Black Boy Out of Time

by Hari Ziyad

as if to be mentally ill in a society that fuels mental illness is reason enough for the state to punish a person.

Of course she was capable of overcoming. She is a Black woman, after all—held

Misafropedia creates monsters out of Black children simply for being children, and I had internalized this concept by virtue of not actively working against it.

This is a culture where state vengeance is lauded as the solution to any problem, where we so regularly send to prison the Black and poor people whom capitalism excludes from accessing resources, punishing them for trying to survive inside a state-designed and anti-Black scarcity model.

our singular past is always that of enslaved people “freed” into an anti-Black, carceral system.

Capitalism is a system in which individuals are given value only through competing,

I didn’t know it was an option to find meaning in getting you back, in nurturing a love for myself.

It’s magical the things Black people create out of the scraps thrown at us.

do not always ask what it means when I desire thin, light-skinned, able-bodied partners (and friends) in a fatphobic, white-supremacist, ableist society.

White people can run away from things that we can’t.

There is so much exhaustion in detailing what no one else is able to do while white people and their problems are attended to, and that exhaustion is taking a thing, too.

Abolition posits that redress is possible when we are allowed to hold resentment and kindness simultaneously, without these sentiments being forced into binary opposition. It posits that people who do bad things can do better, in this life or the next, if acknowledged as being part of a community to which they are accountable, a community that cares for and supports them without letting them off the hook.