Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

“The most important part of writing, and really life,” you said, “is revision.”

America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.

never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn’t survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.

I wondered about the purpose of warning white folk about the coming fire. Mostly, I wondered

what black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.