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It is 2016, and not watching the videos of black people murdered doesn’t mean that black people aren’t still being murdered. I try not to think about death—my own, or that of anyone I love—but I don’t consider the future in the way that The River seems to consider the future. I don’t fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being alive long enough to see it.
What it must feel like to write an album like this. To listen to an album like this with different eyes on the world. What it must feel like to imagine that no one in America will be killed while a man sings a song about the promise of living.
From a metaphorical standpoint, one of the worst things we do is compare love to war. We do this in times of actual war, without a thought about what it actually means. Mothers bury their children while a pop musician calls the bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle—as if there is a graveyard for heartbreak alone. We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon. A buffet of sad and bitter songs rains down from the pop charts for years, keeping us tethered to whatever sadness we could dress ourselves in when nothing else fit.
This is the difficult work: convincing a room full of people to set their sadness aside and, for a night, bring out whatever joy remains underneath—in a world where there is so much grief to be had, leading the people to water and letting them drink from your cupped hands.
How often I first think of who may be watching before I lean in to give someone I love a really good kiss in a crowded store. Here, that shame falls to dust. It is something beyond the smoke that lingers above our heads that does this—turning a person’s face to the face of someone they love, and kissing the way we do in our homes, with the curtains drawn.
& it turns out that I want all pictures of me loving my people to be in color. I want the sunlight whistling its way across our faces to be always amber & never an absent hue that might mistake our lineage for something safe. I am talking of artifacts again & not of how I cup my hands to the chins of those I love & kiss them on their faces & this type of love will surely be the death of us all.
Ice Cube can no longer be who he was in the ’90s, but give him his due for what he has done, more than once: Ice Cube has, for years, spoken to various levels of black sanctuary with anger, humor, and emotion.
Like many of the black men who helped raise me, Ice Cube is complicated, sometimes problematic, and still often endearing. I fight internally with this, the same way I fight internally with the black spaces we all glorify: the misogyny of the barbershop, the respectability politics of the cookout.
I cringe at the occasional Ice Cube interview, I cringe at the occasional remark from my barber, and I value both of these men for what they have given to a world that I am lucky enough to share with them, despite our failings.
A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless. I love the people where I’m from because they would fight to humanize me if I died violently on film. We would do this for each other, despite anything in our pasts, because no one else would do it for us. We know that we are more than only good and only bad, despite what happens to the names of the dead after they are no longer around to speak them.
Somewhere along the way, when established rappers began to take fashion more seriously, clothing started fitting around bodies better. Pants didn’t sag as much, shirts didn’t hang as low. And immediately, the era of hiding yourself in what adorned your legs and torso seemed foolish. We became our parents almost overnight, laughing at pictures of ourselves from less than a year earlier. And why wouldn’t we want to wear clothes that would allow us the freedom of escape? And why wouldn’t we want pants high and well-fitting enough to not become victim to a small and merciless drowning?
To own a pair of white sneakers meant that you had enough money to have options. That you could, if you wanted to, keep a pair of sneakers in your closet for a special occasion and wear the other pair when it rained, or snowed, or wasn’t perfect.
In our twisted and sneaker-obsessed youth, I think we found some small corner of that thrilling. To own something that another person would kill for.
The shared machinery of love and trust has many parts and therefore many flaws, and therefore many opportunities for disaster. At the time, it all existed on too thin of a ledge for me to imagine walking.
There is also something about remaining inside of the wreckage that is more seductive than pushing your way out of it alone.
If I have the destruction of something that I once loved to carry with me at all times, isn’t it like I still have a companion?
I don’t enjoy being heartbroken, but I’m saying I enjoy the point of heartbreak where we convince ourselves that literally everything is on the table, and run into whatever will dull the sharp echoing for a night, or a week, until a week becomes a year. It is the madness that both seduces and offers you your own window out once it’s done with you.
if I can convince you that I am falling apart, in need of love, perhaps I can draw you close enough to tell you what I really need.
For the voyeur who prefers public collapse, there is no better combination than someone who is both sad and willing to lie to themselves about it.
The joke is that they were always too connected to let each other go so easily. I like to think of this as the great lesson hiding in Rumours: there are people we need so much that we can’t imagine turning away from them. People we’ve built entire homes inside of ourselves for, that cannot stand empty. People we still find a way to make magic with, even when the lights flicker, and the love runs entirely out.
Trying to push our shoulder against one of the millions of doors America built to keep us out. And we are all here, we unlikely patriots. All of us pushed to the margins, trying to fight for ourselves and one another, all at once.
The NBA All-Star game brings me joy as it brought me joy to run on the blacktop and throw a no-look pass, or watch someone dribble a ball through someone else’s legs and get a chorus of “ooohhhhhs” from spectators.
There is something about performing toward our roots in this manner, without an eye toward the white people who may be watching us, following our every movements with fear, or disgust.
The consideration of empathy in mainstream spaces does a lot, but what it might do better than anything is convince someone to fight for your life after your life is taken. Or, at worst, it might convince someone that you don’t deserve to be murdered because you wore gold teeth or typed a curse word into a box on the internet.
The feeling I love most is walking into night air after spending hours cloaked in sweat, dancing in a small room with strangers. If the night air is cool, the way it sits on your skin is a type of forgiveness. A balm for all of the heat you’ve leaned into. Sometimes, I think I still only go to shows for the way it feels to leave them, everyone pouring out of a bar or an arena, a collective gasp rising after everyone feels the same breeze at once.
I remember looking up and into the still-lingering crowd and seeing another person scrolling their phone, stopped in their tracks. And then another, and one or two more. I imagined they were all taking in what I was taking in, even if they weren’t. I wanted, for a moment, to share in this small horror. What a country’s fear of blackness can do while you are inside a room, soaking in joy, being promised that you would make it through.
I often joke about how I don’t wear anger well. To a very real extent, this is true. I didn’t see anger translated well growing up, so it isn’t an emotion that I have worked through enough times to push outside of myself.
When I yell, I feel an immediate sense of guilt afterwards. Shame, sometimes fear. People aren’t used to my voice pushing above a joyful monotone. In the rare times I am confronted with anger spilling out, I wish to collect it quickly, before it grows all over everyone in the room.
This makes me ask the question of who benefits from this, our eternal façade of kindness? Is the true work of kindness owed to ourselves, and our sanity?
I remember a brief moment where my brothers and I had to become secretive about our rap intake, our parents growing concerned about the violence of it all. It felt a little heavier to rap along to songs about guns and death. My mother began to eavesdrop on the music I was taking in, cutting eyes at anything with a black and white striped “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker on it. I was her youngest child and it was still the spring. She did not yet know that she would be gone.
Drinking in every bit of excess from a small TV screen in Ohio, feeling like both rap and my life hadn’t managed to change much at all, despite the hole left in the genre, despite the hole left in my childhood home.
The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over. I will take healing in whatever form I can, and I heard my mother’s voice singing underneath that music. I heard her slowly making her way back home.
This is how it goes for women on screens in America: a loss of control driven by anger, or “complication,” followed by a man to help them regain the control that they have lost.
It is the difference in looking out on a land that you believe is yours, and a land that you were taken to, forced to build.
When the right arm is reaching into a fire to push away decades of injustice that still presents itself, how long before the whole body is engulfed in flames?
Still, as thankful as I am to come from hands that still reach out for forgiveness, I am even more thankful to come from a people who know the necessity of rebuilding.
When enough outlets tell you that your life is an exercise in rehearsing invisibility, when you become invisible, it just seems like you’re performing the grand closing act.
In South Carolina, after a hard rain, I walked through an old plantation. And it was the smell descending from the trees after they made room for the storm. A humble attempt at forgiveness.
There is pretty much no violence in this country that can be divorced from this country’s history.
It is impossible for me to imagine that this is the world we live in. One where Black girls must learn to play dead before they learn to play the dozens. But it is not impossible for me to imagine what her grandmother has lived through. What she knew that we did not. Survival is truly a language in which the Black matriarch is fluent.
I found myself, often, foolishly praying for the country’s mercy, as if I could push my back up against a door that was already being broken down from the outside.
Muslims with families that, unlike mine, were refugees from some of the countries on the list of places that America was now banning refugees from. People with loved ones from these countries, not all of them citizens. People who were afraid, wondering if they should sever their own ties with this newer, even sharper America.
It is a comforting and uniting protest, one that isn’t rooted in much shared ideology beyond people simply being angry. One man next to me tells me that he didn’t vote at all, but he was “pissed off” when he read the news this morning. “You just can’t cross a moral line like that,” he said, in a thick New York accent. “Fuck that guy. The Statue of Liberty is right over there.”
There is no border that my living family can be pushed to the edges of, even though a country glares at our name and wishes otherwise.
I think of how foolish I was, to once pray for a country’s mercy, and how thankful I am that those prayers were not answered. How, through this resistance, we might find a freedom where no mercy is required. We might find a humanity that is not asking to be seen, but demanding instead.
It is a luxury to be able to tear your gaze away from something; to only be made aware of old and consistent blood by a newer shedding of blood. It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary.
They plead with the world to be spared. They work tirelessly to show their humanity, show us all the acts of good they have done. They tell the world that they are not like the ones who have killed, as if the world itself, awash with blood, deserves this explanation from the innocent.
I spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint exactly how fear is learned. Rather, how we decide that fear is a necessary animal that grows out of our relentless expectation to survive at all costs, and how I have been afraid and been feared at the same time.
For example, the person who punches a Democratic ticket on Election Day might also clutch her purse tighter when walking past a black person on the street.
But I mostly thought about how I perhaps owned nothing. Not even my own hands, pressed behind my back.
