“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time”— James Baldwin
“In August, the overall unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, while the Black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. As predicted, August’s jobs data shows an unsteady labor market and disproportionate impacts for Black workers.”
– August 2025 Jobs Day Analysis, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
My first semester at Florida State University in 2007, I attempted to join a fraternity in the North American Interfraternity Conference (NIC). The NIC is a division of fraternities throughout the country that are sometimes called the “white fraternities and sororities,” as opposed to those in the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) , nicknamed The Divine Nine which are sometimes called the “black fraternities and sororities.”
The NIC fraternity I was trying to join had just been allowed back on campus after serving a suspension from a hazing incident a few years earlier. Its national organization was formulating the FSU charter around a group of us who would become brothers.
True to form, I was the only black guy in this NIC-fraternity group. Nothing new to me. I’ve been the only black guy in a lot of academic and social circles throughout my life.
We started hanging out a lot to get ready for initiation that fall, and while drinking beers at somebody’s apartment one day, one of my future brothers — a Jewish dude — asked me matter-of-factly why black guys are so angry.
He followed this by saying that I was different, that I wasn’t like other black guys he’d met.
This was one of the few people I genuinely liked in the group too. He was from a small town in Iowa. I assumed his knowledge of black men and black culture was learned through like… The Boondocks.
So, I shrugged. Said, “I don’t know.”
A few weeks later I dropped out of the fraternity rushing process.
I did so after an apartment/pool party where most of my future brothers split their time between a) snorting coke, b) doing keg stands, and c) talking about trying to get a group of women who were tanning by the pool to come inside and get drunk with them so they could do the things some drunk men like to do to drunk women.
I never heard anything about lack of consent, but I didn’t get the vibe that would’ve stopped anybody.
I was a fly on the wall for the little bit I was there before I started feeling like I couldn’t breathe. Eventually, I told them I didn’t feel well and went to my car where I sat behind the steering wheel and had a panic attack. I’d had them before and have had them since — I’m an anxious person — but that was a particularly memorable episode.
My most prominent memory of my time with those guys is the raw electricity in their eyes that day as they cheered and leered and raged.
“As of 2022, Black people were admitted to jail at more than four times the rate of White people and stayed in jail for 12 more days on average across the 595-jail sample, contributing to the larger increase in population observed for Black individuals.”
I work and live where I grew up, Miami, and will probably live out my days here. I’m 42 years old, my family’s here, my friends, my wife’s family and friends. Also, Miami is one of the few cities in the south that doesn’t have the stigma of overt racism.
Yet even here, it’s impossible not to notice my blackness.
I’ve always been a reader and a writer. I’m a nerd all around, proud Star Wars and MCU fanboy. One of my favorite Marvel characters is the Incredible Hulk, who’s most interesting for me because of the Jekyll/Hyde nature of his Bruce Banner/enraged green monster split.
Though I was a fan, I didn’t grow up seeing any correlation between myself and Hulk. Hulk is the personification of might. I was a small, skinny boy same as I’m a small, skinny man.
In adulthood, the metaphor sharpened though.
To be a respectable black man in America is to be a perpetual Bruce Banner, struggling not to let out your inner rage for fear that public reaction will be the same as public reaction towards Hulk in Marvel’s universe, every angry step a threat to mankind.
One of my favorite lines from the first Avengers movie is when Captain America asks Bruce how he controls his anger — and therefore the monster. Slowly transforming into the Hulk, Bruce responds “That’s my secret, Cap: I’m always angry.”
If I could speak now to the guy from Iowa who asked me that question that day— why are black guys always so angry? — I’d send him the clip of that scene.
“Racial disparity within school discipline practices runs through the entire educational continuum, with evidence indicating unacceptable trends as early as preschool. Black preschoolers represent less than 20% of the population but are the subjects of nearly half of exclusionary disciplines in preschool settings.”
– National Library of Medicine
I was sitting in my room that day, watching highlights from game six of the 2015 NBA finals when my phone buzzed; a CNN notification reporting nine people had been shot in a church in South Carolina.
By the next morning the story had a name and a body count and nationwide attention as Dylann Storm Roof was apprehended in North Carolina. He later confessed to the murders, claiming it was his attempt to start a race war.
After spending an hour among people armed only with bibles, Roof stood and told the congregation, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.” He then proceeded to shoot all but one woman who he kept alive to carry his gospel.
In the aftermath, simmering outrage led me to re-read something I hadn’t read since college: Dr. Martin Luther King’s eulogy at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham after the bombing that killed four young girls and injured over a dozen others.
“They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.”
I read this and thought about how hard it must have been for Dr. King to be calm during all that. I also thought that Dr. King’s genius lay in his innate understanding of the intricacies in American white anger.
Dr. King wasn’t an advocate of peaceful protest for the hell of it. He saw what peaceful protests did to the hateful parts of the general American public.
It exposed them.
It brought their anger and prejudices to the surface where they could be recorded and televised and judged by the world.
It was, in part, the televised rioting against nonviolent protesters in Selma that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
It’s hard to deny what’s right in your face, though people try.
Dylann Roof — a white supremacist — murdered nine innocent people in a church. He acted alone in the attack, but he didn’t come out of nowhere.
Living in a culture that cultivates this, next to the living memories of ancestors who were forced to immigrate and slave and serve — black anger was and is inevitable.
N.W.A. was one of the first hip-hop groups to gain a national spotlight in the ‘80s.
Niggaz Wit’ Attitudes.
I sometimes wonder where people think that attitude came from.
“…despite decades of desegregation efforts, more than half of students still attend schools that are located in either predominantly white (26%) or predominantly nonwhite (27%) school districts. Nationwide, white school districts received $23 billion more in funding in 2016 than school districts that mostly served students of color. This means that the average white school district received $13,908 for every student, while nonwhite districts received $11,682 per student.”
We too often reserve the word ‘racist’ for open extremists, which lets everyday racism off the hook.
People like Dylann Roof allow white Americans to have a poster boy they can point at like, See? I’d never do that shit. Therefore, I’m not racist.
Racism is not a statement though. It isn’t a set of words. It isn’t a fired gun. It’s a way of life.
Racism is embedded across institutions and the day-to-day. It’s the idea that, because I was born to Jamaican immigrants, I’m automatically considered a second-rate citizen, judged by my ability to “overachieve” and either fit or break stereotypes I had nothing to do with setting.
Growing up Black in America also requires carrying the weight of history.
Louis CK was one of my favorite comedians before he exposed himself as a weirdo with his predatory sexual proclivities. Prior to him getting canceled, CK had this one quote from one of his specials:
“Here’s how great it is to be white: I can get in a time machine and go to any time, and it would be fucking awesome when I get there! That is exclusively a white privilege. Black people can’t fuck with time machines! A black guy in a time machine’s like, ‘Hey, anything before 1980, no thank you. I don’t want to go.’”
I laughed really, really hard the first time I heard that.
“As the Pew Research Center documented after the 2024 election, Congress remains substantially more white and male than the American public […] Congress has diversified in the last 40 years, to be sure, but these shifts have not kept pace with U.S. demographic shifts. Consequently, the racial gap in representation has not changed significantly in recent decades.”
– Pew Research via Good Authority
My absolute favorite superhero is not the Hulk but Spider-Man. Growing up nerdy, skinny and bookish, I was drawn to the character who was also a nerdy teenager, albeit one who gained magical superpowers after getting bit by a radioactive spider.
Yes, I know he’s white.
This was the ’90s. Most of my favorite superheroes were white. As were the most lauded actresses, singers, models and politicians of that time. Most of the faces with power and visibility I saw growing up were white, or at most non-Black. This felt normal in the rooms I moved through.
My parents taught me to be proud of my blackness though, as they taught me to be extra respectful of white authority figures to avoid unnecessary conflict. They taught me to study hard and get good grades and exceed white people’s expectations of my race, to fit into society as much as possible for an easier future. I thank them for this, because without them who knows where I’d be.
But this defensive strategy also creates a skewed sense of identity.
To get the education my parents wanted for me and to achieve my long-term goals, I had to grow up around a lot of white people because around-white-people is where the opportunities were. This also meant frequently feeling alienated, with both subtle and blatant acts of racism thrown in my face on a constant basis.
Naming each instance is counterproductive, since the point is the apathy with which it’s met.
It’s not that this white guy with a shaved head in a bathroom in Austin, Texas thought it was okay to call me a nigger then shut the lights off on his way out while I was peeing. It’s that I wasn’t the only person in there when it happened, and none of us did anything about it.
It’s not that the white Tallahassee cop with a handlebar mustache pulled me over the night of Obama’s 2008 election victory and issued me a ticket for disturbing the peace because I honked at a drunk white guy who was ironically celebrating Obama’s victory when he stepped out into the street in front of my car. Or that the same cop — unprovoked — asked my white girlfriend sitting in the passenger seat if I was bothering her.
It’s that I smiled and took the ticket, begged my girlfriend to stop trying to argue with the man, and told him to have a nice evening.
It’s not how many times I’ve been called “cute…for a black guy” by non-Black women, or had to seal my lips while the mother and/or father of a non-Black woman I was dating talked negatively about my blackness like it was a foundational bullet point in their argument against my worth.
It’s that it all seemed normal to me, to my friends, to everybody.
The girl who was in the car with me when that cop pulled me over after Obama’s win, I dated her for a little over three years. She was Irish and Italian, raised near Daytona Beach in the small, predominantly white city of Palm Coast that sits right next to the small, predominantly black city of Bunnell. Palm Coast is nice, a beach town. Bunnell—literally across the train tracks — is not.
Visiting this girl’s hometown was one of the first times I ever dealt with blatant racism, which is to say I didn’t deal with it because I didn’t know how.
I didn’t know how to handle being called a nigger in front of my girlfriend.
I didn’t know how to handle her crying when people she’s known her whole life called her a nigger-lover.
I didn’t know how to handle — after the implosion of our relationship — that same girl calling and messaging me with the same racist remarks she decried while we were together.
I still don’t know how to handle a society that tells me the only valid response to shit like that is to ignore it, brush it off, hold my head up and keep walking.
“Throughout 2024, hard-right groups used state legislatures and school boards — particularly in the South — as battlegrounds to target Black and Brown communities, women, immigrants, Jewish people, Muslim people, Indigenous communities and LGBTQ+ people. Many of the extremist actors focused on whitewashing American history through book bans and changes to curriculum, pushing for companies to eliminate all DEI initiatives, and threatening violence against election workers.”
I think a lot about that kid who was almost my frat brother and the question he asked so casually: why are black guys so angry?
In reality, he asked the one question every white person should be asking: why are black people — or brown people, or LGBTQ and other marginalized communities — so angry?
Education could help.
Desegregation was not a failure as some Americans might think. However, it was implemented wrong. Sticking two people together and telling them to get along without teaching them how or why they should goes against the nature of the human psyche.
For two people to get along, they have to learn about each other’s history and culture. This breeds empathy, and empathy is an antidote to bigotry.
America’s racism is stupid. Stupid and idiotic and enraging.
It’s also neglectful.
Two common responses to neglect are sadness and anger.
Plenty of Black people are sad.
I’m just not one of them.
