Monsters

I think there is real darkness in this world, bad people, unredeemable souls, evil, monsters. Blame it on all the comics I’ve read. Blame it on growing up in the church. You’d think that with a country as faux Christian as ours, more people would believe in the Devil. Blame it on my somewhat binary thinking about this, but I believe some people are truly heinous. There is a difference between being angry and making a conscious choice to hate someone because they are different.

On today, at 2AM, Jussie Smollett was attacked for his intersecting identity markers. Black and gay. Queer and colored. He was bludgeoned, beaten, had bleach thrown on him, and a noose slipped round his neck while yelling, “Aren’t you that faggot Empire nigger?” This was not coincidence. It was not a crime of passion. It was premeditated. There were written death threats sent to him. It was hate, weaponized in broad daylight. Monsters running free in the open.

Jussie is in the hospital with broken ribs and possibly fighting for his life. And I know there are some people who believe I am being dramatic. People from varying communities will try to attribute his attack to one of his two major oppressed groups. But this attack reinforces what the Black Queer Community already knew. Not one, but both of his target groups are what made the MAGA monsters choose him. Whiteness coupled with heteronormativity, racism combined with homophobia.

And you know what? We are all guilty. When we see white people downplay Blacks’ mistreatment or murder we are accomplices. When we see Black people being openly homophobic because homosexuals and lesbians, transpeople and other queers don’t rank high enough to warrant our protection. We get it within our own communities. Our own families reject us and somehow people believe this problem just sprang up. No, this problem is homegrown.

In its quieter iterations, privilege mutes protesters, ignores warning signs, denies overwhelming evidence, and excuses actual monsters as a “rogue few.” In its more violent conjurings, whiteness is White supremacy molding America’s landscape to its murderous and self-aggrandizing will. It generated the wealth gap in this country. It fashioned standards for beauty. It engineered a justice system to favor only those who resembled its creators. It bent sound truths into the libels we now call history.

This plague of hatred and viciousness weaseled its way into the hearts and minds of susceptible men, women, and children. It taught them they were better than others and the moment people forget that, the second anyone doesn’t recognize that “greatness” in the manmade food chain, we hear talks about how we get back to it. In politics it looks like “We need to return to family values.” or “Country First.” or “Make America Great Again.” This is not new. It is not okay.

But this isn’t about even really about the monsters. It isn’t even about the lies they tell and their inflated sense of self. This is about those who do not believe in monsters. Too educated to believe in ghosts. Too well informed to trust conspiracies. I don’t write this to suggest weapons for the eradication of said monstrosities. I merely want to convince people of their existence.

Too often “good people” give monsters the benefit of the doubt or flat out deny they are real. “He didn’t mean it in that way.” “You’re just being sensitive.” Trust me when I say this: as a Black queer man, my sensitivities have been attuned to the movement of monsters my whole life, ones who look like me, and ones who don’t. They are real. But whenever I profess such a thing, good people become our parents scolding us or shaming us about the monsters under our beds, or the monsters in our closets. Monsters marking us while we sleep. Surely, it is all a dream.

Nevertheless, you can be sure of one thing, they are absolutely in the house. And they have more power the longer we keep our eyes closed. The longer we decide these phantasms are fictional, the more they can slink between the walls, cutting on the gas in the house, and lighting a match. They will blow the whole place up because your folks are too polite to see that everything is on fire. They live among us. They will snatch your body. And good folks will tell you they don’t even know how it happened.

Writer's note: It is unfortunate that the details of Smollett's attack were staged and the story fabricated. However, I stand by what I wrote regarding the liberal majority's continued inaction as bigotry harms our country.