She was hella pretty so I told her. I wasn’t trying to harass her or make her feel less than what she is. I didn’t want her phone number and I didn’t want to send her pictures of me aroused in her DM’s. I didn’t want to marry her or one day take her home to my mother either. My statement was not a declaration of the ability of my gaze to validate her beauty because she would have been beautiful whether I told her or not. I was just a black man telling a black woman that she was pretty. I felt like she needed to hear it from me. I felt like I needed to tell her that and she needed to know that I was being sincere. I don’t think she felt that way. I think her day would have gone much better if I would have kept my comment to myself. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye as she walked in the opposite direction and said nothing, and what she said to me is exactly how she made me feel. Somehow I wanted to express to her in a three word ebonical phrase that I had suffered right alongside her and I still faced just as much resistance as she did and yet somehow we both were shinning and she was shining even brighter than me and that I acknowledged this fact, I appreciated her, I honored her, and I never gave up on her. But it didn’t go down that way.
Curse my arrogance for thinking that a complete stranger was obligated to respond to my compliment. Curse my sensitivity for being hurt when she didn’t. Curse my brooding ways for thinking that this non-exchange sums up the greatest problem facing black people in America right now, and that is the tragic hostility that drives the black man and the black woman to hate each other. I love that woman but I fear that all she saw in me was a man that had the power to hurt her. Or maybe she saw a man that was beneath her, or maybe…maybe nothing. Maybe I’m just thinking too hard but I doubt it.
-YB