A Black Man Between Victim and Perpetrator
The writer reflects on the contradictory position of being a Black man in a world that casts him simultaneously as vulnerable to systemic violence and capable of inflicting it. Drawing on two news events from May 2020, he traces how childhood conditioning toward white superiority, adult disillusionment, and accumulated historical anger have left him without a clear path forward.
In May, the world was thrown into a frenzy after a black man lost his life from the most unwarranted police brutality I have ever seen in my life. It was a moment for the entire world to remind itself of the systemic racism that still exists in the self acclaimed freest country on earth. One month later, another black man, historically and culturally distant from the former, committed a despicable crime of ‘passion’ - taking away the life of his ex wife and his own life leaving behind three children.
As a black man approaching midlife, yet to marry, and who has been in confrontation with the police in both cultures like the men above on more than one occasion, it is rather ironical that I do not know what to make of my condition as a black man in the world we live in. At every turn of trouble, I seem to be the victim and the perpetrator at the same time.
As a child, I did not understand the concept of race -but every adult around me seemed to make me understand that the white skin was synonymous to something better, more interesting, ingenious, and rich. The bourgeoises were said to live “like whites” and to be late is to be working on ‘black man time.’ Meanwhile there wasn’t ever any implication that there was something inherently wrong with the black skin, it was understood that the ways if the white man were the ways I should aspire to.
As an adult, after living and interacting with the white man to know that he was no much different from me, I still found it hard to be disappointed in the white man for things like colonization and the slave trade - arguable the root causes of my current predicaments. Somehow, I find it easier to be disappointed in my forefathers who never fought a good fight.
I think what that leaves me with is anger, anger that for hundreds of years has clouded my judgement and made my condition to continuously deteriorate. I have become self destructive and no one will help me because the world will be a better place without me. The world no longer needs my physical strength - the strength that laid the foundation for the modern interconnected world we live in. In short, the world has outgrown me.
The world wants me gone but if I must stay, the definition of my sex in this skin color I must change. To change, I must first forget who I am and to forget who I am means I should be nobody once again assuming I once was. And I tell you it is way harder to be nobody than to be a victim or perpetrator. For that, my physical strength will have to become mental strength or I must not stay.
Otherwise, I'm lost.
- Tino Foy
The piece was written in June 2020, in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's death and the global reckoning with police violence and systemic racism it sparked. It arrives at a moment when public discourse oscillated between narratives of Black victimhood and narratives of individual Black culpability, often without integration or nuance.
The essay refuses easy answers or moral clarity. Rather than choosing between victimhood and agency, it names the exhaustion of being demanded to occupy both roles at once—a condition that persists beyond the immediate moment of 2020. Its exploration of inherited inferiority (learned in childhood, internalized into adulthood) and the impossibility of simply 'choosing' a new identity speaks to a deeper psychological and historical entanglement that resurfaces in every cycle of racial crisis.