We all want to believe in progress, in history that marches forward in a neat line, in transcended differences and growing acceptance, in how good the good white people have become. So we expect racism to appear, cartoonishly evil like a Disney villain. As if a racist cop is one who wakes in the morning, twirling his mustache and rubbing his hands together as he plots how to destroy black lives.- Brit Bennett
As I waited in a diner for one of the two waiters on duty to take my order, a group of young Black men entered. They laughed and exchanged harmless digs at one another, and my smile grew.
Though I was alone, it felt like I was right there with them, listening in. Their joy cut through the stiff air of the otherwise lifeless eatery. And in the flurry of news surrounding the loss of Black life, I wanted to witness all of it.
When the waiter guided them to an empty table near me, her supervisor stopped her.
“Watch over these guys. Don’t need any trouble today,” the supervisor muttered to her. Just like that, my face fell and all the joy I felt at seeing these Black boys exist on their own terms was gone. What “trouble” was her supervisor referring to? What was suspicious about their laughter?
I’ve been on the receiving end of that suspicion.
One summer in between semesters, I worked inventory at a local pool supply store in my hometown. When I wasn’t unloading deliveries or restocking shelves, I was helping customers load up their cars with pool chemicals from a fenced area outback.
I was just about finished helping one customer — an unassuming white man in his 50s — load the last couple of bags into his trunk. As he reached for the last bag, his wallet fell out of his back pocket without him noticing. I bent over and picked it up.
“You dropped this,” I said reaching out. He jumped, glancing back and forth at his pocket and the wallet looking mystified.
After thanking me, he said “Thought maybe you tried to pull one on me. Nice to know you’re one of the good ones.”
I winced at his remark but feigned a smile as he packed up and left.
Navigating the minefield of coded language is exhausting and it never gets easier. Our moves and existence are critiqued at every turn. And while Black folks decipher this lexicon for our own survival, white folks either remain oblivious to the whole exchange or worse, actively deny any wrongdoing in an attempt to preserve a perception of neutrality.
From government legislation to casual one-on-one interactions, coded language infects every aspect of Black life. It makes the issues of work and school that much more difficult, and when office hours are over, it still manages to follow you home.
My mother often begins sentences with, “You’re going out in that?”
Each time she does it, I think twice, reevaluating what my attire could mean to white folks who are already suspicious of my movements. It makes me anxious to know that regardless of what I wear, how loud my music is or who I’m with, I’m a target. I’m not safe anywhere.
My mother already sees my face plastered on the news. She sees my body bloody and broken by police bullets. And while I’ve been socialized to be cautious and observant of not-so-coded language. And white folks’ racism is largely ignored or excused because what they say or write doesn’t explicitly resemble “traditionally” racist language.
This isn’t an individual issue. From the beginning, white folks are socialized to violently preserve their narratives over others, often wielding it as a weapon and tool of manipulation.
For Black folk, articulate speech and a calm demeanor are survival mechanisms meant to aid us in a world that would love nothing more than to revoke our humanity. For the most sinister whites, the whole ruse is just a way of expanding their ranks. Whether they wear hoods, have tattoos or are in the white house, they are determined to continue the subjugation of Black and brown people.
White folks show their worst without consequence, while we’re expected to be respectable in exchange for dignity. That’s where the real injustice lies. Not in the fact that they get off scot-free but that they’ve managed to turn their insidious ideology into legitimate topics of debate to be mulled over.
There are those who refute the argument that speech can be a form of violence, and maybe they’re right. Speech by itself may not count as violence, but it’s a damn good precursor to it.
Not much has changed, really. In 1971, then-California governor Ronald Reagan referred to African delegates as “monkeys” in a leaked phone call with President Richard Nixon. There are several hundred hours of secretly recorded audio from within the Nixon White House that reveal his sentiments towards Blacks and Jews. Nixon’s prejudiced political playbook even helped his more cavalier successors launch assaults on the community and reach every limb of the executive branch.
But we don’t need leaked video and audio footage to confirm what we already know. The foundation of America is rife with violence, theft and anti-Blackness. And white folks will do anything to continue steering that violence away from them and their bloody hands.
When Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger murdered Botham Jean, Fox news coordinated a smear campaign against him, highlighting that weed was found inside his home. After 18-year-old Nia Wilson was killed by a white man at a BART station platform, KTVU aired a segment with a photo of her holding a gun-shaped phone case. The list of blaming murdered Black folks for their own murders goes on.
The coded language (and imagery) that TV stations, newspapers, politicians and history books reinforce in an attempt to appear neutral is intentional and offered so that the behavior can be excused. The problem with this type of subtlety is both that it’s painfully conspicuous in its execution and the pain it inflicts.
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Dalvin Aboagye is a freelance writer and student at Stony Brook University. His work runs the gamut in terms of subject matter but he’s particularly focused on dissecting the meaning behind different media.
