A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

by Hanif Abdurraqib

A mother who has lost a child carries with her not only the corpse of that child, but the potential for what that life could have been.

The drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of someone with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink.

America, of course, is not better than this. When the entire architecture of a land is built on a chorus of violences, it takes an unnatural amount of work to undo every lineage of harm and then honor the harmed parties with anything resembling equity.

To insist that violence and any form of bigotry isn’t American is to continue feeding into the machinery of falsehoods and readjustments that keep this country spinning its wheels and making the same mistakes when it comes to confronting the way its past has burdened its present and future. There are people who talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., as if he lived a long and healthy life and then chose to die peacefully at the end of it. There are those who treat the political landscape as if it has only local ramifications rather than the global ones it has had for the majority of my lifetime.

To shout “Black women are going to save us all!” might feel good to type out to send in a tweet, but it reads as less good when one stops to consider that Black people—specifically Black women in this case—are not here in this country as vessels to drag it closer to some moral competence. The American obsession with immorality and a willingness to push its hardest labor off on its most marginalized is integral to the Black American experience, and so it occurred to me that maybe Black women were simply attempting to save themselves. That many Black people in the country have to go to jobs they don’t love, or deal with waves of microaggressions at work or at the coffee shop or at the gym, and still know that voting won’t save or stop any of this but did it anyway because the bet was already bad but the dealer had the cards in his hand to make it worse, and so many of us knew it. And so sometimes, it is simply about alternatives. What marginalized people can do with the space we make our own until someone else makes it theirs.

A Black person leaves their loved ones or their own personal space of comfort to go into an office where their ideas aren’t taken seriously, but they show up the next day still, and the next day after, because the alternative that capitalism has made for them is a lack of security, or the inability to pay for whatever small freedoms make them feel more human at the end of it all.

I wish more people talked about the moments that build up to a potential brawl as intimacy. The way it begs of closeness and anticipation and yes, the eye contact, tracing the interior of a person you may hate but still try to know, even if the knowing is simply a way to keep yourself safe.

some might say that fighting is not about victory but about how vigorously one takes to the chaos

Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

I am afraid not of death itself, but of the unknown that comes after. I am afraid not of leaving, but of being forgotten. I am in love today but am afraid that I might not be tomorrow. And that is to say nothing of the bullets, the bombs, the waters rising, and the potential for an apocalypse. People ask me to offer them hope, but I’d rather offer them honesty. Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn’t always serve reality. Hope is the small hole cut into the honest machinery. The milk crate is still a milk crate, but with the right opening, a basketball can make its way through. If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to a grave.

In my younger days, I might have pushed or fought or begun some pointless shouting match. But another thing I learned long ago is that scenes benefit from the appearance of diversity, because that appearance gives them a space to not change any actual behavior on the interior of the scene. It’s a model known all too well, where a company or an organization has some large public fuckup or gets called out on some long-known truth, and their first instinct is to bring in a Black person to help calm the noise. A politician who is charged with being out of touch with America’s Black population tweets a poorly constructed Kwanzaa greeting. Blackness, or a proximity to Blackness, is America’s favorite balm for a painful conscience.