Before anyone called me a Grand Wizard, they called me
NIGGERLIPS.
I was a kid in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, in a neighborhood where nobody escaped ridicule. Everyone had a nickname. The gauntlet was universal and merciless — that was the culture of the place, and in some ways it was democratic. But the slurs that stick are the ones attached to things you cannot change. Buck teeth. A pronounced overbite. Lips that were larger than the suburban norm and accentuated by the dental situation. These were the features I was born with, inherited from whatever confluence of German immigrant genetics produced my family in western New York.
Niggerlips. The word arrived early and lodged itself permanently — not because I accepted what it implied about me, but because it taught me something specific about how contempt works. The slur didn't require the target to be Black. It required only a physical feature that could be associated with Blackness and then weaponized. The cruelty was not about race in any coherent sense. It was about designation — the assignment of a category to a person based on something they could not control, followed by the social enforcement of that category through repetition.
I was also born in a car. A red Plymouth Valiant, in front of the hospital, because my mother didn't make it inside in time. The kids in the neighborhood knew about this too. They said the doctor caught me by my lip. That detail — whether true or invented — became another tool in the arsenal of immutable characteristics turned against their owner. I had no choice about the car. No choice about the lips. No choice about the teeth. These were the things I arrived with, and they were the things that were weaponized.
This is the original experience of designation. Not the political theory of it. The lived, childhood, daily reality of being assigned a meaning based on features you were born with, by people who had no interest in who you actually were.
What Roots Did to That Kid
In January 1977 I was eleven years old and my parents let me stay up for all eight nights of Roots.
I did not fully understand what I was watching. I understood enough. Eight nights of human beings treated as property — the Middle Passage, the auction block, the family separations, Kunta Kinte on the ground with his foot cut off for refusing to answer to a name that wasn't his. I was eleven years old and I understood that this was wrong in a way that went past opinion into something structural.
I also understood something else, something I could not have articulated at the time but can articulate now. The mechanism that produced the horror on the screen was the same mechanism that produced niggerlips on the playground. The reduction of a human being to a physical feature, the assignment of a degraded category based on what could be seen rather than who was there, the social enforcement of that category through repetition and contempt — these were the same operation at different scales.
The kid who had been designated by his lips understood, at a gut level that no classroom could have produced, what Wright was documenting and what Roots was transmitting. Not as an abstraction. As a recognition.
That recognition didn't produce a political position. It produced a world view. The thirty years of public anti-racist work that followed — the Sojourner Truth plaques in Florence, the Black Stones of Africa on the Bridge of Flowers, the Mohammad Yaseen bench on Bridge Street — none of it was performed for an audience. It was the natural output of a person whose formative experience had been the weaponization of physical features, who had watched eight nights of television at eleven that showed him where that mechanism leads when social power is behind it.
What My Father Finally Told Me
My father was a reserved German-American man who said little about his inner life for most of the ninety-six years he occupied it. He grew up in Buffalo in the 1930s, the son of German immigrants who spoke English as a second language. He walked through Black neighborhoods to get to his trade school and the Black kids chased him and tried to beat him up. That experience calcified into something he carried for the rest of his life — not the burning-cross variety, not the slur-at-the-dinner-table variety, but a settled ambient contempt that was present in the household in ways a child absorbs before having language for them.
He didn't tell me any of this until he was ninety-three years old, on the afternoon of the day my mother died.
She had been in hospice. I was visiting, rotating with my siblings. That morning a Black woman knocked on the door of my father's small nursing home apartment to tell him that his wife of over sixty years had died in the night. I watched his face as she delivered the news. I thought about that face for a long time afterward.
That afternoon, when we were sitting together in the quiet that follows the end of a long life, I asked him directly: how did you feel about a Black woman coming to tell you that your wife had died?
He told me the whole story then. The trade school. The neighborhood. Running for his life. The white flight to Orchard Park. The whole geography of a man shaped by a specific collision between immigrant vulnerability and racial geography in mid-century Buffalo.
And then he told me his answer to my question. He said it didn't really matter. That there were a lot of Black caregivers at the nursing home and he had gotten used to them. That he had no problem with it.
I understood that he had arrived somewhere. Not through a training session or a framework or a bestselling book. Through sustained contact with specific human beings in a specific place over time — which is the only thing that actually moves the needle, as the social psychology literature confirms and as my own thirty-year record demonstrates.
I thought I might have had something to do with it. The arguments through my teenage years, the refusals to let the ambient contempt go unchallenged, the insistence that the world view he'd inherited wasn't the only available one. Maybe. Maybe not. But he had arrived somewhere, and I was satisfied.
What They Called Me Next
In June 2020, at the age of fifty-four, I stood on a public bridge in Shelburne Falls and said things that contradicted the framework the crowd had assembled around.
What I said was not racist. The documented record, the transcripts, the video evidence, the thirty-year counter-record in stone and bronze and steel — none of it supports the designation that followed. What I said was that white people also experience oppression in certain contexts, that the organization raising money in the name of Black lives had documented financial and ideological problems worth examining, and that a public street closure during a pandemic without notice to the businesses whose access was being blocked was not above criticism regardless of its stated purpose.
For this I was called a Grand Wizard. A Nazi. A KKK member. A racist. A bigot. A danger to children. A stalker. A woman hater. A conspiracy theorist.
The irony is not subtle. The kid whose physical features had been designated with a racial slur — who had absorbed that experience into a world view and a body of work spanning thirty years — was designated a racist by people who had never walked seventy-five feet to look at the anti-racist work embedded permanently in the pavement of the bridge they were standing on.
They used the same mechanism that was used against me on the playground. Features that could be designated — things I could not change about myself, things that were simply there — became the basis for a category assigned before any investigation. The category then substituted for investigation. The designation arrived. The inquiry never followed.
The difference is that the playground slur targeted my lips. The 2020 designation targeted my race. The operation was identical. The direction was reversed.
The Arc
A white kid in a suburb of Buffalo gets called NIGGERLIPS based on physical features he was born with. That experience shapes a world view. The world view produces thirty years of anti-racist public work. The work is invisible to the people who designate him a racist in 2020. The designation is based on a fourteen-second clip stripped of context. The clip was edited by the daughter of the woman who would later assault him on a public sidewalk.
The kid who was once designated Black by his physical features is now designated a racist by people who share his racial category. In both cases the designation precedes the evidence. In both cases the evidence that would have contradicted the designation was available and not consulted. In both cases the mechanism is identical: a category assigned to a person based on something the assigner needs to be true, followed by social enforcement of that category through repetition.
The irony is genuinely thick. It is also genuinely documented. And it is the biographical arc that gives the book its moral authority — not as a political argument, but as a human record of what the designation machine does when it finds the wrong man.
The Black Stones of Africa are still in the pavement.
The stones were put there by the man they called a Grand Wizard.
Go look at them.