“I don’t have to do nothing but eat, drink, stay black, and die.”
–Langston Hughes, “Necessity” (1951). 

America, have I ever told you about the time I tried laying claim to my European ancestry?

It was St. Patrick’s Day in 2006, and I was in my junior year at the University of Washington. I had recently declared History as my major, so I had a lot to think—and drink—about. This evening, a gaggle of friends and I found our way, as you do, to a random apartment party somewhere on 42^nd street. If memory serves (and it often doesn’t) we arrived with a 6-pack of Guinness, plus an iPod loaded with a playlist of “party jamzzzz” in case the house music sucked and critical mass demanded a coup.

It did, and they did.

So now we’re posted up in the living room feeling like saviors, when I noticed a few blokes off in the kitchen having an animated conversation. “This is How We Do It” flooded one ear, but with the other I could hear that they were discussing their last names: where in Scotland they got them, which clan they belonged to, and whether they’d be going back to the “the mother country” any time soon. Understand that my last name is Scott—so I felt entitled to join the conversation, not quite seeing until it was a little too late that there was probably no way for this to end well.

A few sips in and feeling empowered, I launched into it: how my parents are from Jamaica, how we got our surnames from Scottish slaveholders who found a way out from under British rule by fleeing to the West Indies, and how we could probably go back and find these guys some black Armstrongs or Scotts or Fergusons who their families bought, sold, or passed their names down too. Did I mention that we were uninvited, and that these guys lived there?

When it comes down to it, I won’t believe we live in a post-racial country until I can drunkenly discuss the trans-Atlantic slave trade at 11:30 on a Friday night at a total stranger’s house without being politely asked to leave.

The political economy of Internet thinkpieces produces spasms of posts on social networking websites about topics floating in the cultural ether. The glut has a way of forcing writers like me back on ourselves, searching for temporal justification to use our voices. But I’ve recently learned the trick of surrounding myself with people who I can stay on the same frequency as, so that all our preoccupations suddenly appear normal when exposed to the heat and light of mutual camaraderie. Say what you want about the “echo chamber”—but it’s cozy in there, and the rent is way cheaper. Combative exploits like the one in that random kitchen during The Bush Regime were, until embarrassingly recently, my idea of fun—sometimes I’d “win”, and a lot of times I’d “lose”, but what I didn’t know was that I was wagering something I couldn’t get back.

So what does your newsfeed look like these days? Do you find yourself inundated by doomsday propositions? Have you placed the reasonable outrage of others on mute as a method for coping? Or have you left Facebook altogether, for fear that you were losing hold of some semblance of mental health by seeing everyone in your digital social circle reckon with issues you find disturbing? How do you balance your need for personal well-being with the need to stay engaged?—or are those two the same thing for you? How receptive are we now that we’ve got more and more access to differing points of view?

Now that it’s March and the sun is out, I recently trifled through the many Facebook links I’d saved since my 30^th birthday in November—a point in time I’ll always associate with the outrage many of us felt as it seemed the country’s criminal justice system was incapable of recognizing that black lives matter. I’ve saved an article from Variety Magazine where Selma actor David Oyelowo opined that the Academy has a history of preferring subservient black roles. I’ve saved a creepily convincing CollegeCandy.com article accusing Beyoncé of habitually ripping-off Jennifer Lopez’ fashion choices. And I’ve saved a picture of a delicious-looking bowl of Cambodian beef stew with a caption from a friend named John demanding that we “go to Phnom Phet and order the number 11.”

But of them all, one really stands out, and it’s a vid of James Baldwin asking why America saw fit to “invent the nigger”:

I have an answer for Baldwin, but I think it requires going back to that random college kitchen. I think America “invented the nigger” at some point in the 17^th century because it had a pressing need for cheap labor, plus a desire to place a division among colonial commoners that would keep them from uniting against a well-heeled aristocracy. Psychologically, I imagine it had the effect of giving Europeans who were dirt poor a sudden boost in status, while simultaneously lowering the expectations of skilled Africans who had everything to gain in a new land. 400 years later, I feel like we all know a lot of people who have nothing going for them but whiteness, and a lot of black people who’d do better to think better of themselves.

But I’m not complaining. I literally can’t. I suppose I agree with something Seattle writer David Shields wrote in his memoir Remote: “Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular attribute—say, race or gender—are always the writers whose work has most directly benefited from this attribute.” Having two dark parents was the reason I’ve never seen fit to get a tattoo—this skin color is all the body art I’ll ever need. But somewhere under here, there’s a guy whose memory goes back far enough to know there was a time when I wasn’t black, but something else: still a guy with this skin color, but someone who lived in a world that didn’t yet have this idea he was expected to inhabit and animate.

All of us were born with that one thing that isn’t going anywhere—a known fact on which many of our secrets are based: the first thing people notice, but the last thing you can talk candidly about in complacent settings. So maybe we could take pleasure in starting the conversation.

Stormy souls who grimace for the camera while wearing their identities like awkward extra poundage may be doing it wrong. Out there, there’s a world of people to meet, accomplishments to wrack-up, and off-color jokes to tell. And maybe you’re the only excuse you should need.