They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

And I do imagine that it must be something, to be able to decide at what volume, tone, and tenor you will allow black people to enter your life, for praise or for scolding.

Music, Abdurraqib reminds us, is something that is not only received but happens, takes place in a place where people are.

All of us are frightened and heartbroken and ecstatic and mourning and in love and driving fast down the interstate, and we are blessed enough to live in a time when there are plenty of artists adept to holding that mirror. Last

Joy, or the concept of joy, is often toothless and vague because it needs to be. It is both hollow and touchable, in part because it is something that can’t be explained as well as it can be visualized and experienced.

I think, though, that a natural reaction to black people being murdered on camera is the notion that living black joy becomes a commodity—something that everyone feels like they should be able to consume as a type of relief point.

The soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself. Sometimes what we need is something to make the grief seem small, even when you know it’s a lie.

And maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.

Even in my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

don’t fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being alive long enough to see it.

We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon.

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.

I considered how often there is shame attached to loving anyone publicly. The shame, of course, comes on a sliding scale, depending on who you are and who you love.

The problem is that everyone wants to talk about language entirely independent of any violence that the existence of that language has accumulated over time.

It is one thing to watch a people take a weapon out of your hands, but it is another to fashion it into something else entirely, something that doesn’t resemble a weapon at all. And it is even another thing to then see the newly-fashioned once-weapon scattered into a lexicon that denies you immediate access.

I suppose no one wants to hear a rapper, of all people, rap exclusively about something that we could get from a collective of sad boys who can sound sad singing sadness.

We often see black people, more than any other demographic, restricted to what versions of themselves can be briefly loved and then discarded. The rapper with chains and a past worth a dangerous fantasy, but not worth considering as something that makes them full and human.

In the punk landscape, we are often given imagery that reflects the most real truths of this scene: the exclusion of people of color, of women, of the queer community, and that exclusion being sometimes explicit, sometimes violent, but almost always in direct conflict with the idea of punk rock as a place for rebellion against (among other things) identity.

Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays. The heart scatters across states, and has nothing left after what home takes from it.

Sometimes, when you know so much of not having, it is easy to imagine those who do have as exceptionally worry-free.

I understand what it is to be sad, even when everyone around you is demanding your happiness—and what are we to do with all of that pressure other than search for a song that lets us be drained of it all?

Cute Is What We Aim For pretended to think they were the joke, but they seemed to want to be taken seriously with their sprawling songs about heartbreak and distance.

It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

But our best work is the work of ourselves, our bodies and the people who want us to keep pushing, even if the days are long and miserable and even if there are moments when the wrong side of the bridge beckons you close.

Life is too long, despite the cliché. Too long, and sometimes too painful. But I imagine I have made it too far. I imagine, somewhere around some corner, the best part is still coming.

It was easy to be confident on The Black Parade, an album that unpacks a complete certainty: that we are all going to die, and none of us know what comes next.

The Black Parade doesn’t treat the recesses of grief as a members-only party, where we show up to the door with pictures of all our dead friends and watch the gates open. It assumes, instead, that we’ve all seen the interior, and offers a small fantasy where the other side is promising.

It helps, in the moment of the casket’s lowering, to think about suicide not as a desire for death, but a need to escape whatever suffering life has dealt.

It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.

No one decides when the people we love are actually gone. May we all be buried on our own terms.

To fight for a country to see you as human is an exhausting thing, that exhaustion compounded by the physical exertion of marching, chanting, making your space your own.

There is also something about remaining inside of the wreckage that is more seductive than pushing your way out of it alone.

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.

For anyone who has ever loved someone and then stopped loving them, or for anyone who has stopped being loved by someone, it’s a reminder that the immediate exit can be the hardest part. Admitting the end is one thing, but making the decision to walk into it is another, particularly when an option to remain tethered can mean cheaper rent, or a hit album, or at the very least, a small and tense place that you can go to turn your sadness into something more than sadness. It’s all so immovable, our endless need for someone to desire us enough to keep us around.

The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.

America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people but not the black people themselves. Everything is a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, or a march where no one was beaten or killed.

When black men die, they live on, almost forever. When black women vanish, they often simply vanish. 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. I

There is sacrifice in that. In being a black woman who fights and is alive at any time in this country’s history is a sacrifice. It can still get you a death

What people are asking in this exercise is never about where I’m from. The question they’re asking is “why doesn’t your name fit comfortably in my mouth?”

The distance between curiosity and fear is tragically short. They are, like sleep and death, within the same family, a quick nudge pushing one directly into the other.

There is no retaliation like American retaliation, for it is long, drawn out, and willing to strike relentlessly, regardless of the damage it has done.

Real power, I am reminded, doesn’t need a new reason to stop pretending to be what it actually is underneath. All of the old reasons are enough to seduce.

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. It is a luxury to be unafraid and analyze the very real fear of others.

It is summer and white people are sad on the internet about black people dying again.

Us, all of us truly in this machine, know that the grief that comes with the killing sits heavy and never leaves. I feel this fear more in my new Northeast home. It is a fear greater than anything I experienced under the cloud of expected Midwestern racism. Here, I can’t tell who wishes for me to be gone. Sometimes it’s the ones who would mourn for me the loudest.

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise. Silence is the hard thing to block out, because it hovers, immovable, over whatever it occupies. Noise can be drowned out with more noise, but the right type of silence, even when drowning, can still sit inside of a person, unmoving.

When you allow something to grow a shadow at your back, anything that distracts you from it is going to need severing.

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. 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.

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.

People become so caught up in a child’s understanding of a world much larger than their own, one that, I imagine, they are in no great rush to understand.

Joy alone will not grant anyone safety. It can, however, act as a small bit of fuel when the work of resistance becomes too much.