"My father finally let me shave after eighth grade. I remember the date he gave me his old electric razor — the kind that could still cut you — vividly. July 4. Independence Day. The day I bled for my country. The day I looked at my face in the mirror and finally became an American.
Now white boys in Brooklyn are sewing hair onto their faces in the same city where brown boys still have scars from ripping it off. I want to talk about what it means for these boys to be adorned with words like "beautiful" when their brown counterparts are shackled onto other words like "terrorism." What it says about whiteness. About me and all of the other brown boys fumbling into ourselves in a world where our bodies are policed to the point of being alien to ourselves.
When I read about white men getting beard transplants, part of me appreciates how explicit this transaction is. I understand it the same way I am slowly understanding how my brown body becomes cool here. How such sites of fear and trauma — skin, a beard — become "cool" when associated with the white kind of body."
FB:" People want the rugged authenticity of being different without actually being punished for it — and I understand why they do it. I recognize the insecurity. Just a decade ago, my peers were flinging words like "terrorist" and "faggot" to me in the halls of our high school. Now I'm "trendy" and "fierce." Either assessment rings lonely and desperate. How they are tremendously afraid of being insignificant. How the fantasy of race that they have projected on my body makes me have some mystic power they are jealous of. They are afraid of boring. They are afraid of being nothing. They are in a constant state of falling — grasping for all of the bindis, beards, dashikis, gauges that they hold on to to feel relevant"
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