They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

It is fitting that Chance comes from a city that never lets you walk alone.

There is no singular version of any place, but particularly not Chicago. Everyone, turn your eyes to the city you are told to imagine on the news and, instead, listen to the actual voices inside of it.

The Weeknd tells the same tale: it’s never about love but then again, how can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires.

Afropunk by itself isn’t going to save us, or dismantle a racist world, but if punk rock was born, in part, out of the need for white escape, Afropunk signals something provided for black escape from what the actions of white escape breeds.

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

A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.

celebrate expressions of unbridled black joy because I know what it takes to unlock this, to have the joy of the body drown out the anxiety of the mind, if only for a little bit.

The daughter of a black man murdered on camera by police records an ad for a presidential candidate and the white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of a life without her father. 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. I think about this when I go to the gym and hand my gym card over to the same front desk person, always a white man. I ask how he’s doing. Most days, he says “Good. Really good.” The link between black music and black survival shows up most urgently when the stakes are at their highest. When I say that music is how black people have gotten free, I mean Harriet Tubman echoed songs along the Underground Railroad as a language. I mean the map to black freedom in America was built from music before it was built from anything else. Black music is the shepherd still pointing us toward any needed liberation, giving us a place to set our emotions, a room of our own.

When a smiling, joyful black person says they’re “doing all right,” I imagine it’s because they know “good” may be too close to the sun. I imagine it’s because they’ve seen things burn.

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. It makes “Alright,” the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.

the lingering state of crisis and uncertainty, where crime can thrive.

To grow up poor, especially with any proximity to wealth, real or imagined, is to think sometimes that money can save you. To think that money can pull you and the people you love out of the feeling of any grief, or sadness.

Sometimes it isn’t what we’re battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself.

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

think about that expectation, to hold off injustice with one arm while still consistently offering forgiveness with the other. I think about how often that is what blackness in America amounts

Here, we are saying that we will tear your country apart, we will give birth to the terror within, and then we will leave you to drown in it.

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.

The Compton that needs to be understood when discussing Serena Williams is the one that America has used so often for entertainment and irony, while simultaneously turning its back on the infrastructural failures that plague so many of the neighborhoods that kids from the suburbs have the luxury to wear on their tongues, and on their bodies, but never in their hearts or minds.

making themselves comfortable with the silent, liberal racism.

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?

Parked next to me was a car with a confederate flag decal in the window, and I wanted to tear it off. In that moment, I wanted Dylann Roof to be dead, in the street. I wanted the police to find him and kill him like they’d killed for less before. I remember this, sitting in my home state, where I was first called a nigger, and scrolling through my phone with unsteady hands, thinking of black children playing dead and black people not playing at all. Thinking of fear and prayer and that which will not save us no matter what house we yell God’s name into, and I wanted Dylann Roof’s death to be immediate then, and buried under the names of everyone’s life he cut short. But that was a long time ago. The state is going to kill Dylann Roof, and my desire for his death has long passed. I don’t want him to die unless he can, somehow, carry the insidious spirit of his motivations, which rest deep inside of America’s architecture. Everything else feels like the cruel theater of revolving death, which the death penalty often falls into. But I knew what it felt like, for a moment, to wish for a death to cash in on. 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.

life as spectacle is more protected than life as a fully lived experience.

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 optics of equality, though not doing the same work as actual measures of equality, mean something. Particularly to any people who have been denied access or visibility, or any people who were made to feel like the work they created was not worthy of equal consideration in the eyes of the country it was created

the immense difficulty in being the most visible man in the world and operating in a way that was often unafraid to nod to blackness, even clumsily.

I don’t mean to sell the idea that Barack Obama could be a rapper; more the idea that his understanding of cadence, tone, and crowd control always felt rooted in rap music, which is rooted in a black oral tradition.

When people in power who enforce and back violent policies pretend that the “rawness” of rap makes its creators less human, there is no use in imagining much of a bridge. The question isn’t about the obscene, but more what obscenities people are comfortable crawling into bed with.