They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting. When I do not feel like I’m pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here.

think about suicide not as a desire for death, but a need to escape whatever suffering life has dealt.

Once you understand violence, once its presence is constant enough, it can become something you survive until survival becomes normalcy, and fear becomes something you lie about when your friends are listening.

The hood is not glamorous or romantic, but it is mine. It is ours, those of us who still sleep with its whispers hanging over us. And I am loyal to this.

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

We know that we are more than only good and only bad, despite what happens to the names of the dead after they are no longer around to speak them.

I 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.

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.

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.

keep most of what you have at a whisper, but keep just enough of it so loud that it won’t be forgotten.

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.

People we still find a way to make magic with, even when the lights flicker, and the love runs entirely out.

The consideration of empathy in mainstream spaces does a lot, but what it might do better than anything is convince someone to fight for your life after your life is taken. Or, at worst, it might convince someone that you don’t deserve to be murdered because you wore gold teeth or typed a curse word into a box on the internet.

What a country’s fear of blackness can do while you are inside a room, soaking in joy, being promised that you would make it through.

Another element of that is rooted in the distance between my anger and the trouble it might cause me if taken in by the wrong audience.

The stakes are high and the capacity for mercy is not. When I yell, I feel an immediate sense of guilt afterwards. Shame, sometimes fear.

The relief that people have when a protest centering on black lives aligns with their ideas of peace.

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.

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.

America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people but not the black people themselves.

Taylor Branch, a historian of the Civil Rights Movement, once estimated that from 1954 to 1968, there was a church bombed almost every week. During the freedom summer of 1964, it is estimated that a bombing happened every other day.

We do get to reflect on what it means to live in a world where little girls can get dressed up to go to church and not make it out alive. But there isn’t the satisfaction of knowing that we live in a world where this could never happen again.

The black church, where we can do this without apology, without the politeness of anxiety. Yes, be loud, and free, and rattle the walls with song. Yes, clap, and stomp, and sweat on whomever you must. Yes, leave baptized and clean. Yes, survive another week and pray for another.

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 to.

I want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of boundarypushing and I want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of being alive and loved.

Survival is truly a language in which the Black matriarch is fluent.

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.

August 9, 2014

I have no words for this. But it is important.

The question they’re asking is “why doesn’t your name fit comfortably in my mouth?”

I was making the curious parts of myself invisible in the hopes that curiosity never turned to fear.

It is eight days in to this new and violent empire that is building upon a legacy of violent empires before it, and I have finally stopped trying to tell myself that everything is going to be all right. 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.

And now here we are again...or still.

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.

There are few things like being feared simply due to having a body.

The shame that exists because of what we have to do in order to remain alive, be seen as human.

it is easy to fall into an idea of wanting to prove yourself. To reach for anything that might show that you are a whole person and worthy of staying that way.

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’s that people have found so many new ways to say “silence.” It is what is meant when we look at a peaceful protest and hear people say, “Well, why can’t they just do it more peacefully?”

There really is no measurement for how America wants its Black athletes to be. Oftentimes, they are asked to both know their greatness and know their place at the same time,

We’re asking her to not be great so that we can be comfortable. We’re telling one of the most dominant athletes many of us will ever see to maybe keep it down a bit, as if any kind of dominance is stumbled upon silently.

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?

It is the inability to see a body as worthwhile if it doesn’t have a value you can trade in on, some sentimental cash out.

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

Is prison simply a place of repeated dehumanization and punishment? Or is it a place where personal change can happen?

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.

The optics of equality, though not doing the same work as actual measures of equality, mean something.

There is a level of danger that proximity to whiteness makes thrilling, when taken in from afar. Knowing that you could never survive it, or even attempt it in your own life.

The fantasy of being able to say whatever you want, with no respect for the masses, with the masses rarely wanting you silenced.

He sounds, at times, like a tour guide, performing for this largely white crowd in a black neighborhood. At a show that most of the neighborhood’s population couldn’t afford tickets to even if they wanted to go.

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

Being white and profiting off of rap music has never been about skill as much as it is about what can and can’t be sold. If you can both win over white audiences and trick the black ones for long enough, the formula works.