Patrick Ewing, Spike Lee, Charles Oakley at Madison Square Garden, Masai Ujiri at the Chase Center, famous Black men treated as instigators of conflict, aggressive transgressors storming sanctified systems of order and propriety. Belligerent agents of catastrophic change. I and most Black folk know this judgement raying from the eyes of those offended by our reach, our demands, our rise in a system they refuse to examine for plagues. In Brazil, Bolivia, in New Zealand, Australia, Western Europe and most tragically throughout the world, the eyes of bestial judgement pierce the flesh, engendering anger, rage, a raying back, a loop, a mask concealing the tripped circuit of our shared textures.
Every day I focus face to confront the gaze. My projected aura is not centered in fantasies of human goodwill, human empathy, the goodness of my species. It is structured, marshalled, swaying from, “I am not a threat” to “Not worth your time to fuck with”. Occasionally it will break, sugar glass, to fleetingly acknowledge a gaze not tossed with fear, suspicion, or suppressed malice. Those moments are memorable.
It is a harsh presentation developed over decades, years immersed in negative to strained neutral. It is not me, this aura, it is my fearful defence of self against the aggression you deem your right. You think it screams beast? Lol. It is a call and response and you are the preacher. It reflects the ruthlessly narrow gaze impacting, the silent shade you throw.
But am I/we/them/us/others not also locked in auras of defence? Throwing gaze like bullets of finality? Butterflies crushed between the cause and effect?
There is a white woman approaching. She sees me. She crosses the street before I’m too near. I taste fear diffusing wind. A shift, a glance at another woman and her lips’ curl. Cut eye, dismissive, projected loathing. She is black. But having faced the salivating gaze of men from adolescence, the entitled encroachment, smirking right to intrusion, violation of peace, of space marked safety, I will judge her aura forged in a shit-shined gaze of lust, of hostility, arrogance demanding shackled servility?
I have projected that gaze from the bubble of my aura. These streets. More complex than I wish to acknowledge.
I throw what I blame. Locked, I sit in the chaos of fires burning, concentrating on a match, willing it lit, careless of encroaching conflagrations.