Diary Entry #2: Reform, Revision, Repeat— Black Masks on Black Faces in white Systems of Hegemony
September 5th, 2018
I am no stranger to apology.
When I cursed at the dinner table, I was expected to apologize. I remember because I had soap stuffed into my mouth and went to bed hungry, ears intent on following the rhythm of an overhead subway in the South Bronx. Triplets, Smooth Jazz CD101.9, and the devotion I paid to repressing the bottomless anger and frustration I had with parents who also hurt me for things I did not do. There were times when this happened, and the truth was never told because I took to ‘turning the other cheek’. Other times it was— but an apology could never be enough to this day.
You see: to be bled, bruised, or poisoned by our “caregivers” (i.e. beacons of ‘necessity’ we are forced to be dependent on by Law, Order, and artifical scarcity), is betrayal. I expect the Smartass Nihilist to question this simple thought with smug affection: “If we depend on them, what can we do about it? Nothing…” *queue its bourgie nihilist ranting*. And so, I shall retort with the nihilist’s bane: “Why do we depend on them in the first place?”
The Nihilist will refuse to answer because “Life is meaningless, ” while the fool believes Life is inherently meaningful. Yada yada yada. All noise, because life could be either or. Who cares. I hope you don’t either.
We depend on them because of material conditions that exist, whether created because of metaphysical belief, or not.
We depend on adults who lacerate our skin with belts, shove bar soap down our throats with hot water, break coat hangers on our backs, and demean us because we can not destroy their power without ending up in juvie, dead, disowned, or alone... Not as children, at least. We depend on them because the methods of obtaining food, which requires knowledge of acquiring money, which requires knowledge of obtaining work, so one can afford housing, etc. are obscured from us. Why?
It’s not that deep and it’s not something we choose to do with consent.

It’s because we live in a capitalist society that values age over youth, even of it values youth over ability. Even moreso, it values the nuclear family and age-as-authority, reinforced through surname worship, tax documentation, religious ideals, and most comprehensively: the cultural superstructure. Most are simply afraid of Western [am I doing that right? lmao] authority, exile , death, pain, suffering, and punishment while being scapegoated for unjustified, false-flagged retaliation. What this mean is that constituent steps towards liberation from this particular kind of subjugation requires the destruction of all metaphysical and material ideals— from surnames to ‘legal marriage’, and their documentation.
And the same truth lies at the corner of the bed at which capitalism currently lies in comfort, sleeping Time away until it grows into fascism.
And again, the bourgeoisie nihilist opens its putrid lips to speak quater-baked inquiries with arrogance: “But what is the point of destroying these if some of us benefit? How can you convince us?”
I do not need to. If you don’t feel urgency to do so, or feel a need to inquire into your own survival, then you are probably too comfortable to care about the subjugation that exists in the world today. Most of us do not need to inquire. We simply work towards it, or die. And this is the nihilists’ death: relativity in meaning— to which the absurdist is born.

And so I do not need to expend energy persuading you. And when I will need something to survive, when you have that something I so desperately need to survive, and I am able to take it, I will take it. It doesn’t matter whether you can recall there being meaning or no meaning to life.
But why haven’t I?
I spent a year pleasing an abuser to gaslit, hit, shamed, manipulated, and traumatized me. Why? Not because life is meaningless, or because life has meaning, but because I apologized.
I did it again and again. I refused to leave her, even when I had recurring nightmares of her. I let her steal things from me when I could barely afford rent, or happiness, because I was afraid of many, many things she held over my head like a dependent child to a parent / adult / authority . I was afraid of retaliation, exile , death, pain, suffering, and punishment while I was being scapegoated for unjustified retaliation, pushed out of friends groups because of lies she spread about me through gaslighting, stuck in my room researching ways to kill myself, and thinking I must be a bad person because I made her even consider weaponizing crocodile tears to make me forgive her— time and time again.
I am no stranger to apology.
I don’t think most of us are either.
Today many spend a lot of time believing in reform— whether its reform of the mind, body, soul, or a monist combination/denial of all the aforementioned. We forgive. We come up with excuses for a thing that steals, lashes, scapegoats, imprisons, exiles, silences, tortures, and lies about us— a thing that has continued to do this for over forty decades: 4 centuries, 400 years, etc.… Today many expect reformism to work, even though reformism has failed us for decades, even though the more Left(tm) of us tokenize the fuck out of Martin Luther King’s words on the failures of integration, even though we LARP the Black Panthers alongside white “radicals” in red handkerchiefs, and maybe some ‘reformed’ libertarians and Nazis that tag along. Some even expect reformism to work as a tool of awareness, or consciousness— where failure after failure will somehow bring about a need for revolution as if it does not already exist, and as if people aren’t capable of forgiving.

Over 200 years of reformism, disappointment, rioting, rebellion, and protest has not helped us. 400 years of hard work has not liberated us— because too many of us were putting that work right into the legitimacy of Amerika.
The truth is that a reason has existed since the nonBlack indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were genocided (albeit not completely), and even earlier as our ancestors were taken aboard those ships, those who sold us not knowing what would be done with our bodies and labor. This has continued to exist all through Middle Passage genocides and onwards.
Recently, we saw democrats, and republicans, East Asians, the progeny of chattel slaves, and even [South] Vietnamese people mourn McCain’s death. Today, I see Ayanna Pressley being celebrated for convincing us to forgive Amerika and its peers once more for it’s bottomless pit of atrocities committed against a majority of people on Earth— to have faith in a system that has failed us for 400 years, giving it another chance to fail us once again. So many desire for Amerika to exist in spite of our centuries long failure to make it work for us all.
Why?
Because it has a Black face? Probably.
Because it a Black body?
Probably.
Because there is potential for more Ayanna Pressley’s, more “social Democrats”, more Presidents of the World’s Greatest Imperialist Power to merge into the cell within the body of the parent / adult / authority / system of cultural governance known as Amerika?
Most likely.
So what is to be done about this baroque, ‘mise en abyme’, fractalized recursion of a nightmare of subjugation?
You wanna know why it’s so hard to Make This World a Better Place?
To be frank:
It’s because you’re not invested in revolution, or at least, not enough of us are. How do I know? Because you’re asking me how successful revolutions start instead of researching guerilla warfare and practicing self-defense, medic training, spycraft, mental / ‘spiritual’ health communal healing techniques such as CBT and DBT, etc. etc. etc…. I know because you haven’t heard of War of the Flea and because you don’t know what revolution is beyond “kill and win”; you don’t know how to survive, how to thrive, how to liberate and maintain liberation through dual power because you’re too busy studying ideology to be interested in praxis. You don’t know what propaganda warfare is and how it was used in Vietnam— how it has been used between North Korea and South Korea. You don’t know how China used music to disorient assholes invading North Korea. You haven’t read your favorite revolutionary’s biographies yet, or haven’t accepted and tried to learn from the shittiness they spoke, practiced, or both. You think Lucy Parsons’ ‘To Tramps’ was her only essay, and don’t even know whom it was addressed to. You think all her essays were violent. Most importantly, I know because you haven’t tried to Google any of the above yet. And if you have learned where guerilla warfare fits before “total war”, and the use of each between strategy and tactics, and you’re isolated because you, like me, are surrounded by Comfortable, Apologetic People, then I hope you reach out to others like you ;-) !
If you have made it this far, I am breaking the fourth wall to remind you that you now, and always will, have a choice to set all these truths aside: to remain a sycophant for scraps of comfort, always slaving while waiting for the next round entertainment… or to take a moment to collect yourself before you pick up The One, True Revolution as a career: to begin figuring out the multitude of ways in which you are able to participate in insurrectionary liberation, and to begin spreading the word that now is the time for permanent liberation!
We can’t know how this will end until we make sure we know how to win. We don’t need a reason why. And without a struggle today, we can’t know if there will ever be liberation in the future. Join your compeers in the struggle for liberation as a medic, as a guerilla, as a cook, as tech support, as a writer, reporter, artist, smith, driver, anything!!! The results take the shape of the struggle — so the more colorful/full of variety the more of us get to see the end results. Most importantly, make it real! As long as we are making it together, we will be making it til its impossible to make any more.
Our hopes that Letting the Right Reforms In will somehow somehow give us a break are allowing this shitstain of a sovereignty to continue existing with everything that makes it Amerika. If we are to finally be free of our abusers, our colonizers, our subjugators as subatern peoples, we ought to sieze the belt middair before it lands on our shoulder, and declare that this routine of pain — forgiveness — repression — more pain ends. If we are to rid ourselves of this nauseating codependency, we ought to stop forgiving Amerika for existing. We ought to stop Amerika from continuing to exist, history, future and all.
Best of luck, fellow recovering codependents!

