A New York Times columnist traces the effects of bullying, abuse and the growth of self.

CHARLES BLOW, Visual Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times; Author, Fire Shut Up in My Bones

In conversation with IAN F. HANEY-LO?PEZ, Professor, UC Berkeley; Author, Dog Whistle Politics

 

IAN HANEY-LÓPEZ: The narrative of [your] book starts with a traumatic event, a tragic event that happened to you when you were seven. Can you tell us about that?

CHARLES BLOW: The event is an instance of childhood sexual abuse, and it happened when I was seven years old. The abuser was an older cousin of mine – he would’ve been a young teenager at the time. This was during the summer and back then, in the rural South, people used to come visit all the time; you’d send your kids and I’d send my kids.

So he came to visit, and I was feeling very alone at the time. My parents had recently separated.

When they were together, we lived in one neighborhood. That neighborhood, I found incredibly nurturing. I didn’t spend my days in daycare; I spent my days with elderly people and my great uncle was my babysitter. We would visit all his friends, and old people have a way of slowing time to a crawl. They were just beautiful, beautiful days. They called me Charles Baby because I wasn’t just my mom’s baby, I was everyone’s baby. Then, all of a sudden, my parents separated, and we moved not very far away at all, but it took me away from my village.

Now, I felt incredibly alone. I was already a quiet kid and I could feel myself becoming even more quiet. Then this cousin showed up and he made it clear that he wanted to play with me, which was strange to me because he was the age of my older brothers. But also I was so starved for attention that I was like, “Anyone play with me.”

One night, I woke up in the middle of an abusive episode. I didn’t even call it abuse, which is what it was. I just called it an incredible betrayal, because I just could not fathom what it meant. At seven years old, you’re a pre-sexual being. You don’t even know what intimacy looks like other than a kind of hetero-normative idea of intimacy, which is that parents pair up and men and women kiss and hug. That’s about as much as I knew. What would make someone do this? Another sort of thing that kids do is ask, “Did I do something that would make this happen?”

It spiraled from there. Once I made clear that I didn’t like this and I didn’t want to do this, he became my biggest bully. I think that it was designed to keep me from ever telling, and to destroy my credibility if I ever did tell. And in fact, I wouldn’t tell until I was an adult.

HANEY-LÓPEZ: He bullied you in a particular way.

BLOW: Yeah. It was homophobic bullying, because he knew that that was the nature of what he had done and [he wanted] to shift the onus of responsibility from him being the actor to me being the lure; to say, this is your nature and, therefore, you’re responsible for me coming to you in this way. It’s such an assault on the spirit of a child. I can think of it now, as a 44-year-old man, and I can contextualize it and logically figure out the design of what was happening. As a kid, you can’t do that. You’re not emotionally equipped, you’re not spiritually equipped, you’re not intellectually equipped, and so it had currency.

HANEY-LÓPEZ: There’s the betrayal, there’s the bullying, but in addition in your book you narrate a series of self-doubts that are deeply tied to this episode.

BLOW: I think what often happens with children is they braid together abuse, attraction and identity, because it is their first introduction to anything that would be intimate, or any idea of identity on that level.

It is very likely that children who will eventually identify as different are more likely to be abused in the first place. Abusers are diabolically gifted at picking up the buds of what will eventually become different. They’re incredibly gifted at seeing the child who isolates – either self-isolates or is isolated by the society in which they live, and they target the isolated, because childhood sexual abuse depends on silence. It depends on shadow and darkness.

As an adult I started to unbraid those two things; this person doesn’t have that much agency over me, they don’t have that much power over my fate. It is most likely that we are all predetermined, or at least predisposed, to like whatever we’re going to like anyway. And that, though there are negative effects of childhood sexual abuse to be sure, that identity is not a negative. You can embrace that and it doesn’t have to be some willful acquiescence of acceptance. It can be a full-hearted embrace and love of self that you can experience when you separate the two things.

HANEY-LÓPEZ: There’s a moment in which you were very far from that moral clarity, or where you had clarity of a different sort when you were 20. Tell us about that.

BLOW: I thought I wanted to be a politician. Not just any politician: I wanted to be the governor of Louisiana, specifically. The CIA became very interested in having me be an intern. I thought that it would be great on the resume of a kid trying to go to law school who wanted to be a politician. They bring you to Virginia to do the last phases. One of the things they have you do is a lie detector test. I think the idea is that they don’t want you to be able to be blackmailed. Whatever the truth is, you need to be able to say it out loud and not have any guilt about it. I wasn’t thinking anything about this lie detector test because I wasn’t going to lie.

The second question came, which was, “Have you ever had sex with a man?” The childhood sexual abuse immediately pops into my head, and I’m like “How do you answer this question?” It wasn’t insertive, so was it sex? We were both kids, so he wasn’t a man. It wasn’t consensual. I literally didn’t know what to say. So I just said, “No.”

I could hear the machine scratching before I even got it out of my mouth. Now I was a sweaty pool of anxiety. As soon as it was over, I knew I’d bombed this thing, so I turned to the guy behind me and I just spilled my guts: everything that I’d never told anyone. I begged him to let me take the test again, which he agreed to do. Then I said yes to the question. It still said that I was lying. I realized in that moment that there was so much anxiety built up around this that I actually didn’t know what it was. I didn’t even know how to describe it. I didn’t even know what the truth of it was.

The gun incident [took place] right after that. I was back at school and realizing, “Okay, I can’t be a politician, because the government thinks I’m a liar.”

I was thinking that this childhood episode had literally robbed me of all my dreams. It robbed me of being able to naturally come into being as who I most naturally would have been as a child – that’s how I was thinking about it – and now, it had robbed me of the one dream I’d had in the world.

I was very depressed about it. I was in my apartment; my mom called and said, “I have somebody here who wants to speak with you.” There was a pause on the phone and I heard somebody get on the phone and say, “Oh, how’s it going, boy?” I immediately registered that it was him. In my depression and anxiety everything exploded. My mom – don’t ask me why this happened – had given me a gun to take to college, just in case. I wouldn’t even take it into my house. I kept it underneath the seat in my car. I ran down – not even dressed, I had on pajama pants, no shoes – and I jumped in the car. I grabbed the gun and I slammed it onto the passenger seat and I rushed on the road to kill him. In that haze of craziness, madness, my only thought was that the only way for me to exist in the world was to remove him from it. The only way for me to have fullness of self was that he had to be gone.

I got there and I said [to myself,] Charles, you cannot do this. You cannot continue to live your life through the eyes of this hurt little seven-year-old little boy. You have a life, you have a future, and you have to make a choice. You have to release it. You have to stop hating him so that you can start loving yourself, because love and hate can’t exist in the same body. There’s not enough space so I had to let go of the hate so that I could start loving me.

HANEY-LÓPEZ: [Your] book encompasses a period of your childhood to very young adulthood during which you moved in spaces that were hyper-segregated and almost exclusively African American. Did that allow you to at once express the complicacy of people and at the same time not engage in the turmoil of the white gays?

BLOW: It’s really important to understand that [idea of] not having to deal with the racial aspect very much at all, because the world that I inhabited was, like you say, for the most part all black. If you were not elected the class president, it wasn’t because you were black.

In addition to that, the school that I spent most of my time in, which was [in the] Gibson-Coleman school system – the Coleman part of that school system had started as the first African-American college in Louisiana – it was set up to educate the sons of freed slaves, and so they had this very long legacy, and you felt that. There was this sort of erudition in the way that people comported themselves and what they imbued in us about what it was to be a Coleman kid. I realized that my legacy sprang forth not from nothingness, but from something solid, and that it had a very long history in terms of education, and sense of self and sense of place.

HANEY-LÓPEZ: Six years ago, I think people talked about a post-racial America. Were you one of those?

BLOW: I look askance at all those people. I don’t even know what that would mean. I do believe that race is a completely constructed weirdness meant to suppress and deny.

That said, because it has been an organizing principle, and in many cases, a negative one, cultures have built themselves up around those lines. There’s a cultural question about whether or not it is even reasonable to say, Do you want to eliminate that culture from the world? Or do you want to build a society that recognizes race and recognizes differences and recognizes culture, and appreciates it more than it does now, and doesn’t denigrate it, and doesn’t arrange it hierarchically so that there are some races that experience privilege and others races that experience oppression? That is a real question for us to grapple with as a society. I think difference is fantastic.