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whiteness is such the American default that it has even colonized our imaginations,
Only someone so comfortably ensconced in privilege that they need to find ways to fabricate closeness to death to feel alive would leave their bed and blankets and house and clothes and city and the tens of thousands of years of civilization devoted to finding more efficient ways to protect us from the elements in the dead of winter to belly flop into a billion gallons of toxic ice.
This hypercognizance of both my blackness and what the possession of blackness in America is supposed to mean has created a nigga neurosis—a state of being where Did that happen because I’m black? and If this is happening because I’m black, how am I supposed to react as a Professional Black Person?
To be black in America is to exist in a ceaseless state of absurdity; a perpetual surreality that twists and contorts and transmutes equilibrium and homeostasis the way an extended stay in space alters human DNA.
It is natural to be aware of our status and the extreme measures taken to expand and extend our subjugation and for this information to make you goddamn fucking furious. It is, all things considered, as predictable to be that if you’re black as it is to bleed when decapitated.
when first encountering a white person intentionally oblivious to how being white in America is like being free to take an open-book exam on the same lesson materials that we weren’t even allowed to study for?
