Looking at the Moon

From time to time, a memory streams through my mind. I was walking down a road with a friend one cold night, returning to our dormitories. A car quickly passed us by, and from it I heard a slur directed at me. Shock quickly propagated through my body, and I thought I had brushed it off. It still lingered.

I spent a good deal of time wondering why God had created me with this burden of perception. Feeling at times like Sisyphus, bound in a world, almost like a prison. It is difficult because deep down I see the world as a foreign object, built by some "other". I felt genuinely tired of constantly trying to please the superstratum, wanting to just be.

All the people I admire look nothing like me, a source of great happiness. They are everywhere. Mathematicians, physicists, creators, explorers, and inventors. Some who would not view me as an equal, who would not want to be in the same room as me. The road I walk on, the light I turn on, the equations I learn in class, tethered away, seemingly forever. Why have we remained in the dark?

I feel as though I am destined to repeat the fate my forefathers lived, to live in a world closed by religion. To live in a world without a self-referential question. Without sufficiently complex axiomatic systems. My ancestors lived in such a world; they lived in a world of dirt, of poverty, looking down at a book that told them all stories had been told. The world rushed by them.

They live through me, the nucleus of every cell. In the shape of my face, the color of my skin, and the very material that makes me up. Maybe I should be more grateful? The result of billions of years of evolution, a process with trillions upon trillions of dead ends. Lucky organisms in a sea of ends. So maybe my ancestors did alright.

Then it is all determined, all written by a book, now being told. When I believed in the One Above, I never questioned their will. They cared about me. Gave me free will, to do, to change. Yet, after my awakening, the one above was an imaginary friend who did not care for me. They left me stranded. "Why had they done this?" I asked. A question directed above, ironically, after the loss of my faith.

In reality, the question seems ill-posed; we are but droplets in the universe. Emergent complexity on a rocky planet, undergoing evolution. When you see it that way, to be black or not to be black is all but meaningless. Nothing is a punishment, but just a state in the world, dictated by randomness and banality.

I do not hate my color; I feel trapped by the human perception of it—my own biases, as well as the biases of the world. Everywhere I go, that is what is seen first. I hear comments that make my skin crawl at times. The pain becomes an existential sickness. What have I done to these people? Why is my existence an issue?

No one controls their skin, their intelligence, their mind, or their looks. For me, these are in the same category as other properties, like the color of the rock I saw yesterday, or the cloud that was shaped strangely like a rabbit. These are things that really have little meaning, at least for most interactions. However, humanity does, our evolutionary history rooted in small group social dynamics has extrapolated to a domain our ancestors could have never imagined. We are, in every sense of the term, primitive greater apes. Our social structure is forcing us into this degenerate state of being.

My eyes see a man from Ethiopia, raised in a bidirectional world, between the US and Ethiopia, a man in love with mathematics and machine learning. Others see my skin, my hair, all the things that I do not see daily, unless I look in the mirror, of course. That is the peculiar thing: I have never directly seen myself, only through light reflected by a mirror, and yet I am judged by the one thing I cannot even see.

One might say go, be with your people then. Where everyone looks like you. Yet I ask, who are my people? The people who have the same physical characteristics? The people who believe in the same concepts? My friend is the one who sees me as me; the one whose first thought of me is not the color of my skin, but our shared experience, as dwellers, explorers in this beautiful universe. We do not look the same, yet we are alike. The question of who I am, though, is left unanswered, although I assume its answer was written in the initial conditions.

Anyway, it feels strange. I sometimes say being black is like looking at the moon, destined to never feel the warmth of the sun.