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Who can really protect Black children in an anti-Black world?
If the tables were turned, how much wuld change? If we could chose to trade plces with a Black person, we all know what our choice would be.
Too often, the gods Black children are presented with demand they conform to respectability politics, with morals rooted in what white society sets as the standards for behavior—standards that were designed specifically to exclude them.
misafropedia” to mean the anti-Black disdain for children and childhood that Black youth experience.
I have seen this too much in my lifetime. How do we make the right chnges as white people of privilege? We, alone, have the ability .
After five hundred years of the atrocities of colonialism and no repair, there must be more to Black folks’ struggles than our own failures.
Can you imagine feeling this way?
There are doctors who disregard what we know about our bodies because they have anti-Black biases about what these bodies can do, deduce, and withstand. All of this is real—most of it I’ve experienced firsthand—and it leads to a logical aversion to medical professionals, particularly those whose effectiveness relies on how much they get to know you . . . which means it also relies on how vulnerable you allow yourself to be.
Read this again.
twenty-two-year-old Malaysia Goodson, a Black mother who, in January 2019, fell while trying to carry her stroller and baby down the subway stairs because there was no working elevator at her station and died (her official cause of death listed cardiac hypertrophy, which can lead to sudden death after physical stress, and hyperthyroidism as factors16).
I don't know what to add here.
It’s almost impossible to feel excitement about anything when the threat of fatal disease is lurking around the corner.
If you don't have hope, there is nothing .
In this version of the story, other poor Black children were always a different type of poor from me.
This works for our own narrative.
To hear this white police officer tell his account of Brown’s murder, the young man was angry for no discernible reason, just as Roberto seemed to me in my recollections. Angry without cause. Beast, not boy. Bloodthirsty and devious. His violence was constructed as inevitable, regardless of whether it actually occurs. His violence was manufactured as perpetual, even when a pattern can’t be established. Because if you construct the story like that, then a Black child deserves whatever comes to them. Both Wilson and I were raised in the same America. The America that demonizes all Black
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We need to understand this to make any kind of change.
On the few, but still too frequent, occasions that I came home to that little yellow house to see one of my older siblings crying because one of his Black friends had been killed, I was always already armed with a plethora of reasons for why and how they might have deserved it by the time I reached my door. If I chose to bear those arms, I was also choosing to live in a specific version of the present defined by the state. I often did. I
We created this. Only we can change it.
Protecting children shouldn’t be conflated with controlling them and their perspectives along their journey into adulthood.
Children should have the privilege of chosing who they will become.
All Black children are subjected to the harm that comes with erasing the complexity of their childhood experiences as they are forced into the categories of “young men” or “young women.” This expression of misafropedia also comes for our girl children, in how we project designations like “fast” onto those like Tierra.
neighborhoods where sisters like Sarah and Tierra and Marissa and Titi sometimes fight on the streets, but only because they want nothing more than to protect and be there for their siblings.
Most of them, in fact, serve to foster a kind of community, the kind that cheers on a person for acing tests that measure only how good they are at taking tests, not their intelligence; for having more of the skills others will celebrate than anyone else in the room, even if they don’t have more of the skills others will need;
Bernie gets this.
To be Black and exceptional in this world requires seeing yourself not in your people but in whiteness.
Think of all of the black people you know and ask yourself if you are most comfortable with those that fit your idea of white.
I had come to think of the tardiness of my peers and Black folks in general not only as inconvenient but as an indictment of their character.
There's much to read here.
the state hoarded resources to turn the white faces of the opioid crisis into sympathetic victims while it made out the Black faces of the crack epidemic to be monsters deserving of their lot.
Two sides of the same coin.
“People get too caught up in what they call god, and what he does or doesn’t look like, with too little concern for all that he does,” he rationalizes.
I agree.
To make your body seen in a world that finds your light too bright, you must first put it out.
Heartwrenching statement.
El-Amin could only be a brute. That is the story that reaches the widest audience possible, and so that is the story that sells.
News isn't free. The "story " has to sell. What are you buying?
For empathy to be activated, a witness has to interpret someone else’s pain and see it as similar to their own. When Black pain not only is seen as dissimilar to the viewer but also gives them pleasure—when our bodies have been defined as inherently criminal—it’s no wonder that police body camera footage of an unarmed Black person being murdered so rarely leads to a conviction.
This paragraph overwhelms me.
