In Defense of the 40-Degree Day.

Stringer Bell: Nobody give a fuck about 40. Nobody remember 40, and y’all niggas is giving me way too many 40-degree days! What the fuck?

Sapper: [a few minutes later when Stringer is done talking] We on that shit like a Forty Degree Day!

I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I was feeling. My growing detachment with the place that pays my rent. My growing awakening to the pitfalls of securing institutional futurity within corrupt systems. The fact that my compassionate labor does, in fact, contribute to that. The non-profit industrial complex, the increasing philanthrocapitalism that bolsters these organizations. The search for innocence that is manifested within reformist dialogue and iniatives meant to give the appearance of “but we are trying.” The fact that I know this trying is all about helping this deceptively-narrowly-defined us, at the behest of communities like Chester who have helped to mold me. The non-recognition of our active role and support of a system that is all about controlling, containing, removing me. If not in body, in the spirit of the last of everything that stands against this corrupt system. The belief that my colleagues might see me (27-year old, Ivy-League graduated, collared shirt wearing, James Baldwin quoting) as different, disconnected from them. The resulting personal question of where I might stand with seeing myself in the shoes of those I announce to love. Am I disconnected? How has race and masculinity and heteronormativity blinded me? What is in that dark shadow that sits beyond the normative exceptionalism that accompanies my travels. You’re brilliant, Chris. Chris, you have so much to offer. You write so well and with so much passion, Chris. You should keep talking, Chris. Have I become comfortable playing the role of the exception? Is there any honor in that? No. Let’s be honest, Chris. How truthful do you want to be with white folks today? Lord knows I’m trying to keep delivering these 40 degree days. I gotta look these folks in the face tomorrow. All these things that come to mind in a middle of an innocuous professional development session meant to open our faculty into a more authentic inquiry circle to grow our practice.

But what is our practice but not a reflection of our whole selves.

But I don’t get paid to be my whole self, I get paid to physically work a job. Any emotional labor is unpaid overtime. So I’m on that shit like a 40-degree day.