They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I have been thinking a lot lately about how black people have to hold on to our stories, or tell them for ourselves. I have been thinking about how I learned to write, to tell the stories I have, largely at the feet of black women who then became ghosts—ghosts by death, or ghosts by erasure of their living contributions, and sometimes both.

It is easy to be black and non-confrontational if nothing is on fire, and so it has never been easy to be black and non-confrontational.

It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary. It is a luxury to be unafraid and analyze the very real fear of others.

How we take that long coat of fear and throw it around the shoulders of anyone who doesn’t look like us, or prays to another God.

Like everyone, my interactions with the police exist on a wide spectrum. Unlike everyone, my expectations for interactions with the police only exist on one part of that spectrum: I expect to fear and be feared.

It is one thing to sit in a movie theater and watch the fragility of Black life play out on a screen in front of you. It is an entirely different thing to sit in a movie theater, watch the fragility of Black life play out on a screen in front of you, and have no escape from it once you leave.

What I got to experience in moving to the Northeast after living my entire life in the Midwest is the different masks that racism wears.

When you love a place, coming to terms with its lesser qualities and learning to apologize for them is commonplace.

Here, I can’t tell who wishes for me to be gone. Sometimes it’s the ones who would mourn for me the loudest.

Rap is the genre of music that least allows for its artists to comfortably revel in fiction, even though all of us know we are watching a performance.

Additionally, when black people singing songs about guns and drugs make it to number one in a country where black people are arrested and killed for guns or drugs or less than that, it can feel a bit like life as spectacle is more protected than life as a fully lived experience. I understand these things and also say that we’ve allowed the rappers we grew up with to grow up and still rap about selling drugs with platinum records and sold out tours at their backs, but a suburban zip code is where we draw the line, as if growing up all kinds of black in all kinds of ways doesn’t carry its own unique and varied weight. As if, in the mirror, if you look hard enough, you still don’t see yourself as the world sees you.

There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others. The things that push us further away from who we are, and closer to the image people demand.

the door that Barack Obama pushed open for rappers to be seen and comfortable in his White House presented a new type of power dynamic.

The problem with the way visible and complicated people of color and their histories are approached by the world around them is that they are, all too often, not afforded the mosaic of a full and nuanced history.

Listening to Eminem was like watching my white friend Adam cuss out his parents in broad daylight. Thrilling at first, but then, as I got older, more troubling.

The ultimate white rapper joke is the white rapper who never wanted to be as famous as he ended up being, but couldn’t help having it happen due to his country’s endless desire for a white face to save everything,

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise.

There are as many ways to be heartbroken as there are hearts, and it is undeniable that it is exceptionally difficult to be both public-facing and sad.

What often doesn’t get talked about with real and deep heartbreak after a romantic relationship falls apart is that it isn’t always just a single moment. It’s an accumulation of moments, sometimes spread out over years. It is more than just the person you love leaving; it’s also seeing them happy after they’ve left, seeing them beginning to love someone else, seeing them build a life that you perhaps hoped to build with them.

I imagine this is why Future has become obsessed with losing track of time. It is hard to keep missing someone when there’s no way to tell how long you’ve been without them. When everything blurs into a singular and brilliant darkness.

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.

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.

How do we explain to a child that children have been buried and we were sad but could not let go of our principles and our history and the violence that is born and reborn from it—that we clung to our guns, those small deadly gods, more tightly than to our neighbors?

Something that says You have taken so much from us, but we are still here. As we are being asked to come to terms with death, again and again,

It becomes urgent, I think, to do more. The people I love are black. The people I love are Muslim and queer. The people I love can’t get people to use their proper pronouns. The people I love are all afraid, and because these are my people, I am afraid with them.

I want to be immensely clear about the fact that we need more than love and joy. Love and joy alone will not rid America of its multilayered history of violence

The only thing promised in this world is that it will, oftentimes, be something that makes living seem impossible.