Black Boy Out of Time

by Hari Ziyad

I learned only recently that insects orbit our bodies because they are attracted to our decaying skin. They sense the parts of us that are dying, that we would never otherwise notice. Perhaps, in the single month they have to live, they are just trying to share in this terrifying experience together—just saying, “I am dying, too”—but all I ever heard was a nuisance.

Now I wonder if, like the fly, she was being drawn to the parts of me that I had begun to lose over the years: pieces of my childhood that reflected so much of the life she would soon lose, too.

But as meticulously as she’d phrased it, underneath her carefulness I still heard, “I don’t want you to be a child.” The unuttered words mocked me through the filter I’d built policing myself, trying to get away from the little boy I had been conditioned to want to leave behind.

her womb was always deadly, I suppose. It was always Black, and its likelihood of carrying a fatal cancer was always higher because of it—just one of many such racial health disparities that the United States has not eradicated, despite medical advances.2

across social groups, illustrates this.3) Other disparities—that Black women in this country are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related issues than white women,

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

carceral logics—beliefs rooted in policing, punishing, and incarcerating the socially undesirable and in locking up those who don’t fit neatly into this society’s binary definitions of selfhood—were at the root of everything that had been unfair to our entire family. Because the only solution they offer is punishment, adhering to carceral logics prevents us from recognizing our role in each other’s pain, sometimes even as a coping mechanism developed in an understandable attempt to avoid the cruel and constant hand of punishment ourselves.

how much should I hold accountable the world that separated us from our childhoods in the first place and told us that blaming each other was all we could ever do about it?

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.

“misogynoir” to describe “the anti-Black

I offer “misafropedia” to mean the anti-Black disdain for children and childhood that Black youth experience.

even then, I knew there were no unimportant father-son moments—not when the death and encaging of Black fathers is a birthright.