Smiling while Black

I hate having a nice smile. An interaction I just saw between a white man, and a woman from Burkina Faso that works at the gas station down the street, just reinforced the reasons why:

“You have such a nice smile.” The white man said, using his white man I'm talking to an exotic Black woman voice.

“Thank you.” She replied back.

“I bet you never have a bad day.” He answered. He said a few more things after this but that last line stood out for me. “I bet you never have a bad day.” I know for a fact that Black women have bad days. All people do. And Black people as a whole probably have more. And Black women specifically. I've also been told by many well meaning white people some variation of “you have such a nice smile, I bet you never feel sad.”

It's the tone in which they say it. White people have a tone that I can only describe as “naming.” They feel very comfortable naming and renaming already named people/places according to their own interpretation. Or oftentimes, if the original name is too difficult for them, they feel quite comfortable and in fact entitled to stripping that name away and coming up with a new name that they can pronounce.

That habit of renaming difficult names also happens as they rename difficult people, difficult emotions, difficult different cultural norms too foreign and hard to rationalize when held up to the light of their whiteness. So they will rename you a terrorist, insane, a super predator, just for being not white in ways that are difficult for them to pronounce spiritually.

They will erase your actual identity and prescribe one to you more convenient to them.

At its core, paternalism is the stripping of authority and agency of the child subject, and replacing it with the will of the parent subject. That is why paternalism remains such a stalwart part of white supremacy.

White people insist upon occupying the parent role towards the child roles of the Black and Brown. And for Black people especially, they feel a large degree of entitled paternalism due to the psychological effects of the master slave relationship that existed for Black and white people during enslavement.

They are conditioned by this country to see us as a mongrel race in need of saving and instruction. “You ain't Black if you don't vote for me.” In they heart of hearts most of them feel Black folks are too blinded by trauma to be trusted with our own agency. Too hysterical with righteous anger to be the ones who lead.

So the insistence and readiness they apply the servile smiling negro trope to me and other Black folks they deem “safe” because of superficial traits like a smile is alarming. Physiognomy is the pseudo scientific practice of assigning character traits to a living creature based on its appearance.

White supremacy as a philosophy and a business model for imperialism could not survive without physiognomy. It is how they separated us into different categories of enslaved. And for them, it shows up in the silly idioms that allow white men to be president. “You can trust a man that has a firm handshake.” Or the classic that has fallen out of style sadly; “I just like the cut of that guy's jib.”

No one knows what a jib really is. But it is likely an amalgamation of square jaw, eye contact, 6’2 or taller and hard handshake. I know from working in the tour guide industry and getting tipped large amounts by white men you can win them over simply with unwavering eye contact and a hearty laugh.

They are culturally trained to look for every shortcut that allows them to assign a role to you or themselves in society. To me, that is the white workers prescribed function, to oversee the marginalized lower than them, while also being manipulated and abused by the big man in the house. That is very much another essay.

So when they insist that Black people with nice smiles never have bad days it reads as a renaming to me. The context of the event is usually during a transaction. It just feels like “good for you, aren't you happier like this?” I doubt that is the conscious or even unconscious intention sometimes. But it is the function of that renaming. The function of that interaction that insists the Black body is whatever one dimensional back of the box description of the chattel in front of you.

White people in my opinion, struggle and are often unwilling to see Black people as more than one thing at one time. They are much more comfortable assigning to us our character and function based on how we look and talk. As has always been in America.

If you are tall and Black, you need to play sports, if you are small and Black, you need to be funny and sidekick willing, if you are a woman and Black, you need to be sexually available at all times–this physiognomy is what America runs on.

This physiognomy says “smile” and “Black” equals “safe.” Black people throughout American history have had to smile to keep themselves safe from white violence. Their smile made them look smaller and less likely to fight back in the eyes of white supremacy. Good boy. One not sick with drapetomania or freedom psychosis.

It's a shame that something as primordial as a smile has been corrupted by white supremacy. Even Black folks find themselves suspicious of niggas that smile a lot. Cause what is there really to smile about for a Black man?

One of my first memories, also a gas station actually. I'm four, smiling at a Black lady I don't know. “What you smiling for?” As an adult, I wonder what her tone really was. I don't remember it necessarily as good or bad. The question has just always stuck with me I think. And throughout my life it's been an aspect of my appearance the white world fixates on.