We Who Wear the Masks

On Legibility

Image: Getty | Silhouette of the profile of a Black woman with an afro.

Hello. I want to preface this short missive with a welcome to all the new subscribers to Tiny Violences.  This is a place for experimenting, and for me to tell my business, but I guess, to do so artfully.  I was one of three selected by Roxane Gay as inaugural stewards to the Joel Gay Creative fellowship, where we are invited to write weekly newsletters.  I’m a Black Queer Femme.  I am a native New Yorker from the Lower East Side, a fashion industry reject (or drop out - depends on who’s telling or who cares), a former community organizer, entrepreneur, the occasional muse, and someone who does not take herself too seriously. It is only recently that I’ve proudly taken on the assignment of writer, but if I had a Real Housewives of Anywhere tag line it would be “I might be a writer, but I’m best known for reading,” which in short has two meanings:  I try to keep my nose in a book and I wield a razor sharp wit that I will not hesitate to employ. There’s more about me and the mission of Tiny Violences in the About section. Thank you for subscribing and I encourage you to consider a paid subscription – for both my ego and my nail money.

---

The recent murder of famed rapper Takeoff most known for his extemporaneous and sometimes hilarious ad libs on tracks with rap trio Migos, violently ripped me back to my early childhood. I woke up in the morning to the news of him being slain during a dice game, the image of his body on display as casually as a promotional photo. When I was just a kid, I remember being affixed to MTV News watching the reports of the spray of bullets that led to the agonizing murder of Tupac Shakur. My body tensed the same when the voiceover described his injuries over b-roll of the crime scene. And then six months later, waking up to the news that NOTORIOUS B.I.G. had been slain. All three rappers were under the age of 30, all globally recognized writers and performers, all killed by a gun in the hands of those (I suspect) they held company with.  I was just a girl but the trauma of knowing someone who has an influence on everyone around you being dead, being killed – ostensibly because of that fact took a toll on me.  It seemed to my young mind the music industry was a hazardous place for Black people. Yet another thing that could take your life. Having influence made you a target.  The images most associated with Black popular music in the last 30 years has conveyed at once a sense of opulence and danger. Diamonds. Guns. Beautiful rich Black people, holding on to both the panache and horrors of ghetto life. Chillin in a mansion, or brooding collectively in the PJs. It was beautiful and confusing.  This was how I began to understand the cultural performance of the music that shaped mine, and millions of people’s imaginations.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Thinking about the concept of legibility extends beyond words on a page.  The ways in which we contort and distort our (Black creative) selves to be recognized by industries that have the power to make us very rich, alienate us from the very creativity they wish to exploit. An extractive pipeline.  I grew up in the ghetto yet, I do not believe many people are deserving of murder.  It is hard for me to grasp how someone can so freely extinguish a fire that burned so brightly for all to gather and be warmed by. I wondered this as many of my neighborhood peers perished as a result of this specific type of violence.  Perhaps owning a handgun and ammunition is the most expedient way to bypass any emotional regulation. Perhaps in wielding a handgun an individual is seeking a justice that they feel they can only mete out.   Brandishing the wish of death upon someone is a cold thing to do, it must feel like power. But those who enact that wish seems to be desensitized, likely because of complex trauma.

 Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

       We wear the mask.

The motif of the gun toting, short tempered, sociopathic gangster, is one that has been popularized.  This motif acts as a lens in which many Black rap musicians are filtered through, either because of a legitimate inheritance (namely being born into a distinct set of circumstances) or a tendency towards an exaggeration that will both be understood by (largely non-Black) executives looking to exploit the allure of a lifestyle (to largely non-Black audiences). This is not endemic to just music; we see regularly the online refutations from people who respond to the employment or subversion of tropes in Film and TV (think the Tyler Perry Cinematic Universe versus the Atlanta Black Twitter to TV pipeline).  They are produced and written by Black (cis-male) creators, but funded and distributed by global corporations.  These performances, whether they are authentic, or a masquerade still seem to have deadly consequences.  This, however, is not about rappers, performers and people who are paid gross sums of money to sell a story.  This is about how many of (if not all of us) living within the cis-white-hetero-capitalist-patriarchy find ourselves fighting for not just visibility but to be seen, to be recognized.  To be be read as we have written ourselves. To be understood as more complex than the implicit identities that are assigned to our bodies.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

       We wear the mask!

I think of legibility as a form of invention, one where we compose ourselves. Living in the plantationocene (these complex, intersecting systems of oppression), Black folks must piece together composites of identities, not just for the sake of respectability but to ensure our safety. Though our right to live is not guaranteed, the struggle to exist is wrought with excruciating consequences. 

Poem We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

---