By Kejhonti Neloms

Picture it: It’s raining. I walk into a hotel’s restaurant where I have an appointment with the head bartender as a bartending stagiaire. A stagiaire is just an exclusionary word for trainee. In modern times, Americans have adopted the term to mean something more along the lines of “let’s see if this is a good fit.” It’s unpaid labor, but it also serves the purpose of informing the stagiaire if this is a place that they’d like to work.

I am greeted by a smiling short young white host. Next to her is a manager. He is in a suit. I am in a hoodie. My button down is underneath the hoodie and should be slightly visible. My hair is cute. Justifying and explaining my appearance uncoerced is a knee jerk reaction borne from growing up in a white supremacist nation. I didn’t even notice I was doing it until the second edit. For every blow I receive from racism, I am learning not to ask myself if it was something that I did, wore, said, assumed or trespassed on. I am learning not to blame myself for the behaviors of racists.

Introducing myself, I inform him that I’m here to stage. He replied, “I assume for the kitchen?”. I heard, “A negro!? You must be here to wash dishes or cut potatoes.”

It kills me because every restaurant manager is just another poor white servant. They are almost never anything else. A bartender is a poor working class servant, too, so I certainly have no pride in being front of the house or back of the house. We’re all servants to an elite that hates us, especially in fine dining. For example, the majority of workers in these high end establishments can’t afford to eat at the places they serve. Though a few industry workers become industry leaders, even then, their livelihood is still derived from the deprivation of marginalized populations. It’s capitalism—y’all seen the script. 

I didn’t tell a higher up about the not so coded racist comment that the manager made. I don’t want to place any faith that anything will be done about anything—ever. I don’t feel like filling out an incident report, nor do I feel like battling HR (whose sole purpose is to protect the interests of the company). It’s cynical, I’m cynical. I’m young, very Black and very queer and I have seen the higher ups. They all resemble various incarnations of Donald Trump. And surely if I can’t roll with the punches dealt in the boys club, there must be something wrong with me, right? My blood pressure rises thinking about it.

So, I, ever the eloquent Black, especially while speaking to people who truly don’t deserve to share air with me, inform him of who I am and what I do. He got me his boss. He took my hoodie and backpack. I made cocktails that were impressive using products that only the head bartender was familiar with. I haven’t decided if I want the position yet.

Every microaggression puts me in distress: do I wile out and get an assault charge for beating the shit out of some well meaning racist maitre d’? Do I smile and shuck? Do I find his online linkedin information, catfish him then publish the inbox on his company’s Facebook page? It’s a lot of work doing anything, just like it’s a lot of work deciding what to do—or what not to do. Then I’ll inevitably feel bad for not doing anything. It’s a forked road of disappointment that I never asked to travel. I kick myself again and again for spending a far greater time considering my responses than any white person ever does when speaking to Black people. 

These deliberations on how I should and how I shouldn’t respond are survival tactics. They are terribly ironic though, because I feel that these same survival tactics are killing me. I don’t come out whole either way. 

What’s micro about high blood pressure and an early death from everyday descrimination? For me, the term microaggression centers the aggressor and catalogues their aggression as not that “big” (Severe? Long lasting? Permeating? Offensive?). As in, the aggression that they displayed while asking you in a not-so-neighborly manner if you actually live here or if you’re here as the help isn’t as big as say—the “macro” aggressions of a Flint Michigan, or redlining in Chicago, or the crack epidemic, or slavery. 

I used to wonder if white people invented the term microaggression until I learned that that is definetly not how it happened. A Black professor named Chester Pierce coined the term in the 70’s. The way we use it has more or less remained unchanged throughout the decades, however I am skeptical of the concept and the way that we understand it. Maybe I am just confused.

In my head it’ll make sense for a white person to have invented the idea of microaggressions—that way slavery would be their litmus test for what is and isn’t micro. Microaggressions, in their minds, would be a signifier for what modern violence(s) they could inflict upon us (in nice hotels or in quiet libraries) without it being considered a faux pas. It would be a rubric for what they could get away with without losing their jobs. If it’s not them chasing a nigga around town with a noose it can’t be that aggressive, right? 

Yet perhaps I am placing this all in the wrong context. Chester Pierce was a Black pisces man born in the same year that the construction of Mount Rushmore began. It is easy to tell through his work that he truly loved Black people. He was a psychiatrist, so I know that he invented the term to center victims of racism—not their aggressors. He must’ve coined the term to help him categorize the daily antagonisms he experienced and witnessed growing up in the United States. He has certainly seen his share of white violence in it’s various vicissitudes. I’m almost certain that he wanted to name these unending sleights so that he could more accurately prescribe solutions. 

Between macro and micro, I would choose neither. I haven’t been able to make the microaggressions feel any less aggressive than a full slap to the face. For me, the macro only provides substance to the micro. For me, it all feels macro. Every impulsively locked door, adverse glance, sleight, short clip, assumptive comment—they are all warning signs. They all say: nigger stay in line or I will allow the police to kill you in this most modern of hotels.

There is no shame in flying off the handle. I would have felt vindicated by making that manager regret coming to work that day, though surely white supremacy would have made me pay threefold. I have chosen to conform and I sometimes feel that I’ve given up on myself. I feel that I have a gift of hurting whites with language. I haven’t reconciled the fact that I let him live unscathed. I denied myself. This winter is making this defeat (that’s what it feels like) a bit hard to stomach, but at least I wrote it all out. Let this be a record. This is the most of what I’m in position to do. This pen is my most immediate resistance. This ink is my most immediate scorn.

Reading Suggestions:

“Black Girl Dangerous,” Mia McKenzie (2014)

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)

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Kejhonti Neloms is a queer student/teacher. He has dreams of starting a community center for black queer kids.

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