armed & dangerous
Xavier Gerard Lee
Response
At night at Swarthmore, where
the campus is relatively poorly lit,
it’s rare for people to say hello to
me. As we are approaching one
another, my face shrouded by a
hoodie or hidden in the darkness,
students look at me, squinting
their eyes in order to attempt to
identify me, but in finding that
it is too dark – and that I am too
dark to be seen – they look away.
There is a certain terror I see in
their expressions, for they cannot
recognize me as Xavier, as fellow
student. They see in me a black
male figure, and all the roles
similar figures play in the American
imagination.
Black men have become symbols
of violence in our culture. We
are seen as dangerous in our
very existence, and must bear
the weight of the burden of the
epidermalization of contempt
which is the immediate response
of those whose paths we cross.
This fact incensed me to no end
during my first year at Swarthmore,
having never experienced this
form of fear before. I did not see
myself as scary because I knew
that I was a good one. The clothes
I wore, the way I walked and the
words I used revealed immediately
that I posed no threat, although
26
the assumptions that someone’s
hostility can be boiled down to
outward appearances is obviously
dubious. Yet still, it continues to
be a menace to the lives of several
million, for it is has been the
justification for countless murders,
all in the name of self-defense.
The notion of Black men
representing violence is an issue
of American sensibilities. Our
culture is saturated with images
which present Black men as
"Black men have
become symbols of
violence"
violent, as villainous, as ravenous.
The understood virtues of white
people represent a stark contrast
to the character assassination
of Black men. In presenting the
Black man as dangerous, you
present, consequentially, since
blacks and whites, oddly, represent
opposites, that the White man
is defensive. The Black man
represent sexual hunger, is, as
Fanon writes, biological while the
White man, conversely, represents
worldliness and society. When
applied to white women, through
the white male imagination, which,
unfortunately, is also our own, we
see white women as unnaturally