They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

The way I say “My people” and My People know who they are even if we’ve never met, or even if we’ve never spoken, or even if all we have is the shared lineage of coming from a people who came from a people who came from a people who didn’t intend to come here but built the here once they arrived.

It is an album of return and escape and return and escape again. It feels, in tone and tension, like coming home for a summer after your first year of college, having tasted another existence and wanting more, but instead sleeping in your childhood room.

The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that you simply cannot push back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour.

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.

What possibilities would black people be allowed if their anger, and all of the ways it manifested itself, could be seen as a part of the human spectrum. The way we cut a wide lane for riots after sports games, for punk rock and metal bands fronted by white anarchists who wish to overthrow all unjust modes of government. Our fights aren’t going to be equal in the world, but if we are pushing our backs against the same barriers of injustice, I would like my anger to live in the world as your anger does. Reasonably, with expectations that it doesn’t make me who I am. It is a task, some days. To think about your consistent kindness as, instead, a product of restraint.

When I see people talk about diversity in film rooms and writing rooms, I often see numbers and percentages, but not often very plain talk about what the repercussions are when no black people are present.

I think of this child growing up and knowing what it is to escape death. Wrapping herself in the trauma of that. Knowing at such a young age that to be a Black woman in America is, in a way, to feel like you will survive until you decide to stop surviving.

We both want to survive through another year. Still, they were taught to run toward guns for survival, and I was taught to run from them, or even the illusion of them.