Black Boy Out of Time

by Hari Ziyad

When Black folks die, it is never so simple.1 When Black folks die, it can always be traced to the myriad ways the state has perfected killing us over the last five centuries of colonization.

I believed that the parts of her that would understand and love me were buried so deep beneath her own pain that they would take years to excavate. Years I knew she didn’t have. Years that had been stolen from her, just like my childhood had been pried away from me.

How much could I blame myself for internalizing self-hatred while trying to find what about me was worth saving

Black lives, Black suffering for the sake of pious ideals never proved to be enough for divine intervention—for any kind of deliverance

and beating myself up trying and failing at perfectly masculine performances, under the direction of my parents and their gods, never brought me salvation.

Therapy is not a substitute for communal healing practices or a community that cares for you, but it can help you better recognize what that community looks like or aid you in becoming a member of a caring community for somebody else—and for yourself—when done with that goal in mind.

“The policing I do to shame my Inner Child, I’m encouraged to do that every day by the whole nation-state of America. I’m encouraged to mute my anger at injustice, never to speak my mind about the state harming me or the oppression I feel and experience by law, and that doesn’t just affect me. That affects everyone in my community.”

In exploring how to truly witness how I have been affected by our past, I am compelled to acknowledge that reshaping how I understand it affects what came before me, too. It affects how the past shows up in my life, in the stories I tell about it, and thus it affects what the past is to whomever I tell these stories.

She is a Black woman, after all—held hostage by a myth of limitless strength that allows her meager rest.

There is so much truth, history to unravel and uh huh moments in this statement .

there are many different versions of the past, that each is affected by the perception of the person telling the story.

To make your body seen in a world that finds your light too bright, you must first put it out.