The Words We Were Made to Swallow

“Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.” —Psalm 24:3–4, KJV

On Hakeem Jeffries, an old slur in new company, and the two ways our agency is denied

American Blacks, the descendants of slavery, carry a very distinct history. It is wrapped in the reality that our ancestors were so strong they endured the worst of every condition that confronted them, and by nothing more than the grace of God and an unshakeable resolve, they survived the worst of times and lived to tell of the best of times. Up from Slavery is more than the title of a book in our communities. It is a destination that was walked, scraped for, and captured by the legacy of our generations. It goes back to our foundations, and it is overrun with things like collard greens, pork chops, and rice pudding with raisins, and it stretches from the shores of the East Coast all the way across to the shores of the West.

Within that historical context sits the reality of what our enslaved ancestors went through. The ridicule and the rapes. The dehumanization. The constant taunt of being forever left out, while hoping that one day, in a future they might never see, if they did not live to taste the fruits of their labor, if God did not return while they were yet enslaved, He would at least set their descendants free. And so they endured the worst of the beatings and the hangings, and they endured what was counted the least of the punishments, the names. The nigger. The monkey. The boy. Words they learned to hear and swallow and look away from, for the salvation of sons and daughters to come. Our ancestors ate those words so that we would never have to. That is the covenant underneath our history: they swallowed the insult so their children could one day answer it.

That freedom was supposed to include the right to think, choose, and speak for ourselves. Yet we are still being asked to swallow the insult, only now it is served to us in two different forms. When certain political allies want our votes, they tell us that we are underserved, incapacitated, and less than whole, a people waiting for their policies to rescue us. But when we exercise our own judgment and refuse to follow them, the concern disappears and the ridicule begins. We are useful when our suffering advances their cause, useful when our history can be borrowed for their argument, and useful when our votes can deliver their candidates. The moment we depart from the assigned position, we become bought, controlled, ignorant, or incapable of thinking for ourselves. One approach diminishes us to win our allegiance. The other punishes us for withholding it. This week, we witnessed both.

I was reminded of all this reading Justice Clarence Thomas's memoir, My Grandfather's Son. Thomas writes of the rage his grandfather, Myers Anderson, carried out of the Jim Crow South, the daily humiliations served to a grown, hardworking man: a fabricated traffic ticket, and a white woman calling him boy in front of his own grandsons. Every Southern Black man knew such moments, Thomas writes, and the rage they stirred was like a beast that lay in wait, threatening to burn through the masks of meekness behind which our people hid their true feelings. Understand what that word does. Monkey denies a man's humanity, but boy does something even more intimate. It reaches into a man's life, his labor, his household, his gray hairs, and repossesses all of it. It tells a grandfather standing in front of his grandchildren that nothing he built counts. That is part of why Myers Anderson built his own fuel oil business and answered to no white employer for the rest of his days: so that no man could stand over him and hand him that word with his wages. When Rula Jebreal reached for errand boy, she reached for that word, the one that made the beast stir in better men than she will ever meet.

So today, whenever someone grabs those terms and hurls them at our community, we recognize what it is. We recognize the hatred and the covered racism even when the words are taken back as soon as they fall from the lips. We recognize it especially from those who pretend to be just, who pretend to stand with the once oppressed, who will stand with us so long as we serve the cause of the day, and who, once we depart from their line, reach down into what is stored in the heart and spew out at us the oldest words in the American gutter. Jesus said it plainly in Matthew: out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good treasure of his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil treasure. The Lord was not warning us to watch the tool. He was warning us to watch what is brewing in the treasury.

This week we witnessed the treasury spill.

On a progressive podcast, journalist Rula Jebreal, discussing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his support for Israel, called a high-ranking American Black elected official a bought and paid for AIPAC monkey. She said it with a disclaimer attached in the same breath, with all due respect, and I don't mean it in a racist way. Hear that carefully. You do not disclaim what you do not recognize. The flinch inside the sentence is the confession. And then, for good measure, she called him an errand boy. Monkey and boy, in one sitting, aimed at a Black man, by a guest who wants us to believe she stumbled into two of the oldest slurs in the American vocabulary by accident, back to back. The host let the moment pass with a mild note about connotations and published the episode anyway.

And this did not begin with Jebreal. Weeks earlier, when the streamer Hasan Piker suggested on his program that American Jews were inviting violence upon themselves, and Leader Jeffries condemned the remark as dangerous, malicious, and antisemitic, the answer from that ecosystem was not reflection but accusation. An AIPAC boss call was made, Piker sneered, telling his followers the Democrats condemning him were unanimous in their hatred and urging them to tally the politicians' lobby money. The mockery that followed dressed the Black Leader up as AIPAC Shakur, a bought man, a servant of a foreign master. Long before the word monkey was spoken aloud, the picture of Hakeem Jeffries as somebody's owned thing was already hanging in their gallery. Jebreal did not invent the portrait. She just said the caption out loud.

Then came the machinery of excuse, and it told us more than the slur did. Jebreal apologized days later, unconditionally, she said, in a post that opened by declaring how disgusted and horrified she remains that Jeffries takes AIPAC money. An apology that leads with the grievance is a press release, and sorry does not unsay what was said with a whole chest. Joy Reid, the American-born daughter of immigrants from Guyana and the Congo, a woman who wraps herself in the American Black experience as if it were her inheritance and who built decades in American media on the backs of an American Black audience, had the audacity on her own show to issue a waiver: sometimes our friends get it wrong, perhaps a cultural disconnection, different from when conservatives say it, because they are malicious and she, presumably, is not. This is the same Joy Reid who spent years, treating every racist caricature aimed at Barack and Michelle Obama as exactly what it was, with no waivers issued for anybody's cultural background. The standard apparently depends on who is holding the paintbrush.

Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks skipped the apology entirely. When a Black woman told her online that the disclaimer did not cure the slur, Kasparian answered that she would not want to offend Israel's cattle, offered political prostitute as an alternative, and said she wanted the race vultures to shut up. Race vultures indeed, and she pointed that finger straight at her own self. As of this writing, those posts still stand. So there is the taxonomy of how our dignity gets handled by our declared allies: excuse it, waive it, or curse the ones who object to it.

Let me make the demand underneath all of this plain. Piker, Jebreal, and Kasparian expect American Blacks to adopt their position on Israel and Gaza as though our history has already decided the question for us. They want the suffering of Palestinians placed inside the frame of American slavery and Jim Crow, with Israel assigned the role of the white oppressor and American Blacks expected to recognize ourselves in the Palestinian cause. Once that arrangement is made, our history becomes evidence for their argument, our voices become moral reinforcement for their movement, and our votes become political property they believe they are entitled to collect.

American Blacks are free to support Palestinians, oppose Israel, criticize its government, or reject AIPAC. We are equally free to support Israel, accept lawful campaign contributions, and reach conclusions that do not serve someone else's movement. Our history does not predetermine our foreign policy, and nobody inherits authority over our political judgment by declaring his own cause analogous to ours. Solidarity that must be purchased with obedience is conscription.

That is what this sequence exposed. Piker supplied the accusation that Black political disagreement must have been purchased by AIPAC. Jebreal supplied the racial vocabulary of ownership, calling Jeffries a monkey and an errand boy. Kasparian then turned upon the Black people who objected, calling them Israel's cattle, political prostitutes, and race vultures. First comes the demand that we serve the cause. Then comes the suggestion that any Black person who refuses must be serving a master. Finally comes the attack upon those who recognize the insult and answer it. They do not merely disagree with the choices of American Blacks. They deny that those choices could have been made freely. And let me be precise about who this indicts: not immigrants as a class, but those who enter an American argument, borrow the moral authority of American Black history, and then claim cultural disconnection when that history prohibits the language they want to use.

I don't support the Congressional Black Caucus. But thank God for the clarity that answered them. With a quick and concise rebuke, the Congressional Black Caucus needed one sentence: there is not a non-racist way to call Leader Jeffries, a Black man, a monkey or an errand boy. Representative Ritchie Torres said what should never need saying, that calling a Black man a monkey is racist. And the Leader's own brother, the historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries, put it the way our grandmothers would have: Hakeem is a man, a Black man, and nobody's monkey. One sentence apiece, because the truth here is one sentence long. It takes a graduate seminar to complicate it and only a memory to know it.

Now let me speak to the excuse itself, because the waiver Reid issued deserves to be examined and then denied. The argument is that intent lives in the speaker's politics. If a conservative says monkey, it is malice; if a progressive says it, it is a cultural misunderstanding, a point gone askew. But our ancestors did not swallow those words because of the speaker's party. The overseer's politics were not the wound. The word was the wound. A standard that assigns racism by the speaker's coalition rather than the speech is not an anti-racist standard at all. It is a membership benefit. And notice what the benefit purchases: the coalition's foreign policy grievance gets to ride on the back of a Black man's dignity, and we are expected to carry it quietly, the way our ancestors carried it, for the good of a cause that is not ours. The slur becomes the toll we pay for belonging, and this week Reid held the booth.

That denial of American Black agency is not always announced by a slur. Sometimes it arrives more quietly, dressed as concern and carrying a diagnosis. The overt version says that when a Black man reaches the wrong conclusion, somebody must have bought him. The covert version says that Black people are too injured, too underserved, and too politically helpless to reach the future without the speaker's prescription. One punishes our independence. The other refuses to recognize it. Both require American Blacks to remain useful as victims but unavailable as sovereign political actors.

Consider Abdul El-Sayed, the physician and public-health official who did not pursue clinical practice, now running for Senate in Michigan and making his case to Black voters on our own airwaves, from his Breakfast Club sit-down with Charlamagne to the coverage that followed on Native Land Pod. For months, across forum after forum, El-Sayed has told audiences that when a Black patient walks in with a Medicaid card, the doctor thinks of you as a half citizen, that Black women are discriminated against at the point of care, all of it framed as the structural racism only his program can cure. Meanwhile his own wife, a psychiatrist, runs a private practice that reportedly accepts no Medicaid, no Medicare, no insurance of any kind. Physician, integrate thy house. But my deeper objection is the portrait. There is a racial essentialism in constantly telling American Blacks how oppressed, underserved, and helpless we are, as the predicate for why we must be saved by the teller. We are not the half citizens of his stump speech. We are the descendants of people who built businesses like Myers Anderson's under Jim Crow itself, and our hosts and our platforms owe our community more scrutiny of that portrait than they have given. Pity is just contempt wearing its church clothes.

I recognize this arrangement because I have encountered versions of it throughout my own life. As a Black woman, I have been perceived by some as downtrodden before they knew anything about what I had built, survived, believed, or accomplished. Others have looked at my skin and presumed that I would toe the Democratic line, repeat the approved positions, and place my vote wherever the coalition instructed. Then there are those who elevate me by tearing down other American Blacks, pretending that I am somehow different from the people whose history formed me. They offer approval as though being separated from my own community is a compliment.

I have learned to be wary of all three. I watch those who speak constantly about the failures of American Blacks while elevating themselves as the people qualified to diagnose us. I am equally mindful of those who profess a profound loyalty to our community but turn upon Black people the moment we think, vote, worship, or speak outside the boundaries they have drawn for us. Anyone whose affection requires me to believe that I am better than other American Blacks does not respect me. Anyone whose solidarity disappears when I exercise my own judgment was never standing beside me. They were standing over me, waiting for obedience.

That is the second part of being an American Black descendant of slavery. The first part is the endurance. The second is learning to recognize the people who misalign our story whenever we refuse to serve theirs. We are the moral credential when we are useful, the helpless victims when our votes are wanted, and the monkey when we are not. Our history gets borrowed for every cause and returned damaged, and the borrowers are offended when we ask for it back. But the covenant our ancestors kept was not made so that their descendants could swallow the same words with better seasoning. They ate the insult so we could answer it. So we answer.

Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. This week some mouths spoke, and some hearts were disclosed, and no apology that leads with a grievance and no waiver issued on a Friday show can seal that treasury back up. We saw what was stored. I have lived long enough to recognize the difference between solidarity and supervision, between respect and recruitment, and between someone who honors my community and someone who merely finds me useful. We are the descendants of people who learned to read men by exactly this light, in fields where reading anything else could get you killed. We recognize what we heard. And we will remember it the way our people have always remembered, which is long.