I can still remember the story. The pages hung untethered to the spine, creased with dogears, and marked in every which way with the tip of a pencil. The last check-out was some years previous, but it sat on the shelf, wedged between two other far glossier novels, waiting to spill the world contained within. And I, the chubby eager kid, was desperate to know who this “Maniac Magee” was and what secrets he would inevitably share with me.

Maniac Magee was the first novel that made me pause, look up from those tattered pages, and reconsider my surroundings. Before that point, young and susceptible as I was, I had never seen societal classes as divided by skin color. To that point, I had not even conceptualized societal class. People were people. I divided people by family, friends, strangers, and those pugnacious bullies that everyone, in one shape or form, knows.

I had never seen someone as simply ‘black.’ I saw everyone in the scope of the unique identifiers I attached to them. She was Kayla, with the neat braids and hairclips. He was the kid that could out-jump rope me. The boy in front of me was the one with all the answers. Those girls at lunch were loud and laughed without care.  Maniac Magee changed me.

“For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.”

Claudia Rankine gave back to me that same feeling. That sense that your eyes have only just opened, that there are things beyond the margin of your own vision. Things you have never considered or put too much thought into–things that exist whether you choose to acknowledge them. “because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black people are dying”

My heart breaks. There is so much hate, so much separation of people from people for being people. Who is to blame? This hate feels genetic, so hardwired into society as a collective that you almost conflate our proclivity to stereotype and judge with a predisposition for an inherited disease. Yet, we are inheriting these old grudges, these old and long since incorrect modes of thinking. And we perpetuate them. It’s our demise.

Rankine is right. A line from Maniac Magee sticks out as highly relevant here: “Inside his house, a kid gets one name, but on the other side of the door, it’s whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.” I believe that goes to the very heart of what Rankine suggests. There are two sides to any one person: the person we create and the person they are. How Rankine writes cuts away the unnecessary verbiage, it levels the reader. It cut me off the knees and I felt so interconnected to what was being said, although I have not experienced a large majority of what she was talking about. I think that is intentional. Part of me believes that Rankine uses a more universal ‘you’ to establish that sense of personalization, that sense of hurt one might feel if it was directly related to them. It is a unifying ‘you.’ In this division of white and black, of us and them, we have created a rift in a world that ought to be united in its differences.  And as long we continue to apply these snap judgments and mass generalizations, the body count will continue to rise.

Looking at Sleeping Heads by Wangechi Mutu on page 147, I see the same thing. I see the loss of identity. I see someone, a collective we, being choked. I see society choking the identity from a person and assigning its view, its perception of who that person is. “The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you,” (Rankine 146). I felt that. I cannot begin to fathom the horror of how it feels to be persecuted for the color of your skin. However, I do know the feeling of being forced and categorized into one version of myself solely because I am gay. It is as though that one detail encompasses all of who I am to most people. I am gay first and a person second. Black first and a person second. It is not that simple or that easy or that black-and-white. The world is a kaleidoscope and we need to learn to see it that way.