Content Warning: images of a lynching, mentions of chattel slavery and racial/class discrimination
I have been reading and listening to Legacy Russell, Sylvia Wynter (The Caribbean’s finest), and a YouTuber named Dasia Sade, a fellow Tragic Optimist. I know that my writing could desperately use some resourcing, not for this audience or any audience, but for me. For context. I did not invent the idea of liberatory suicide, reverse desirability strategies for survival, or any of the other ideas I bring up in my writing. I am still not self-important enough, because that would be rather lonely. Alhamdullilah I am not a singular Other. I feel cloaked in validation when I read the likes of Claudia Rankine, Audre Lorde, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (who I had a very encouraging chat with this week), all people who were once Black girls. Black girlhood will always live in me, because I can’t let go of what hurts me, reason: Unknown.
I interact with genocidal tendencies every single day. Every day, someone makes it a point to make my life just a little bit harder, to push me as close to death as they have in their power to. This could look like anything. The methods people develop are truly innovative in terms of enacting anti-Blackness. Cutting me in line like I am not there, sitting or standing too close to me like I am not there, likely so they can stick their nose in my business. Seeing if I stink to reaffirm their bias (sometimes I do smell bad, and then I feel like I am betraying my entire race, because I am not human I am commodity and I must be Perfect). Not paying me and seeing if I bring it up. Overcharging me and seeing if I bring it up. Pantomiming a punch directed at me on the Elsewhere dancefloor. Swerving a car in an attempt to frighten me. Soft hate crimes meant to ruin any chance of me being able to fucking calm down.
I have never been refused service at a business anywhere but Middle America; most recently in Texas, where I sat at some overpriced Tex-Mex restaurant, attempting to get some nosh before my flight. I walk up to the hostess, a Black woman, who suggests the bar for me to sit. I accept, but then she swiftly changes her mind and seats me at a booth at the outer edge of the restaurant’s seating arrangement. I notice that the people sitting where she first thought to seat me are white and Mexican men, presumed to be monied, by the quality of their boots and and hats. I sit, and wait, and charge my phone. Ten minutes pass. I start looking around a bit for a server, but I am not in a rush, so I don’t stress too much. Another fifteen minutes pass. A server asks in passing, “You good over here?” in a tone that presumes I am just sitting at a restraunt not eating because I just don’t want to, or something. I tell him I haven’t been helped. He says he’ll send someone. I wait another 10 minutes and never see that server again. It’s like they punished him for talking to me and now he’s benched. The other server, a tall Latino guy with black, shoulder length hair, simply refuses to acknowledge my existence let alone serve me. I begin to get sad, and then my sadness turns to anger. I just want to eat.
I call my sister.
I begin cursing about how these people hate Negroes and freaks (me) and how I am tired of Middle America and I am so glad I don’t live here anymore, loud enough for others to here, not that they care, but because I am committed to making racists, classists, whatever the fuck, uncomfortable as best I can in a given moment. She says “I’m sorry dude” and it helps. I mean, what else is there to say?
Reader, this is Grief. The remnants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade latch themselves onto my epigenetics and my current reality. It is inescapable. I often waterboard myself with my tears.
Airports are one of my least favorite places to be Black and low-income1. The residuum of the Fugitive Slave Act are ever-potent in 2025. Everyone, white, black, or otherwise looks at me like they wanna ask for my papers. Where is my owner? Who do I belong to? It couldn’t be myself. No children, no man? Burn it. Ignore it. Kill it yourself, or make it wish it were dead. Make its life as short as possible, lest Whiteness be squandered and we all live.
When American Leftists bring up imagery of Fascism, they consistently focus on Europe. Hitler, Mussolini, the like. What about Reagan? There is a much more heinous history to cite, and it’s right at home. Fascism looks like the forced sterilization of Black women, “Mississippi Appendectomies”. We are the Black Engulfment, a force to be stunted. I remember that, as a Black person on public assistance, if I existed in a time not that distant from right now, I would be hunted for my uterus. And if I was a detained immigrant, right now, I might face the same fate.
Fascism looks like smiling white faces eating lunch under a tree with Strange Fruit. Please take a moment to think of these martyrs and those they were taken from.
Even the imagery and general understanding of the Holocaust excludes people like me. Black people, Black women, disabled people. Even the most painful moments of human history have been rid of our existence, because we are fit to be unhuman.
Every day I experience the violence of microaggressions, like bringing up Afropessimism only to have a white Leftist exclaim “Oh, let’s not talk about that, it’s so sad!” like I don’t fucking know. This same white Leftist has insinuated that I have “thick skin” and that my hair can’t grow. So there’s that2.
How do you organize with people who only vaguely acknowledge your struggle and mostly perpetuate your harm, your genocide. People who know they can’t ignore it, but refuse to sit in the darkness of it with the people it effects. Ever since I knew what DSA was, I have criticized its overrepresentation of “educated”, classed, white people. I enter as a dissenter. I enter as an advocate and a member of those whose pain is commodified so as to make it as unreal as currency itself. The Negro, the Slut, the Alternative. All identities I personify and hold as dear friends, as my life has never known breath without them, and I could never dream of undergoing any procedure, surgical or ritual, that would take me from them. I enter with experimental intention. Can I Glitch this place? That is forever the question.
As a Tragic Optimist, I do believe a time will come. A time will come where our genocide ends, and the Apocalypse is archived for us to learn from, but no longer to experience.
If your “organizing” is not to this end, or camaraderie is fraught.
What I Read This Week:
The Last Stoner Standing— Transtender on Substack
A funny piece, because aftercare
A Place In the Middle— dir. Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson
A heartwarming documentary, because aftercare
Which is why I literally always read Black Friend by Ziwe when I am in them
Let the record show, I usually don’t have the energy to check nonblacks as they perpetuate The Whiteness, but I will l damn sure write about it, hit “post” and not care if you see it/what you think about it.
the lack of engagement on this proving my point is so disheartening......
Omg I absolutely love this, you had me through out the whole piece but you snatched my soul out my body when you said “organized towards the apocalypse” so the end can teach us something new. I am also sorry the source of such insightful wisdom comes from such intense pain as systematic oppression and the silence of such extreme misery. I have arrived at a similar place as you by way of suffering, Afro-pessimism and Sylvia Wynters as well, what happens when at the limits of language to articulate and respond to such intense pain all that one can truly say is “I am sorry, and Thank you.”