I don’t mean this in the sense that black people are apparitions. I mean it in the sense that Ralph Ellison meant when he wrote the preface to Invisible Man:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

Dehumanization doesn’t start with the word nigger. It begins with an ocular sleight of hand, a political magic trick that suggests that a group of people were never “people” in the first place. When this happens, people get treated as things — cue slavery. Scholars disagree about whether slavery started because of racism or economics, but they agree on this: black folk were routinely described as unthinking brutes, mere material beings whose cognition only rose slightly above that of animals. This was a conjure tool par excellence: it transformed a person into a thing, and in so doing, produced a context wherein white people can’t see black people. They can only see black “things” — and no one gives a fuck about things. Not giving a fuck doesn’t begin with physical violence. It begins with the political violence of indifference.

What I love about SOB’s piece is that it is written in anger, but not concentrated hatred. I could be wrong here, but what I hear him doing is saying that indifference can go both ways. If you refuse to recognize me, then I’ll do the same. Because refusing to recognize me amounts to rendering me invisible — which amounts to not giving a fuck about me. SOB says it better than I ever could:

I will never extend my care to a peoples whose idea of reciprocation is my annihilation. They can mourn over their losses by their goddamn selves. Just like we do… I don’t give a fuck about Justine Damond because there are too many — way too many — white-neglected black bodies I have to climb over before I could even get to thinking about hers.

SOB’s refusal to “give a fuck” comes from the fact that he literally can’t give a fuck — he has no room in his mind, heart, or anywhere else to begin that process because there are countless “white-neglected black bodies” (I love this turn of phrase) that demand his attention and care.

And in making this claim, Baldwin does what many black people are unwilling to do: in refusing to give a fuck about Damond, he also refuses to give a fuck about whether or not white people, white institutions, or even this whiteness-based country see him. Hegel claimed that a person needs another person to recognize him or her as a person. But in his white-man rush to universality, he didn’t qualify this claim. And even if he had, he wouldn’t be able to stop black people from finding their humanity in black communities. What I hear SOB powerfully claiming is that black folk don’t need white people — or even this country as a whole — to recognize us in order for us to thrive and experience the complex vicissitudes of life.

There are waaaay too many black people in this world to worry about whether America sees me as human. Even if SOB didn’t mean this, what I take from his piece is simple: all I need is recognition from those who are willing to do so.

So, for all of the black folk who continually struggle with our invisibility, remember: invisibility can be a blessing. We don’t need substantiation from the media, the president, or even white liberals to know our lives are inestimable.

We don’t need the media playing our deaths on a loop to know that our lives mean something.

We don’t need the president to come and visit us in order to know that our lives are substantial.

And we for damn sure don’t need black organizations who thrive off of white recognition (cue the NAACP) to substantiate our claims that black lives matter.

All we need is each other.

Be well, beloveds.