Hate Starts at Home

A Black Doctor, My Jealousy, and America’s Mirrors

Two days ago I wrote that Amazing Grace bends the proud toward repair. I thought the confession was finished. Grace had other plans.

He was Black, single, competent, charismatic, and the room praised him without effort. The female gaze pinned him like a target. My old bruise woke up—the years of being mocked as talking “too white,” the hunger for a place to stand. Like Footsteps in the Dark, my jealousy moved ahead of me, and in the space between each step it hardened toward hate. I hated a man because he was a Black doctor. I am not asking you to absolve me of this. I gotta own it.

I named the heat envy and sat with it until it loosened. He was not a rival. He was a mirror. Envy was a map pointing to the steadiness I want in myself.

I know the irony. If white racists had come for him, I would have been first to the line. If it were a slur in a hallway, a smear in a comment thread, a cheap joke at his expense, I would have stepped between him and the blow. I have done that for strangers. I would have done it for him without thinking. Inside, though, I was running a different play. In public I was his defender. In private I was his prosecutor. I wanted his shine to dim so I could breathe easier. That is not solidarity. That is scarcity speaking in my voice. Grace is not a cape I throw over other people while I leave my own bruise festering. Grace asks for interior honesty.

Here is the ledger I carry against myself:

SAT scores that made me feel small.

Didn’t finish my bachelor’s.

Never made supervisor.

Business ventures that bled out.

Books begun and abandoned.

He rose above the “acting white” smear. I let it stain me.

Failed at even maintaining my health.

This is the bruise. This is the scoreboard. When he walked in steady and admired, my ledger lit up and called it justice. It was not justice. It was envy reaching for a mask. I was not angry at him. I was angry at the version of me I keep promising and failing to become. He did not betray me. I betrayed my own promise. The hatred I felt for him was a costume. Under it was the old, mean voice I use on myself. I am not asking you to absolve me of this. I gotta own it. And when I name it as self-hatred, the current changes direction. The target disappears. The work returns to my side of the mirror.

We lived this on a national stage. Many of us treated Barack Obama like I treated that doctor: as a mirror mistaken for a thief. He walked in steady and admired. Degrees, diction, discipline. A Black family that looked like a promise. For some, that presence pressed on a private bruise.

The middle-class ledger was turning red. Wages stalled, titles shrank, bills rose. When the numbers do not add up, the body looks for a face to blame. It is easier to hate a mirror than to face a deficit. It is easier to say “he thinks he is better than me” than to say “I am afraid I am falling.”

Not all of the backlash was this. Some of it was old-fashioned racism, organized and shameless. Some of it was policy and power. But braided through it was a quieter current: self-contempt looking for a target. A country that felt behind turned its envy into a story about him. I know that current because I felt it. My ledger lit up and tried to deputize me. It told me his ease was my indictment. It told me his praise stole mine. None of that was true. He did not take anything from me. The story I tell about myself did. That is the trap, personal and political. When we misread a mirror as an enemy, we license cruelty. We dress self-hatred in the language of critique. We call it realism. We call it patriotism. It is projection with a flag on it.

If anything I write works at all, it is because I do not treat writing like a hobby. I use the page like an altar and an operating table. I cut where it hurts. I name what I would rather hide. That is the only way I know. That’s the only way I can roll. My mistake is thinking the work ends with the pen. It does not. Ink without practice curdles into vanity. Confession without repair turns into a show. The page is a key, not a door. If I do not walk through and change my habits, my choices, my stance toward the bruise, I am only entertaining myself.

Jefferson hinted at this limit. He wrote a sentence so fine it still sings, then lived a contradiction so stark the ledger reopened. The country learned the hard way that words do not settle debts. History came to collect. The book was not closed by a flourish of the quill. It took struggle, blood, law, and ordinary people changing how they lived.

Jefferson hinted at this limit. He wrote a sentence so fine it still sings. Then he lived a contradiction so loud the ledger reopened. Say it plain with me family: words do not settle debts. Say it again so it sticks: words do not settle debts. History came to collect. It came to the plantation gate, it came to the courthouse steps, it came to the pulpit and the polling place. The book was not closed by a flourish of the quill. The book was pressed shut by people who changed how they lived.

Not with ink, but with blood.

Not with quotes, but with votes.

Not with posture, but with practice.

Not with sentiment, but with sacrifice.

Jefferson hinted. The nation learned. It learned in fields and factories, in streets and kitchens, in marches that blistered feet and in laws that had to be written again. The hymn was beautiful, but the math did not balance, so the ledger stayed open. History came to collect. It kept coming until the living lined up with the language.

Hear thus refrain and hold it: Grace is not a loophole. Grace reopens the ledger. Grace will not let us hide behind eloquence. Grace will not let us point to a paragraph and call it finished. Grace demands a life. The book closes only when the words become work, when the promise becomes practice, when the line “created equal” is honored in how we eat, hire, vote, heal, teach, and protect.

The enemy is not my neighbor with the Trump sign who stopped speaking when he saw a Harris sign on my lawn. It is not the Hispanic brother in the Home Depot lot waiting for a day’s work. It is not the Black single mom with a SNAP card holding up the line. It is not Obama, who you think took your spot at Harvard. It is not that Black doctor whose shine stung me.

The enemy is the darkness I carry and the story I tell when I feel behind. The enemy is the bruise that wants a face to blame. The enemy is within us. Say it again so we hear it: the enemy is within U.S.

Grace does not hand us a scapegoat. Grace hands us a mirror. I am not asking you to absolve me of this. I gotta own it. My sight, today, is simple: I cannot close the ledger with a paragraph. I close it by how I live after the period. If someone’s shine stings you, write the want under the wound, then do one small act that honors it.

Now, let me go back to cosplaying a coastal-elite journalist with a Substack and a snobby attitude to match, and imagine a guys’ night out with my Black doctor pal. At least I ain’t gotta worry about him stealing the attention from the ladies. I’m married, but still.

Listen, nobody owes this work a damn. However, If it gave you sight today, pay it forward and support independent media. It’s us against the mainstream media.