We Never Wanted to Look

Based on true events.

A black student, resolved never to let them
make him feel lesser, is expelled when he
stuffs slurs back into the mouth of some
privileged white kid. The white kid finds a
rally coming to his aid, pouring out
sympathy for the injuries delivered by the
savage, the tiger, the animal, the thug he
provoked—they’re just so loud and violent.

In the same breath, kids on the football
team reenact the brutal qualities of their
fathers as they wrap stones in sheets of
paper and chuck them at the queer kids
when the adults aren’t watching, and I
swear, these mother fuckers are never
watching. This way, when the queer kids
open up their wrists in the hope of ‘better
luck next time,’ the adults can claim they
never saw it coming.

In a classroom, Mr. Peterson, a nominally
qualified science teacher, tells the
brown kids that systemic racism is a lie—
racism, he tells them, ended with the
civil war, biology was settled in six days,
and the most important question you can
ask yourself is: is there life after death? I
wonder if he knows the number of kids
racing to uncover the answer because of
people like him.

The spirit of cruelty is alive and well, here.
Cultivated by a system and culture caught
up in the march of June 1929, when over
three-hundred klansmen made their way
down Draper Street to insist this small
town is for whites only—with the exception
of that one black family they allow to live
on the outskirts to prove to the world that
they’re not just a bunch of bigots.

Broken mirrors and skipping records have
a lot in common with this place. We are unable
to see ourselves with any honesty,
unable to get up and change that goddamn
minstrel tune we’ve been playing since
1873. We’re afraid to look up because the
trees have eyes. We know this because we
hung them there, like the brown Christ we
nail to a tree annually, on every Good
Friday. Is it a wonder, then, that the image
of breaking the shells of rainbow colored
eggs is lost on us?

Look, there are a lot of things you can try
in our small town, just not love or
compassion or mercy or acceptance,
because that—that is just some anti-
American, communists bullshit, and we
don’t take kindly to that sort of thing
around here.