niggas is tired
and we been tired
There was never a point in appealing to those that continually brought us harm as Black folks. It is a form of self-sabotage. To waste time trying to tell white folks how badly they’ve done in this world or how much the 1% should care is to willingly disrespect ourselves. They don’t care, they aren’t listening, and once someone is in power they will rarely rescind it without struggle.
For so many years of my life I focused on educating everyone to the detriment of my mental health. It did not make sense to try to be a one-man superhero with the high and mighty goal of solving the world’s problems with 1:1 conversations. Folks in positions of power and privilege have set a pattern that has only become clearer to me each year. And truthfully, I’m sick of negotiating with folks who dehumanize me. I do not mean “dehumanize” as some abstract term, but in the very real sense of seeing me as less capable as a man due to my queerness. Or as less valuable than any other human because of my Blackness. Fighting becomes exhausting.
At a community event earlier today there was an elder preaching. I loved what she was saying about how systems of white supremacy affect us and our children. Then she said: ‘we’re lucky if our kids just come out gay from this system’. Oh. I really want us to move past this idea that the white man made us queer, that queerness is inherently wrong, and that queerness is weakness.
I am a nigga as much as I am a faggot. It’s pretty simple. They can’t be separated.
“If you had to choose, you’d choose Black, right?” is a question I get more often than I’d like. Y’all realize I can’t choose, right? I am both. I have written about it, talked about it, and will probably write about it s’more but back to my original point.
Appealing to white folks to see us as human is (and has always proven to be) useless.
Negotiating with folks willing to give up their original cultures to dominate other cultures with this elusive “whiteness” is silly. While survival is real, and assimilation is often rooted in survival, what does it mean to forget one’s culture and hold onto whiteness? Having gone on and on about whiteness, I can boil it down to entitlement and unearned privileges as the result of a white supremacist world. So if the whites are surviving mighty fine so far, what’s good? If they survived and made it this far by giving up their personal ties to their own homes, then ain’t it time to repay their debts to society? Make up for the blood, spirit, and land stolen?
Here’s the thing though: so many of us keep trying to appeal to white folks and at the end of the day? They ain’t ready to give anything up. I used to unknowingly write for a white audience until I read more Black writers and surrounded myself with more Black people. Many Black folks have known this, have warned us, and continue shake their heads as we coddle and center the feelings of white folks in everything we do. So when I think about what my grandparents grew up in, what my parents grew up in, what I grew up in, and what my kids will grow up in? Man. Things have changed but ain’t shit changed. And some things actually got worse.
Separation — which is different from forced segregation — should really be our goal as Black people, but we’re not united enough for that to be a tangible goal. Yet. I’m not being radical, over dramatic, or nonsensical. I’m actually being very reasonable, rational, and logical. Let’s work through this.
Why would I force my family and my children to live with people who think we’re monkeys, thieves, thugs, and problems? Why would I continue to engage with a group of people who have continually hunted down my people, hung us, skinned us, raped us, and spit on us? What benefit do Black people gain from being forced to live next to people who want us dead and think we’re less than them? Seriously. If we accept and embrace them like my elders have been forced to do, what do we get in return? Not on an individual scale. On a systemic scale.
Now, why would a person interested in the survival of their people stay in a such a hostile environment? It’s pretty simple: we’re forced to stay. We — Black Americans and many Black folks living outside of the continent — were stolen from our homes, languages, spiritual beliefs, cultures. But we don’t currently have anywhere else to go unless we want to replicate the ways of white settler colonialists and inhabit land that is not ours. Separation is the next logical step if we wanna do more than just survive, and we have to strategize what that looks like.
In response, people can think #NotAllWhitePeople all they want, but at the end of the day white people contribute to, knowingly uphold, and gleefully benefit from the myth of white supremacy. That’s not something I’ll argue anymore, as I’ve invested too much of my own time without reimbursement. And frankly, my people have invested too much of our own time without reparations or some kind or another.
My twitter feed, my writing, and my existence does not exist to make white people comfortable. Point blank. White people took photos at lynching. Smiling. Smiling. Smiling. What the fuck is wrong with you to smile as a person is being hung? Cops wore “I Can Breathe” shirts after Eric Garner uttered “I can’t breathe” more than 10 times before he finally was murdered. These are just a few examples.
What I have been returning to all year is the idea that intergenerational trauma lives in the bodies of Black Americans, meaning it lives in white people’s bodies, too. When you abuse someone a scar is left on you too, not just those who are abused. Some deep things had to have happened to these ofays to be capable of such atrocities all over the globe. It’s fucked on all levels.
The argument is often made that “it wasn’t just white people.” That’s fine and dandy, but they still contributed. And still do. Heavily. And historically speaking, violence among Black folks was rooted in territory and survival. Additionally, most violence is intraracial for a number of reasons folks can theorize themselves or read. Yet violence from white folks to Black folks has been frequent throughout history for fun, retaliation, and for no recognizable reason. Even in the wake of Trump, anti-immigrant sentiments are followed by anti-Black sentiments as the top two of the hundreds of hateful harassments since Nov 8th, 2016.
Violence committed toward white people at the hands of Black people, by contrast, does not have the same historical precedent. What has been established is that Black folks will defend ourselves. Even so, there are many more white Dylan Storm Roof’s than Black ones. We — Black people — don’t typically enter white places of worship, celebration, and freedom with the same intentions as folks like Roof.
In short:
Women niggas, poor niggas, trans niggas, queer niggas, disabled niggas, incarcerated niggas, unemployed niggas, and most niggas? We tired. Needless to say, we’re tired of the violence of global anti-Blackness and we need to get serious in our discussion of the viability of Black nationalism, dismantling settler colonial logic, and exploring separation.
