L | A
By Ryan Ken
Whenever I post on TikTok, I have no aspirations or expectations of going viral. I'm grateful when my work has more reach than I anticipated. Still, virality comes with its headaches, as my videos travel beyond a like-minded audience. Some people enjoy arguing and rigorous debate online, but that's never been my ministry. I'm looking for that much-maligned echo chamber.
My hope with every video is that the algorithm puts me in front of people inclined to agree. That audience has helped a person as profoundly anxious as myself feel safe sharing vulnerably in some of the most public forums ever created.
Many of my political and social beliefs are not widely popular in America. Believing in the dignity of all human beings is considered a radical position in this country. And the intersections of my identity—black, non-binary, Southern, fat—make me difficult to read to many. In our culture, it's more common for those identities to be the butt of a joke rather than held by someone who is crafting the jokes.
As a writer, I'm interested in explorations that challenge dominant cultural narratives. I'm acutely aware of their dominance, which is why the echo chamber I've created over the past few years has been such a respite. It's an affirmation that there are enough people who believe in the dignity of all human beings that we can sometimes gather and laugh by the dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
The other side of virality is that it opens the door for those narratives of domination to announce themselves at a disorienting scale. Not too long ago familiar conversations arose on TikTok when some black people began "confessing" about how uncomfortable they are around "hood people." If you haven't encountered it, you're not missing anything. It's the same bullshit it's always been since time immemorial. It's Chris Rock's bit about "black people versus Niggers."
In response, I made a video about how antiblack the whole discourse was and, to my great relief, it reached the audience I had hoped—people who saw the vulnerability in sharing my deconstruction of antiblackness and people who were willing to share their learning as well. What I am most proud of is that many folks from "the hood" felt affirmed by it.
But the video also reached an audience of people who raced to my comments to let me know that there is plenty of good reason to be afraid of "crash outs" or "crash dummies"—terms I was completely unfamiliar with.
As I gathered soon afterward, these are terms deployed to refer to and devalue violent people from the hood who seem to have little to no regard for their lives or the lives around them, ultimately rendering themselves disposable.
Commenters explained that they were merely expressing their discomfort with people who had "nothing to lose." I was told, "You know what they mean!" I didn't. Eventually, I realized they simply meant "Niggers."
Instead of a just society, America offers its people the Nigger. A mythological monster onto which we can comfortably project society's ills. Niggers have no history, context, or humanity. They're superpredators responsible for whatever harms befall them—a rightful punishment for subhumans who were predestined for their tragic fates.
The Nigger's function is directly linked to the reality that dignity is not a birthright in this country. Instead, it is a competitive set of prizes in a cruel game of survival known as The American Dream. Most of us will never win, but we can at least have the satisfaction of beating someone else. The Nigger is the unit of measure we use to determine our value relative to others. It's how we tally the score.
To buy into the American dream is to believe your dignity is the result of doing rather than being. It's being suspicious of your rest, your neighbors, your anger, your empathy, your volatility, your fragility, your desire to burn all of this shit to the ground.
To believe in the myth of the Nigger is to admit you're not free. And to be afraid of people from the hood is to project your legitimate fears onto fictional monsters rather than the real systems designed to kill you.
And even though it is a lie built from our flesh, black people are often willing to accept the Nigger as reparations too.
Sure, the education I pursued put me in mountains of debt and may never deliver on its promise of financial stability, but at least I'm better than the crash out. I may have devoted years of my life to climbing the corporate ladder in ways that leave me feeling like I betrayed myself, but at least I have weekends off and sit at a desk instead of working on my feet.
If we're honest, the educational and professional opportunities many of us paid thousands for or fake laughed to get were just for the benefit of sitting during a shift at work. People have developed an entire superiority complex based on their relationship to a chair that doesn't even belong to them—and that many are still paying for.
I think folks online hear how I speak and see how I dress and could never fathom my proximity to the people they gleefully refer to as worthless or my own proximity to "crashing out." More than a few insisted that I go to "violent neighborhoods" so I could be frightened into the good sense of hating hood Niggers.
It read like a fascinating declaration of faith. Faith in their gifts of discernment and faith in the power of the Nigger. People had determined from a three-minute-long video that I wasn't from the hood and thus didn't know any crash outs. Still, I needed to make a pilgrimage so my faith and fear could be restored. And because I was a non-believer, people began to share their testimonies. Many said their belief in the crash out had saved their lives.
To be fair, I don't believe they are saying the Nigger is God. On the contrary, it seems to be the devil—a tempter, ever-present in the world we experience with our earthly senses, and always busy. God, heaven, and The American Dream are otherworldly ideas for a life beyond this one.
People told me that their fear and loathing of the Nigger had propelled them into academic and professional success. Most importantly, their fear took them out of the hood, just as fear of the devil propels many into Christian righteousness and vigilance.
For them, my rejection of the Nigger was a fundamental misunderstanding of the world—an intolerable naïveté deserving of its own damnation, but certainly a lesser punishment than those deemed "ghetto" or "hood," a purgatory. Even in their chastisement, I was supposed to survive to tell the tale. A respectable redemption was possible if only I would just believe. Like all religions, the myth appears to provide a community for the faithful and if nothing else, a reason to gather.
And look: I don't feel compelled to give anyone my hood credentials, but I'll say that not only am I unafraid, but some of the people dearest to me in the world are people who have committed the crimes many believe disqualify them from their humanity. The interpersonal violence they participated in has only exposed a society with a true monopoly on violence. A violence shielded by the law, bureaucracy, metal bars, and faith in the Nigger.
If belief in the Nigger is a religion, prison is its cathedral.
Yet I have learned the most about love, gentleness, compassion, and endurance from prison visits and phone calls. I've cultivated a love not based on myth, but rooted in the reality of surviving the crash. My incarcerated loved ones have helped me nurture a love of this Earth—rather than heaven or hell—and one that is completely within the providence of human beings.
I can now love without a need for deification because that too is dehumanizing. I can love without diminishing the harm someone has caused or disregarding the legitimate fears of navigating safety in a country like America.
What I know intimately is that the most dangerous person in the hood is still a person. The most violent person on the most violent block of the most violent neighborhood is still a person. That's the real tragedy: human beings are capable of incredible monstrosities, yet there are no monsters.
The criminal, the hood rat, the inmate, the crash out, the Nigger is a human being who did not come into the world aspiring to be thrown away. To pretend otherwise is a cruel lie. Living in a world where monsters exist would be easier and safer because we would no longer be responsible for our monstrousness.
To refuse the myth of the Nigger is to accept that both the crash out and the respectable black saint are dehumanizing.
It's the attachment to the binaries of good and bad, saint and sinner, black excellence and black failure, that are themselves acts of violence. And not an abstracted violence either. They are quite literally the binaries that uphold and justify prison, communal destruction, and White supremacy. Because who cares what happens to the crash out anyway? Are they not deserving of suffering? Is that not their rightful inheritance?
I believe as humans, we are wholly capable of whatever violence we can imagine. But to admit there is an archetype of a person that you find entirely disposable is a kind of violence I struggle to perceive and find grace for. It's an expression of the dangerous mentality folks lobbied at the hood.
As I said in my initial video, having the power to discard is frightening because it's a reminder that you too can be discarded. Moreover, you cannot simultaneously condemn people for acting like they have "nothing to live for," while arguing that those people's lives don't matter. Why should people you want dead have to live up to your values anyway?
The people who have fully embraced the myth are as disconnected from a shared humanity as someone could be. And yet, I still believe them to be human beings. That's what frightens me. If human beings are capable of that level of disconnection, so am I.
The "crash dummy" is not my cautionary tale. Those who believe in the myth of the crash dummy are. Because the modest, precarious comforts they have acquired have led them to behave even more monstrously, as has also been true in my own life.
I've come to accept that nothing I've achieved in a corrupt system could ever be solely because of my own merit. More importantly, I no longer believe people have to earn their dignity in the first place. Therein lies the appeal of the Nigger. In a society where your worth is always conditional, someone must remain worthless for the system to maintain itself.
James Baldwin once said:
Though black people didn't invent the Nigger, we must ask ourselves why we continue to be so willing to accept it and, for the "respectable" among us, define ourselves against it.
Deconstructing antiblackness has not been exclusively an intellectual exercise for me. It's an emotional, cultural, and deeply spiritual one. It's as personal as realizing that my sense of self has been propped up by the dehumanization of others, including my own family.
In a society where most of us feel like captives to some extent, making a spectacle of the people whose bondage appears more obvious provides the illusion of freedom—freedom by comparison.
The Nigger is the hollow myth of a society that never intended to deliver on its promise of liberty. To refuse it is to accept that I am not free just because someone else's cage is smaller.
By Ryan Ken
Whenever I post on TikTok, I have no aspirations or expectations of going viral. I'm grateful when my work has more reach than I anticipated. Still, virality comes with its headaches, as my videos travel beyond a like-minded audience. Some people enjoy arguing and rigorous debate online, but that's never been my ministry. I'm looking for that much-maligned echo chamber.
My hope with every video is that the algorithm puts me in front of people inclined to agree. That audience has helped a person as profoundly anxious as myself feel safe sharing vulnerably in some of the most public forums ever created.
Many of my political and social beliefs are not widely popular in America. Believing in the dignity of all human beings is considered a radical position in this country. And the intersections of my identity—black, non-binary, Southern, fat—make me difficult to read to many. In our culture, it's more common for those identities to be the butt of a joke rather than held by someone who is crafting the jokes.
As a writer, I'm interested in explorations that challenge dominant cultural narratives. I'm acutely aware of their dominance, which is why the echo chamber I've created over the past few years has been such a respite. It's an affirmation that there are enough people who believe in the dignity of all human beings that we can sometimes gather and laugh by the dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
The other side of virality is that it opens the door for those narratives of domination to announce themselves at a disorienting scale. Not too long ago familiar conversations arose on TikTok when some black people began "confessing" about how uncomfortable they are around "hood people." If you haven't encountered it, you're not missing anything. It's the same bullshit it's always been since time immemorial. It's Chris Rock's bit about "black people versus Niggers."
In response, I made a video about how antiblack the whole discourse was and, to my great relief, it reached the audience I had hoped—people who saw the vulnerability in sharing my deconstruction of antiblackness and people who were willing to share their learning as well. What I am most proud of is that many folks from "the hood" felt affirmed by it.
But the video also reached an audience of people who raced to my comments to let me know that there is plenty of good reason to be afraid of "crash outs" or "crash dummies"—terms I was completely unfamiliar with.
As I gathered soon afterward, these are terms deployed to refer to and devalue violent people from the hood who seem to have little to no regard for their lives or the lives around them, ultimately rendering themselves disposable.
Commenters explained that they were merely expressing their discomfort with people who had "nothing to lose." I was told, "You know what they mean!" I didn't. Eventually, I realized they simply meant "Niggers."
Instead of a just society, America offers its people the Nigger. A mythological monster onto which we can comfortably project society's ills. Niggers have no history, context, or humanity. They're superpredators responsible for whatever harms befall them—a rightful punishment for subhumans who were predestined for their tragic fates.
The Nigger's function is directly linked to the reality that dignity is not a birthright in this country. Instead, it is a competitive set of prizes in a cruel game of survival known as The American Dream. Most of us will never win, but we can at least have the satisfaction of beating someone else. The Nigger is the unit of measure we use to determine our value relative to others. It's how we tally the score.
To buy into the American dream is to believe your dignity is the result of doing rather than being. It's being suspicious of your rest, your neighbors, your anger, your empathy, your volatility, your fragility, your desire to burn all of this shit to the ground.
To believe in the myth of the Nigger is to admit you're not free. And to be afraid of people from the hood is to project your legitimate fears onto fictional monsters rather than the real systems designed to kill you.
And even though it is a lie built from our flesh, black people are often willing to accept the Nigger as reparations too.
Sure, the education I pursued put me in mountains of debt and may never deliver on its promise of financial stability, but at least I'm better than the crash out. I may have devoted years of my life to climbing the corporate ladder in ways that leave me feeling like I betrayed myself, but at least I have weekends off and sit at a desk instead of working on my feet.
If we're honest, the educational and professional opportunities many of us paid thousands for or fake laughed to get were just for the benefit of sitting during a shift at work. People have developed an entire superiority complex based on their relationship to a chair that doesn't even belong to them—and that many are still paying for.
I think folks online hear how I speak and see how I dress and could never fathom my proximity to the people they gleefully refer to as worthless or my own proximity to "crashing out." More than a few insisted that I go to "violent neighborhoods" so I could be frightened into the good sense of hating hood Niggers.
It read like a fascinating declaration of faith. Faith in their gifts of discernment and faith in the power of the Nigger. People had determined from a three-minute-long video that I wasn't from the hood and thus didn't know any crash outs. Still, I needed to make a pilgrimage so my faith and fear could be restored. And because I was a non-believer, people began to share their testimonies. Many said their belief in the crash out had saved their lives.
To be fair, I don't believe they are saying the Nigger is God. On the contrary, it seems to be the devil—a tempter, ever-present in the world we experience with our earthly senses, and always busy. God, heaven, and The American Dream are otherworldly ideas for a life beyond this one.
People told me that their fear and loathing of the Nigger had propelled them into academic and professional success. Most importantly, their fear took them out of the hood, just as fear of the devil propels many into Christian righteousness and vigilance.
For them, my rejection of the Nigger was a fundamental misunderstanding of the world—an intolerable naïveté deserving of its own damnation, but certainly a lesser punishment than those deemed "ghetto" or "hood," a purgatory. Even in their chastisement, I was supposed to survive to tell the tale. A respectable redemption was possible if only I would just believe. Like all religions, the myth appears to provide a community for the faithful and if nothing else, a reason to gather.
And look: I don't feel compelled to give anyone my hood credentials, but I'll say that not only am I unafraid, but some of the people dearest to me in the world are people who have committed the crimes many believe disqualify them from their humanity. The interpersonal violence they participated in has only exposed a society with a true monopoly on violence. A violence shielded by the law, bureaucracy, metal bars, and faith in the Nigger.
If belief in the Nigger is a religion, prison is its cathedral.
Yet I have learned the most about love, gentleness, compassion, and endurance from prison visits and phone calls. I've cultivated a love not based on myth, but rooted in the reality of surviving the crash. My incarcerated loved ones have helped me nurture a love of this Earth—rather than heaven or hell—and one that is completely within the providence of human beings.
I can now love without a need for deification because that too is dehumanizing. I can love without diminishing the harm someone has caused or disregarding the legitimate fears of navigating safety in a country like America.
What I know intimately is that the most dangerous person in the hood is still a person. The most violent person on the most violent block of the most violent neighborhood is still a person. That's the real tragedy: human beings are capable of incredible monstrosities, yet there are no monsters.
The criminal, the hood rat, the inmate, the crash out, the Nigger is a human being who did not come into the world aspiring to be thrown away. To pretend otherwise is a cruel lie. Living in a world where monsters exist would be easier and safer because we would no longer be responsible for our monstrousness.
To refuse the myth of the Nigger is to accept that both the crash out and the respectable black saint are dehumanizing.
It's the attachment to the binaries of good and bad, saint and sinner, black excellence and black failure, that are themselves acts of violence. And not an abstracted violence either. They are quite literally the binaries that uphold and justify prison, communal destruction, and White supremacy. Because who cares what happens to the crash out anyway? Are they not deserving of suffering? Is that not their rightful inheritance?
I believe as humans, we are wholly capable of whatever violence we can imagine. But to admit there is an archetype of a person that you find entirely disposable is a kind of violence I struggle to perceive and find grace for. It's an expression of the dangerous mentality folks lobbied at the hood.
As I said in my initial video, having the power to discard is frightening because it's a reminder that you too can be discarded. Moreover, you cannot simultaneously condemn people for acting like they have "nothing to live for," while arguing that those people's lives don't matter. Why should people you want dead have to live up to your values anyway?
The people who have fully embraced the myth are as disconnected from a shared humanity as someone could be. And yet, I still believe them to be human beings. That's what frightens me. If human beings are capable of that level of disconnection, so am I.
The "crash dummy" is not my cautionary tale. Those who believe in the myth of the crash dummy are. Because the modest, precarious comforts they have acquired have led them to behave even more monstrously, as has also been true in my own life.
I've come to accept that nothing I've achieved in a corrupt system could ever be solely because of my own merit. More importantly, I no longer believe people have to earn their dignity in the first place. Therein lies the appeal of the Nigger. In a society where your worth is always conditional, someone must remain worthless for the system to maintain itself.
James Baldwin once said:
"What White people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a Nigger in the first place. Because I am not a Nigger. I'm a man. If I'm not the Nigger here, and if you invented him, you the White people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question."
Though black people didn't invent the Nigger, we must ask ourselves why we continue to be so willing to accept it and, for the "respectable" among us, define ourselves against it.
Deconstructing antiblackness has not been exclusively an intellectual exercise for me. It's an emotional, cultural, and deeply spiritual one. It's as personal as realizing that my sense of self has been propped up by the dehumanization of others, including my own family.
In a society where most of us feel like captives to some extent, making a spectacle of the people whose bondage appears more obvious provides the illusion of freedom—freedom by comparison.
The Nigger is the hollow myth of a society that never intended to deliver on its promise of liberty. To refuse it is to accept that I am not free just because someone else's cage is smaller.
