on existential angst
There are people who hate me on principle. They see me, register my skin color, and decide I'm less human than they are. There are a lot of mindfucks that come with being Black, and, for me, that's one of them. I know this from my own lived experiences. Like middle school, and the the 7-11 clerk who told me at 3:30pm that I needed to hurry up and purchase, as the store was closing soon. Or the servers I encountered in the Mission when I went to San Francisco a few years ago, Brown women who glared at me disinterestedly before offering enthusiastic service to the White tech bros that came in after me. Or the light skinned Latina who gave me a dirty look as I sat across from her, waiting to board my flight home from New Orleans. Or the man who yelled “Nigger” out of a car as he passed me on Chicago Avenue last summer, though there were enough other Black folks around for me to be confused about who the intended audience was.
Skeptical White people, liberal and otherwise, will insist there’s no way of truly knowing which of those incidents have to do with race. Sometimes there isn’t. That’s the other mindfuck. You always wonder if the shitty treatment you receive is because the person is just an asshole, or because they register your skin color and nothing else.
Some weeks back I had fallen asleep watching Youtube videos and googling the murder of Deborah Samuels, a student in Sokoto, Nigeria who was burned alive for quote unquote denouncing Islam. And I was thinking about how the Blackest country in the world is in the throes of its own unrest, lawlessness growing as everyday people grow hungrier and more desperate on the daily. I woke up hours later to find more chaos…something about a mass shooting in Buffalo. Racially charged, the headlines said. Oh God, I thought. Is it us? My mind immediately flashed back to the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. How that young White man infiltrated their service, sat next to them in worship before killing them. How the police took him away in handcuffs instead of a body bag. How they bought him breakfast afterwards.
I saw that almost all of the victims were Black in the Buffalo shooting. And that the murderer shot at people loading groceries in their car, people working, people out and about enjoying the unseasonably warm May weather. Buying birthday cakes for their toddlers and picking up something quick to eat before heading home. I cried. I thought about Kendrick’s album, which I also cried for (albeit for different reasons). I love Kendrick the way I love Ta-Nehisi. The way they both write about the Black American experience, all the histories and pathologies and textures we swim through, always shifts something in my solar plexus. I’m a poet after all, and rap is a close cousin. Black American history isn’t the history of my ancestors but it’s a history I cannot escape as a Black person living here. It’s a history I’m connected to as part of the Yoruba diaspora in the Atlantic world, a diaspora that many Black American descendants of chattel slavery are also a part of. Even if the distance for them is greater.
I think about this all on the advent of Juneteenth weekend, which will be rife with Black people celebrating ourselves en masse. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There must be something magical enough about our existence that drives so many to want to extinguish us.