There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy. Should there not be a language for that? A signifier not only for who is to be let in but also who absolutely gotta stay the fuck out?

I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloveds. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.

Shit talking is a right, a gift, a mercy with a lineage all its own.

So much of the machinery of race- and/or culture-driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what. How easy it is to manufacture weaponry out of someone else’s living if the emphasis is placed on the right or wrong word, or if that word is repeated enough, perhaps in a hushed tone.

The first way I felt myself operating on the other side of America’s fear was being young and idolizing the people America was trying to convince me to be afraid of.

and isn’t it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?

Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.