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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.
In 2012, eleven years after that spring, a series of late paychecks from Ebony magazine (where I was employed as a full-time freelancer) began a string of financial setbacks that eventually led to the repossession of my car.
This is one of the reasons I quit working in entertainment. Late checks are no fun.
Myla liked this
White supremacy is so gargantuan and mundane that sometimes its existence and its proficiency can’t be measured, addressed, or even seen without a stark change in perspective. It isn’t like gravity. It is gravity. It is a ceaseless pressure intended to keep blackness ground-bound and sick.
Tony Nabors liked this
And it wasn’t that my parents’ blackness itself was pathological. It wasn’t. It never has been and never will be, for anyone. It’s just that blackness in America meant that setbacks, like my parents getting their car stolen in 1990, were tsunamis. It meant that there were and would always be environmental factors they needed to overcome.
(Seriously, if you happen to know a parent of a thirteen-year-old or a person who teaches or coaches or even lives in a neighborhood with them, the next time you see this person, buy them a drink, a doughnut, and a lap dance, recite the Lord’s Prayer with them, and slide them a hundred-dollar bill.
I take cash. lol
Nat Turner, rape was not the impetus behind his revolution. Instead, he believed he was instructed directly by God, a message communicated not through sexual assaults but by a solar eclipse.
if black people could be racist toward whites. (We can’t, btw. We can be prejudiced, but actual racism is bias plus power. The only “reverse racism” is when white people wear Confederate flag snapbacks backward.)
