A Dark Sin

This is going to be a confession, which means that I am giving you permission to judge me -- not because I want absolution or abuse or absolution through abuse (I am only a secondary victim of my own ignorance), but because learning from the mistakes of others can make the world better, and I will sacrifice for that.

For those of you triggered or injured by this confession, I am sorry, and I hope you hold me accountable in whatever way you need to. Be safe. Be well.

I grew up in Southern Utah around ranchers and other white stereotypes. When I was a teenager I volunteered to help with a boy scout merit badge activity. I was assigned to help at a knot-tying station with an older man (probably in his sixties). I was much more interested in learning a new skill myself than I was in helping anybody. I'm sure I was mostly useless. Between rotation groups, the man teaching the boys how to tie clove hitches and granny squares sensed my eagerness to learn. He got a twinkle in his eye - a sense of illicit mischief - and taught me how to properly tie a noose. "You wrap it thirteen times" he said. It's an elegant knot. A sturdy slip-knot. I was fascinated. And I've always been attracted to goth stuff and death imagery. I was very proud of my secret knowledge.

We had moved to Southern Utah from Detroit, but nobody said anything and I have no idea what my parents thought of my creepy little skill.

As an undergraduate in college, I needed some work-study hours, and got a job as a stage technician for the ballet department. It still is my favorite job I've ever had. Part of my job was maintaining the stage, and sometimes the modern dancers and student choreographers wanted a more industrial, open stage and we would need to tie the wings back against the walls. To do this, the technician supervisor would cut short lengths of black tie-line and leave them draped over the rails in front of the stage weights and pulley ropes. It was irresistible to my inner goth. These little lengths of string made the perfect nooses, and nooses, being basically elaborate slip-knots, made perfect hair ties.

"You have to stop doing that. You're scaring people," the supervisor told me. Well, it's kind of creepy, I thought. That's kind of the point. I wish he had told me to google it. I wish I had googled it, because it wasn't just creepy: it was horrifically racist. Worse than blackface.

I didn't have the historical information I needed to understand how awful I had been until I moved to Virginia to get an M.A. in English. My graduate research professor was black-descended, and used slave narratives from history and contemporary lynching stories to teach us about how to be graduate students. One assignment he gave us was to visit an internet archive of lynch photographs and postcards. He asked us not to look at too many, not to sacrifice our mental health for some misplaced sense of pride, just to understand what they were. I, being prideful, looked at a lot of them. I thought, "These people suffered this for real. The least I can do is look at the pictures and let it change me." Such pride. If you've ever seen those photographs - the white people so proud, throwing festivals, eating food, smiling and pointing up at broken black bodies - then your brain knows. But our souls need to know, too, how sick and wrong it is. And how real.

After that experience, I saw hanging bodies in every shadow, behind every door. I wasn't frightened of them, but my stomach turned, and I wept.

I wish it had been instantaneous, but it wasn't until much later that my mind put everything together, to realize that my "cute little goth" habit of tying nooses was linked in the minds of my black friends and acquaintances to a long history of the broken bodies of their grandparents, their great-grandparents, and their uncles and cousins. It was a threat. Because of violence enacted and perpetuated by white people, a noose can never be anything else anymore. Like a gun, it was always designed to kill, and for so many decades of our national past, it was specifically designed to kill people who looked like them.

Although it was born of ignorance, this was my sin. I hurt people. I pray sometimes that they will heal from the injury I did them, because I don't know them anymore. And even if I did, I could make it worse. But I am sorry. I never wished anyone harm. I was stupid, not malicious.

Please - I was never too young to understand, but nobody taught me. Teach the ugly parts of our history to children and youth. Don't sanitize it. Don't romanticize it. Don't laugh it off. Don't pretend it didn't happen, and doesn't still happen when people are at their ugliest.

And please - be careful of the people around you. Do the research to understand them and the things that make them scared, and do your best to protect and take care of your sisters and brothers on the earth. Be better than I was. People are more important.

And to those of you who think that the kerfuffle about racist fashion is overblown, this is why you are wrong.