They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

This is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, about black life, and black death. In our era, the election of the first black president this gruesome nation had ever seen, and the unavoidable broadcasts of black people murdered have twisted into a sick double helix such that they all decided to pay attention to us again. That means that we have been living and reading and writing in an era when blackness and the spectacle of our irreconcilable, uncomfortable, formative presence in this country, and all the implications of that spectacle, is in full view in a way that is by no means unprecedented but sure is awfully loud.

But it is entirely true that an appeal that music offers us is a way to escape our understanding of the world.

ScHoolboy Q is not alone, but as a rap artist gets bigger, and their ticket prices become higher, their audiences become whiter. It’s a question of who can afford the show, which in the case of ScHoolboy Q, becomes a question of who can afford to be comfortable saying a word that comes with a violence they’ll never know. I wonder, sometimes, if the trade-off is worth it. If my desire to see young black artists “make it” is worth my desire to watch them bowing to the comfort of others in this way. People who may, for a moment, put food on a table for their family, but would also not always fight for that family’s right to not hear a word that, out of the wrong mouth, can still be a weapon.

I want to imagine that I can keep at least these moments to myself and not have them given back over to other mouths. I want to believe that they’re still for us, even if I can see the lie every time the word jumps off of my own tongue.

Well, what makes you think the attitudes of racism and exclusion in the punk scene are any different from that of the rest of the world? The answer, of course, is that they aren’t. Or at least it is all born out of the same system. In the ’70s, the answer was perhaps easier to digest. That punk rock, born in part out of a need for white escape, just wasn’t prepared to consider a revolution that involved color, or involved women as anything that the scene deemed useful.

Today, we sit back and watch seemingly evolved artists talk about tearing down these large political structures and uniting the masses, and making safe spaces for everyone who wants to come out and enjoy music, but the actual efforts to build and create these spaces fall extremely short, as evidenced (in one example) by Jake McElfresh being allowed to play Warped Tour. McElfresh has a now admitted history of preying on underage girls, a demographic that the touring music showcase predominantly caters toward.

It does no good to point at a neighborhood of burning houses while also standing in a house on fire. It is true, now, the flames in the house of punk may climb up the walls more slowly than, say, the flames in the Fox News building. But the house is still on fire.

It was jarring. Another example of how expendable the black body can be when in the way of needs that are greater than it, the range of those needs changing by the hour, or second.

I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

And then, with the sun setting on another hot day, we would ride back a few blocks to our neighborhood’s familiar skin—the language we knew, the songs we could rap along to, and the comfort that comes with not standing out. When I say it is a strange thing to live in close proximity to a world so vastly different than your own, I mean that it creates a longing within the imagination. You long for a place that you know only by its snapshots and not by the lives moving within them. It allowed me to fantasize, imagine a world where everyone was happy and no one ever hurt.

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.

So many of us, especially teenagers, strive to be something we’re not. Escape is vital, in some cases, as a survival tool.

I stopped asking the question of “why?” around death. 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?

The great mission of any art that revolves around place is the mission of honesty. So many of us lean into romantics when we write of whatever place we crawled out of, perhaps because we feel like we owe it something, even when it has taken more from us than we’ve taken from it.

This is what, to me, has separated them from their peers in the genre: a willingness to own their shitty pasts and everything they entail without also trying to cash it in for points, without trying to be the smartest or most charming band in the room. I’m sad and I’ve hurt people and I’m a beautifully tortured survivor of my past is a hard thing to say out loud (or scream on a chorus), but it is the honest thing, which means it is the thing that I would rather have sitting in the room with me on the days I miss everyone.

Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all.

There will always be something great and tragic to celebrate and I am wondering, now, if I’ve had enough. I am, of course, in favor of letting all grief work through the body and manifest itself creatively. But what I’m less in favor of is the celebration of pain that might encourage someone to mine deeper into that unforgiving darkness, until it is impossible for them to climb out. I’m less in favor of anything that hurts and then becomes theater, if that theater isn’t also working to heal the person experiencing pain.

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. All things do not pass. Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might.

There is no evidence to suggest that humans are going to become any more kind this year, or more empathetic, or more loving toward each other. If anything, with our constant exposure to all of one another’s most intense moments, the bar for what we seem prepared to tolerate gets lower with every second we spend screaming into each other’s open windows.

I have been thinking, then, about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety.

I’m not sold on pessimism as the new optimism. I need something that allows us to hope for something greater while confronting the mess of whatever all this blind hopefulness has driven us to. America is not what people thought it was before, even for those of us who were already familiar with some of its many flaws. What good is endless hope in a country that never runs out of ways to drain you of it? What does it mean to claim that a president is not your own as he pushes the lives of those you love closer to the brink? What is it to avoid acknowledging the target but still come, ready, to the resistance?

“Why do we think of grief as a collection of individual experiences anyway? Why don’t we just instead talk about grief as a thing that we’re all carrying and all trying to come to terms with?”

I have, in a lot of ways, convinced myself that more people will feel whatever I am asking them to feel if there is a name or a history to go with the body. If I can unfold a row of photos and stories and name a life worthwhile to a stranger, they might connect better with what I’m saying. And that might be true in some cases, but what I’m learning more and more as I go on is that my grief isn’t special beyond the fact that it’s mine, that I know the inner workings of it more than I know yours.

so what I’m mostly saying is that Memphis is a wild place to fight your way into and then fight your way out of.)

At the start of rap, it was about stepping into a phone booth and coming out as something greater than you were. It was easier to sell a personality than it is now, with every nuance of a person’s life splayed in front of us.

But looking back on Boyz n the Hood now, having watched it at least a half-dozen times in the 25 years since its release, I think that it’s less a movie about death, or about visualizing the ghetto as a living, breathing entity, as it is a movie about loyalty that spans generations. Much like the very hood I knew myself, it shows mothers and fathers doing their best to protect their children, their boys and girls rapidly becoming men and women. It shows loyalty among crews, and the lengths any of us would go to in order to keep ourselves close to our chosen family, despite their most glaring flaws.

Wanting to get out of the hood can be just as honorable as wanting to stay behind, or wanting to keep your hood with you when anyone tries to strip you of your roots, when a city tries to strip the land of its homes.

I know that blackness, when turned away from the mirror of itself and back into America at large, is most appealing when there is a type of suffering attached to it—sadness, anger, struggle, dressed up and packaged to the masses. A quarterback dances to celebrate an accomplishment in a violent game, and words like “class” appear, hanging in the air for months. 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.

Maybe all of these heavens are the same—Kendrick Lamar’s heaven, the heaven that all of the trains and chariots took our ancestors to, the heaven on the other side of Harriet Tubman’s river. Maybe all they ask is that we help hold back the darkness for as long as we can, and when we can’t anymore, they’ll save us a room. They’ll make sure “Alright” is playing, and we’ll feel the way it felt hearing it for the first time, in the face of all this wreckage. Full of so much promise, as if all of our pain were a bad dream we just woke up from.

What I’m saying is that I’ve been thinking a lot about black anger lately, and what we do and don’t do with it. The relief that people have when a protest centering on black lives aligns with their ideas of peace. The relief that I have when there are no pictures of police pushing protesters to the ground. I am interested in what we afford each other, in terms of the emotions that can sit on our skin, depending on what that skin might look like. This makes me ask the question of who benefits from this, our eternal façade of kindness? Is the true work of kindness owed to ourselves, and our sanity?

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. The silence may reward you briefly, but it always comes at the risk of something greater: your safety, your family, how the world sets its eyes upon you and everyone you love.

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. This is why the telling of our own stories has always been important.

Here is the story I hope we tell: Nina Simone’s blackness didn’t wash off at the end of a day. Nina Simone sang “Sinnerman” for ten minutes in 1965, and the whole earth trembled. Nina Simone played the piano like she was cocking a gun. Nina Simone was dark, and beautiful, and her hair piled high to heaven. Nina Simone survived what she could of the civil rights era, and then got the fuck out. Nina Simone rode away on the troubled ocean, standing on the deck of a black ship, looking back while a whole country burned, swallowing itself.

I don’t know what a community does when it has no more forgiveness left, or when it knows what forgiveness in this age truly means. I don’t know how a country can forgive itself for the deaths of those four sweet girls in 1963, just as I don’t know how it can forgive itself for the consistent assault on black sanctuaries ever since. Still, as thankful as I am to come from hands that still reach out for forgiveness, I am even more thankful to come from a people who know the necessity of rebuilding. Who know what a church does, know how to drink all they can from it, and refuse to let it be torn from 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 that has existed for longer than any of us have been alive.