The Compulsorily Polite Negro

Our favorite Compulsorily Polite Negro,
Carlton Banks (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air)

If you're Black in America, you've undoubtedly experienced the same routine: you enter a room in either a professional or casual setting, and you're forced to interact with the dreaded (but seemingly ubiquitous) Skittish White Person™. Or, worse, the Slightly Racist White Person Who Thinks All Black People are Criminals™. Their body tenses up. They cross their arms or graze their fingers over the top of their purse or wallet, trying to verify that their worldly possessions haven't been filched via telekinesis. There is a concerted effort to avoid eye contact at all costs, as if seeing my Blackness in its unfiltered form could, like Medusa, turn an unassuming victim to stone (or, just as terrifying, compel them to purchase a copy of All Eyez on Me). If I am in a store, I am followed, the store's staff eagerly awaiting the moment that the prophecy fulfills itself and the Black girl with the Afro slips an unpaid-for bottle of Kinky-Curly into her purse. If I absolutely must be spoken to (a last-resort conundrum that should be avoided at all costs), it is in a slow, condescending tone, as if in my family's three hundred years spent in America, they never happened to pick up more than a few syllables of the most rudimentary English. 

I am feared, loathed, and intensely and intentionally misunderstood, a dangerous threat to society in my ballet flats and button-down. 

My credentials, education, and identity are irrelevant, decades of hard work and lived experiences becoming obscured and ultimately negated beneath the weight of the stereotypes of Black female hypersexuality and "ratchetness" and Black male criminality. Such a life is one lived in perpetual fear, trapped in the paralyzing anxiety of a "fight or flight" mentality as one strives to cling to the remnants of a unique Black identity while attempting to function in a society that denigrates or fears the stereotypical elements of what is widely-- and falsely-- believed to be the "true" Black identity.  W.E.B Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), best articulates this "sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." One is always on guard, restrained from living the life one deserves because of the constant fear of "what White people think." And, due to the structural nature of institutional racism, this fear becomes legitimate-- what a particular White person thinks of you has the potential to dictate where you go to school, where you work, how much money you make, and sometimes even where you live.

Naturally, the logical response to such stereotyping would be to combat the ignorance of these people by launching into a long, highly articulate diatribe about the complexity of Black American identity, but combating every ignorant person who crosses the street when they see you approaching them is 1) exhausting and 2) futile (trust me, I've tried). Thus, I have noticed that the default response for most Black people (especially highly educated Black people in elite or intellectual circles) is to morph themselves into the Compulsorily Polite Negro. The CPN speaks in perfectly flawless diction, laughs and smiles excessively to alleviate the racial tension that (through no fault of their own) permeates the air as soon as they enter the room, uses an unnecessary amount of "thank you"s and "ma'am"s and "sir"s and "have a great day!"s in a last-ditch effort to convince everyone in the room that no, I am not a danger to society. He or she makes a concerted effort to read the Wikipedia pages on Girls and Fleet Foxes so that the White people with whom they interact will not be subjected to the unthinkable strain of asking about the meaning of Darius' poetry in Love Jones or understanding the musical differences between K-Ci & JoJo and Jodeci. The Compulsorily Polite Negro essentially subdues his or her Blackness to the point of invisibility for the sake of comfort beneath the White gaze and, in extreme cases, expunges every trace of that Blackness altogether.

I will readily admit that I have been (and am still at times) a Compulsorily Polite Negro, believing that, as a minority, my culture was just too obscure or unworthy of attention to truly advocate for or be proud of it while in a White environment. Being polite to the point of obsequiousness is a comfortable space for a minority to exist-- you get to have a couple of White friends (who don't really get you, but it's better than nothing, right?), have a nice career in an office where all of your coworkers are secretly terrified of you, and generally avoid ruffling feathers in order to live a peaceful and curiously unfulfilling life. It's easy, safe, and the way that things have always been.

But is that what you truly want?