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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

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.

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.