They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

None of the people I wanted to make myself new for witnessed this undoing of pride. It felt, of course, like I didn’t belong. Like I was a trespasser, waiting to find my way back to another home.

Unlike everyone, my expectations for interactions with the police only exist on one part of that spectrum: I expect to fear and be feared. But, I have survived every interaction. The difference now is that when I see the news of another unarmed death, a boy who didn’t react to orders fast enough, or a man who reacted too quickly, I know how this can happen. I have entered that space and come out through the other side unscathed, but with a new layer of anger, a new layer of fear. The fact that I was afforded survival once used to make this type of death remarkable. Over the years, I find it to be less and less. With each body, I wonder how their stories began. If they began something like mine.

It is almost unfathomable to tell someone to act like they’ve been somewhere before when they are intensely aware of the fact that they were never supposed to be there in the first place, isn’t it?

And so Serena throws her racket and falls to her knees. And so a little Black girl finds a tennis court on the outskirts of her hood. And so another father finds hope.

It is an odd thing to imagine yourself as someone who may have more value dead, or dying. But surely, if the emotions attached to your vanishing can be currency, isn’t your vanishing, itself, something to trade?

To want a body as sacrifice, something to help dull the noise, to even a score that could never be evened. I glimpsed, for a small moment, what it must be like to consider someone I didn’t know as less valuable living. And the impossible weight of it all.

The first single, “Bad and Boujee,” is the country’s number one song. It’s being sung in trap houses and in minivans.

If the sins don’t come to you naturally, you seek them out. You chase them, let them consume you, and the ones you can’t touch, you write about like you’ve lived them.

It’s one of the many fatal flaws of politics: not trusting those who are either living or archiving an experience to know what might be best for that lived experience.

But above my desk now, a picture of Barack Obama, surrounded. Rappers on every side of him, dressed however they chose to dress. Rappers with their honest songs about the people who live and die in places often used as political talking points, standing proud in front of their proud president. All of those smiling black people in the Oval Office. Miles away from a past where none of them, I imagine, ever thought they’d get to make it this far.

Eminem was rapping directly into that proximity. For the black kids in the hood, he gained a type of credibility for the ruthlessness and carelessness with which he regarded human life, particularly his own. We understood nihilism, and a desire for exit. We understood anger, angst, bitterness, and the rage that fueled it. What we didn’t understand was a way to express what we understood and walk away unscathed. Eminem’s fantasies often involved the blood of people who were living, and it must be funny to be on the other side of a fantasy about death.

I stopped fucking with Eminem when he couldn’t stop making rape jokes in his rhymes as he approached 40 years old. There is a time when all of us have to reevaluate the distance we actually have from dangerous moments. Eminem has a distance that never runs out. A distance that only grows wider. And there are those who would call him edgy for not realizing this, while ignoring those who realize that their proximity to danger is a lot slimmer, and yet they’ve still found a way to stay alive. No one finds this funny.

I am sure that there is a place for this, the reveling in guilt for what is afforded to you due to race.

What Macklemore didn’t embrace was the thing that Eminem embraced before him: if you are in a system that will propel you to the top off of the backs of black artists who might be better than you are, no one black is going to be interested in your guilt.

But you’ve been waiting for the punchline, and here it is: in a country that wanted more than anything for him to be the man to lead rap into something they imagined to be better, Macklemore chose to instead make himself a man without a country. And isn’t that funny.

Sometimes it isn’t as easy as unfollowing a person on social media to not see these moments. When it is present and unavoidable, there have to be other ways of severing emotion from memory.

If she were living, she’d be celebrating 64 years today, and I am in an airport holding something in my hands that she might have been proud of, and I can’t take it to her and place it in her living hands and say look. look at what I did with the path you made for me. And states away, someone still living has decided that they aren’t in love with me anymore, and so I am flying thousands of miles for weeks at a time and staying up staring at computer screens until there is nothing rattling in my brain but a slow static to ride into dreams on.

The woman who works at the newsstand taps me on the shoulder, and asks me if I can turn down the music in my headphones because it’s distracting other customers. She walks away, never saying anything about the fact that I was crying in the middle of her store.

The key is in the echo. A gunshot, generally, is a brief burst and then a brief echo. A firework, on the other hand, explodes and echoes back, back, back. It swallows and keeps swallowing. Even if the light never touches a sky you can see, the echo is what to listen for. I don’t remember how young I was when I learned this, or if I will teach it to any children I may one day have to look after. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.

It occurs to me that for some, emotional distance is what it takes to equalize race. A white man fights in the army next to black men and so he learns what it is to die for those particular black men. A white man grows old and a young black man comes into his life that could be his son’s age, and he learns what it is to want to fight for him, as well. We all do this, I think. It’s how we learn to work through our various disconnects. Still, without anything chopping at the root of our souls, we’re still imagining the individual only, and not the system that surrounds them, that makes them feared.

There are sometimes wide and splitting paths that take us away from the people we aspire to love, even if we know they are loving us in the best way they can, with all of the worldview that their world has afforded them.

Love and joy alone will not rid America of its multilayered history of violence that has existed for longer than any of us have been alive. That violent culture, no matter the amount of prayers and grief we throw at it, remains unshakable.

And I hope, then, that a child who blessedly knows less of the world’s evils decides to laugh with his friends in a place that reaches your ears. I hope it carries you back to the fight, as it has done for me. Joy, in this way, can be a weapon—that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or months, or years.

Let the children have their world. Their miraculous, impossible world where nothing hurts long enough to stop time. Let them have it for as long as it will hold them. When that world falls to pieces, maybe we can use whatever is left to build a better one for ourselves.