeable…but just that they bring out qualities that you like in yourself, by virtue of being different from you.” If the primary incentive for heterosexual companionship is contrast that accentuates positive difference, then maybe Cassie’s professor friend is on to something. black women and men’s similarity feels more salient than their difference in a historically white university setting. Perhaps for the same reason, my and Cassie’s friendship allows for something far more dynamic than what Hammel describes. Cassie and I are alike in terms of interests, temperament, humor, and, yes, race. We each highlight qualities in the other that we like about our respective selves, except by virtue of being the same. This in turn allows us to experience the ways that we are different from a position of safety.

The rapport between Cassie and I works because it functions how relational theorist Emily Style argues the ideal curriculum should: as both window and mirror. “If the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self,” says Style, “education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected.” To the heteropessimist, the dwelling of self is too seldom mirrored in a woman-man pairing. The view through the available windows is often unsightly. These realities are not immutable, and the heteropessimist bears some responsibility for the disrepair. If teachers can, through trial and error, gradually perfect their curriculum, then women and men can perfect their unions.

Style’s windows and mirrors are trickier to reconcile with Afropessimism. The Afropessimist read might conclude that for the ex-slave, mirrors will reify abjection. Windows into other black people’s realities will do the same. Non-black people’s purview will only tantalize the black dwelling of self, since it depicts possibilities that anti-blackness forecloses. If this sounds solipsistic, it gets worse. Afropessimism holds that the experiences of black people can’t be credibly analogized to those of other social outgroups. Not to go full John and Yoko, but women as a group seem to occupy a station similar to black people as a group. Reluctance to validate symmetries between racism and sexism (let alone fully conceptualize the position of people subject to both) informs so-called straight culture. It’s part of why black men and black women so often lock horns over who is “more” oppressed.

The bad news of black life is certainly more bearable when I can commiserate with someone whose chains may be slightly different from my own. To frame my travails as so singular that they defy analogy is to compound them. All the hardships that heteropessimism and Afropessimism call our attention to are best attended to in coalition, not by retreating to silos.

What makes my and Cassie’s dynamic satisfying is something worth striving for—and something I fervently believe is possible—in all human connections: mutual identification alongside curiosity about and generosity toward one another.

93.

The pandemic struck New York City soon after I accepted the tenure-track position that would take me upstate. In the second week of March 2020, Covid’s severity was still relatively unknown, but when I ventured out of my modest Harlem apartment share to stock up on necessities, it was the first time I detected “disaster movie” energy in the uptown ether. I trusted the instinct and moved in with my parents in Brookline, MA. As deaths and case totals climbed that spring, romantic desolation initially seemed like a petty grievance.

My predicament became obvious during a catch-up call with a childhood friend. She had just gotten an interview for her dream position. If she landed the position, she’d be able to move away from the Bay Area and relocate to Birmingham, Alabama. She’d longed to move to the south for years. Seeing one longstanding aspiration move tantalizingly within reach, she began musing about realizing another line item on her list sometime soon.

We should think about a marriage pact, she told me. If neither of us gets hitched in the next five or so years, maybe we should get married to each other. She and I were both staring down our Jesus year. We were in roughly parallel positions in our careers. I told her marriage was on my mind, too, which was not quite the truth. I had actually been thinking about love. Old school love. Resilient love. I was imagining being a cherished member of an ecstatic, adaptable two-person team. I had been thinking about the kind of love where marriage would be a mere formality. My goal wasn’t really to be married. I’d be happy if marriage was a byproduct of successfully cultivating that kind of love.

My friend seemed surprised.

“Do you have any prospects on that front?” she asked me.

I began a quick mental inventory: There were two exes who, were it not for expiring visas and unfavorable geography, might still be in the picture. There was a family friend I had recently been on a handful of promising dates with right before the pandemic struck. With travel restrictions in place and coronavirus continuing to ravage the country nearly unchecked, none of these women seemed likely to walk down as much as a supermarket aisle with me in the near future.

“Uh,” I groaned into the phone. “Not so much.”

92.

In school, I would often turn down a corridor and catch Cassie in lively conversation with another fellow student. She would toss her hair and laugh loudly and easily, her broad, fetchingly monodimpled smile shining like a beacon across the hall. It was often the case that her (usually non-black) interlocutor was standing a curious distance away from her, in rapt attention but also perhaps a bit nervous.

I’d joke that Cassie’s very presence in our MFA cohort was a visual aid. She was a convenient instantiation of Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime. Cassie is whip smart and statuesque, but warm enough to offset the ways that she’s intimidating. She’s one of the only people I know as good at talking as she is at listening. Gracious and understated in her reception of compliments and quick to return them in kind. These personal qualities are of course nevertheless filtered through the prism of her womanhood and her blackness. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” Burke writes.

I’m sure Burke wasn’t thinking of us, but most of the time that black people are represented in popular culture, we’re depicted as either suffering pain and danger or inflicting it. Attractive black people’s appeal is complicated but nonetheless amplified by their association with threat. “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible,” Burke notes. “But at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful as we every day experience.” Womanhood itself foments its own share of passionate ambivalence, so black women are especially likely to occupy a nexus encompassing both desire and fear. For Cassie and I both, the collision of history and biography yields a capacity to draw others to us and at the same time an innate propensity to keep them at arm’s length. Through a heteropessimist lens, this is yet another obstacle to the cultivation of sustainable romantic bonds. It’s also resonant with the Afropessimist argument that an underlying racial antagonism structures social realities. Even when we are sublime, we remain repellent.

These structures of feeling are at work between and among black people, both in ways that are consistent with heteropessimism and in ways that heteropessimism can’t fully account for. Intraracial patriarchy presents an array of challenges. Racism affects how black people think of each other as well. Calling black people’s anti-black behavior “internalized racism” is like referring to breath as internalized oxygen. When a given element saturates the environment like anti-blackness does, we can take it as a given that everyone has internalized it to some degree.

This calls into question whether black people even have access to heteronormativity. After all, Afropessimism posits that the world is organized by anti-Black solidarity. Which means that even for straight black folks, we can’t really embody what is normal, default or preferred. Controlling black women’s reproduction and black people’s sexuality is a cornerstone of the American social order. One of the country’s earliest laws codified black procreation as the wellspring of chattel slavery. In her landmark essay “Whiteness as Property” Cheryl Harris writes that, “in 1662, the Virginia colonial assembly provided that ‘children got by an Englishman upon a negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother.’ In reversing the usual common law presumption that the status of the child was determined by the father, the rule facilitated the reproduction of one’s own labor force…Because the children of black women assumed the status of their mother, slaves were bred through black women’s bodies.” Carrying out a biological imperative—ensuring the longevity of your own people— would necessarily reinforce the institution that oppressed them. If “straightness” and “normalcy” connote a simpatico relationship with dominant power, heterosexual partnerships with even one black person involved have never enjoyed that status.

As Cassie and I each swashbuckled through various dating misadventures throughout grad school and in the time since, we’d always circle back to one another and compare notes. To put it in terms of attachment theory, we each served as the platonic “secure base” from which the other could depart and explore freely. At certain distances with certain modifications, it remains to this day a delightful communion.

91.

The barriers to comity between black women and black men are always simultaneously raced and gendered. A season two episode of Donald Glover’s television show Atlanta (2018) offers an illuminating case study. During a party scene, a white woman notices that Candi, a black woman, is staring at her pointedly. When the white woman asks if there’s a problem, Candi describes the white woman as “saddled over there with your black accessory—and I’m just tired of that story.”

(Could this be the same story that is often projected on my father and used to invisibilize my mother?) The white woman’s boyfriend is a successful black actor, and Candi insinuates that the white girlfriend is a status symbol. “You can afford to invest early,” Candi says. “I don’t got time to be sitting out here with no community theater ass nigga for eight years.” “Maybe I’m just a good woman,” the white girlfriend shoots back, defending her relationship. “I’ve been with him since he was doing community theater.” The white woman wants Candi to know that she supported her boyfriend before he was a success by conventional standards, and that maybe “two good people just found each other.” Candi takes a moment to absorb the argument before ultimately dismissing it. She points out that the white woman’s advantages make it easier for her to be a good woman.

It’s hard to imagine a more succinct fusion of Afropessismism and heteropessimism. Candi’s take boils down to the romantic equivalent of “it takes money to make money.” Privilege makes gambling on a promising but unproven man a lower-risk proposition. And Candi’s suspicion that the actor chose his partner as a trophy, while obviously not accurate in all cases, is more than reasonable. It’s common for people in general to choose partners based on whom they believe will impress their friends. The prevalence of white beauty standards rigs the pageant. I’m sympathetic to the idea that whiteness makes romantic optimism affordable. But black love—romantic, familial and otherwise—has faced long odds since we arrived on these shores. Black people have a track record of rising to the occasion.

In her book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, scholar Dorothy Roberts confirms as much: “Black women, along with Black men, succeeded remarkably often in maintaining the integrity of their family life despite slavery’s traumas…Amazingly, despite forced mating, sale of loved ones, and other brutalities of bondage, many slaves lived in settled, intimate families for a good part of their lives.” I’m not invoking the bloody legacy of enslavement to wag my finger at a fictional black woman. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that opting not to spend eight years on a community theater ass nigga is the sound of freedom ringing. I just think that it’s easy to forget that African Americans are heirs to a tradition of loving through struggle. Waiting for a safe bet before wagering is a choice.

90.

No matter how upwardly mobile a young black person seems, they are always at the same time an at-risk youth. Sometimes it’s precociousness itself that marks you as at-risk, or at least, at risk of one day being married to a white person.

My dad and his sister were discussing a section of Barack Obama’s memoir in which he mentions calculating that he needed to be married to a black woman to realize his full political potential. Like most Democratic candidates, he’d need near unanimous black support to be elected president. Maybe especially because of his biracial parentage, “black wife” was a box he needed to check en route to the White House. The conversation between my father and my aunt is in some ways the inverse of the Atlanta scene. Both of them clearly recognized Michelle Obama as a status symbol herself—a feather in Barack’s “race man” cap. I’m not sure my aunt and my father would evaluate Barack’s candidacy on this basis themselves so much as that they were imagining the criteria that black America at large might use. Ok, he’s a light-skinned Harvard Law product raised by his white mother and her family, the thinking would go. But we know he’s down because of his wife, who is not only black, but notably also not light-skinned–and from the southside of Chicago.

I was 22, and a long way from thinking seriously about marriage. But somehow Obama’s quest to be an optimally palatable black presidential candidate had something to do with me. “G’Ra,” my aunt began, apropos of nothing in particular. “I just want you to know that if that’s something you wanted to do—if you married a white woman—that would be ok. And no one would hold it against you.”

I didn’t covet this: preemptive amnesty for an outcome I didn’t see as a foregone conclusion, or even something I’d need to be forgiven for if it did come to pass. What I mainly took from the comment was that I was already marked as a racial defector in waiting before I’d even accumulated any substantial romantic experience. “I don’t think this is something we have to worry about, actually,” I replied, a bit flippantly. “Because I want to be president, too.”

Here was the hubris of youth talking. My ambition to be head of state was extremely short-lived. I was probably only a few years removed from grudgingly accepting that my grownup job wasn’t going to be “ninja.” But the core of what I was saying was true. I was determined to be a person who didn’t alienate himself from the only community who felt some obligation to embrace him. The notion of pandering to the “white gaze” takes up so much conceptual real estate that the import of the black gaze is hardly considered. Where calibrating one’s image in the white gaze is crucial to sustenance in the public sphere, catering to the black gaze is central to the private one. These two color-coded viewfinders aren’t symmetrical, though. The white gaze, buttressed by institutions, laws and norms, is easy to generalize about. The black gaze is more situational. In this particular case I knew my audience well; both my aunt and my dad were and are in happy, long-lasting marriages to black people. I thought that a similar future was well within the realm of possibility for me. But more importantly, I didn’t want to be sorted into a category of people who found the prospect unappealing.

When I tell Cassie that I’m considering writing about the search for love in the valueless abyss of modernity, we spitball ideas about it together, as we usually do. She relates to some of the challenges that I enumerate, but is for the moment unconcerned with surmounting them. “I really think that you and Elle are my soulmates,” Cassie tells me. Elle is another black woman and NYC-based artist we know. “I’m happy with that.” A few days later Cassie texts me a link to an Atlantic article called “What if Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?” None of the featured “best friends” who’ve centered their lives on a single, emotionally satisfying platonic relationship are of opposite gender. From the looks of it you might surmise that men and women are only non-romantic soulmates if it’s the first act of a rom com, a waystation en route to becoming something else. I’m not surprised that my particular scenario isn’t mentioned. It’s only the latest in a lifelong succession of hints from my society that I’m doing gender wrong. The article’s premise makes me curl my lip, not because I’ve never asked myself the same question, but because in the context of my and Cassie’s earlier discussion, it carries a whiff of meek surrender.

Answer Key

In an earlier section of 99 Problems with Finding the 1, I consider the roots of heteropessimism and Afropessimism and whether they are impediments to love involving one or more black people. This section of the answer key takes Audre Lorde’s observation that “what’s going on between us is related to what’s going on between us and other people” as its point of departure. Lorde said this in a conversation with James Baldwin in 1984. Originally published in Essence Magazine, the exchange between two generational black minds showed that even among those mutually committed to anti-racism, there are still broad gaps in understanding about how patriarchy shapes and maintains power disparities between black men and black women.

“I don’t want to break all this down, then have to stop at the wall of male/female division,” Lorde says. “When we admit and deal with difference; when we deal with the deep bitterness; when we deal with the horror of our different nightmares; when we turn and look at them, it’s like looking at death: hard but possible.”

The alternatives to heteropessimism and Afropessimism begin with recognition of the hard but possible. Most people are not well-practiced in thinking about sexism, racism and heterosexism at the same time, and yet it’s hard to imagine any of the three can be properly understood independent of the others. What would it mean to deconstruct that wall of male/female division, particularly as it pertains to race and sexuality? Can black women and black men do the difficult work that Lorde alludes to, and look honestly and unflinchingly at our separate but deeply entwined nightmares?

For a possible route forward, I looked to Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.” The essay refers to a study in which psychologists sought to find out if two strangers can form a bond by asking each other a series of specific personal questions. The study includes 36 questions divided into 3 sets, with each set of questions intended to be more revealing than the last. I wondered if the same format could be used to scaffold the kind of mutual self-disclosure that could meaningfully advance feminist anti-racist solidarity. I set out to write questions that could encourage two people to expand upon and investigate some of the gaps and silences in the Lorde-Baldwin conversation.

The exercise is designed to suit any two black people willing to be receptive, self-critical and accountable. As pivotal as those three qualities are in the pursuit of solidarity across social difference, they are even more vital to the possibility of love. I often think of my generation’s smug refrain: “we are not our ancestors!” To which I say, yes, we should be learning a lot more from our forebears than we do. As things stand now, we may need to discover from scratch the wisdom that should have been inherited. I offer the below not only in the spirit of retracing the steps to the recipes we’ve lost, but fashioning new ones too.

Set I:

About when did you become conscious of your assigned gender? What caused you to become conscious of it?
When was the first time you realized you were black?
Tell me about a time when you became aware of expectations placed on you about sexuality and what kinds of desire were “allowed.”
When was the first time you thought about the relationship between your race and your gender? If you can’t remember, how about the most recent time?
How do you think your gender influences/d your relationship with your father?
How do you think your gender influences/d your relationship with your mother?
If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
What does the American Dream mean to you, and do you believe in it?
Do your race and your gender have any bearing on what you think of the American Dream? If so, how?
When was the first time you recognized some form of anti-blackness in yourself?
When was the last time you had to check yourself on being sexist?
In what ways do you feel empowered? In what ways do you feel disempowered?

Set II:

Respond to this James Baldwin quote: “Don’t you realize that in this republic the only real crime is to be a black man?”
Respond to this Audre Lorde quote: “It’s not Black women who are shedding Black men’s blood on the street – yet. We’re not cleaving your head open with axes. We’re not shooting you down. We’re saying, ‘Listen, what’s going on between us is related to what’s going on between us and other people,’ but we have to solve our own shit at the same time as we’re protecting our Black asses, because if we don’t, we are wasting energy that we need for joint survival.”
Pick a pivotal moment in your life. Narrate how you think it might be different if you were still black, but not the gender that you are now.
Narrate the same moment, but this time imagine how you think it might be different if you were the same gender that you are now, but not black.
Audre Lorde tells James Baldwin that “the boot is on both of our necks. Let’s talk about getting it off.” If we were to hatch a plan together about how to get the boot to budge even an inch, where do you think we should start?
What is the most common misconception about who you are that you face? Why do you think that misconception persists?
Tell me one thing that you think would be incredibly important for black people of a different gender than your own to know. Pick something that they are unlikely to know or learn otherwise.
What’s a positive stereotype about the groups you belong to that, even when well-intended, gets on your nerves? How does it affect you?
Be honest: do you have any grievances with black people of genders other than your own? What are they?
Describe how you feel in environments where black people of a different gender than your own are the numerical majority.
Do you think eagerness to blame one another is a contributing factor to discord between black women and men? What would getting past blame mean to you?
How important is it to you to show strength? Is your attitude about being strong in any way connected to your gender and/or race?

Set III:

Describe how you feel in environments where black people of your gender are the numerical majority.
Who was the first black person in popular culture that you aspired to be like? Why did you want to emulate them?
Who was the first black person in popular culture that you admired romantically or felt attracted to? Why did they appeal to you?
Do you date or have you dated interracially? Has the decision caused you any inner turmoil?
How do you feel when you see black people dating people who are not black? Do your feelings vary based on the genders involved?
If you looked forward to starting a family when you were young, what did you imagine that family would look like? Who did you imagine as the other members?
What’s one thing that you can do to help spread awareness that brute force is not a legitimate way of dealing across sex difference? What’s your idea of a first step toward, as Lorde puts it, “setting up some different paradigms?”
Finish this sentence: “Let’s make a mutual commitment to…”
Tell me about a kind of freedom that you are grateful to have. Then describe a freedom that you long for or wish that future generations could have.
Describe a time when another black person made you feel loved.
Share one way in which you would like to be supported, encouraged or assisted that is otherwise lacking in your life.
Share one way in which you, personally, could stand to be more compassionate.