“Til’ you do right by me, everything you even think of is gonna fail.”
I love these words. In which Ms. Celie offers us all a testimony and a cautionary tale. A tree can’t grow healthy without its roots, and if our family is one then Ms. Celie’s words are instructive on how we nurture our roots into health.
The world is hostile to us, black people. Its hostility thickens the further one moves from the platforms of patriarchy. Black men, our kin in oppression, having the most access of anyone to black femmes, are the ones who beat, rape, exploit, who shoot and kill us. No show of loyalty has proved strong enough to create a pause between your anger and your sistahs; we remain the safest place to plant your pain.
How do we imagine liberation with men who hate us? Imagine the feeling of going to war against racism and having no comfort in comradery, always on guard against violence from the enemy within.
I refuse to accept narratives of blackness as pathology. Black people are human and imperfect, unremarkably so. We’ve done so much without respect; we frustrate devils and kings. We are divine in a world that worships a white god. Idolatry that is unrelenting and extremely dangerous. You learned to hate me like you hate yourself. I know you can only do what you do, black men, because you feel like shit. Less useful than dust. I imagine there are many reasons how this came to be. Hurt people hurt people. You’ve been sold into masculinity that thrives off of controlling resources and simultaneously your body is the resource. You have to be strong with muscles made of trauma. You can’t cry. It’s fucking miserable. I don’t hate you. I hate the evil that made us like this.
I don’t believe that you are a thug. I don’t believe the right questions are being asked. Why won’t you stop shooting? Why won’t they? Hmm. What is sacred about life to a baby born in a graveyard? Life don’t mean shit to a nigga that never had shit. Somebody always wants something from you and the exchange is not mutual. A baby can’t hold up his own head, but a black man, infantilized and denied childhood, he has to hold up the whole world? Is that what it feels like? I can only imagine.
Depression has taught me that I will only survive this nightmare if I allow myself radical, unconditional empathy. I’m thinking too that radical empathy will help me survive this nightmarish life with my blackness intact. I’m holding tight to my belief that blackness, black people, are not problematic. Just human. The shit black men do challenges my radical empathy towards black people. I’m angry, hurt, and I want to hate you so much. But. I can’t learn to love myself without reconciling the self I see in you. I speak love for us both. I won’t hate you, even if I can’t trust you.
When we make eye contact we see each other’s reflections and get angry because the image seems ugly. No life form exists without power to harm another. Ants bite and get bitten, stuck in spiderwebs. So it goes and goes. This world sometimes feels like a web for black lives. Somehow we always end up getting stuck and chewed up. I wonder if we’ve been made to feel so powerless that, in order to live a life not defined by loss and defeat, we spend it biting at each other. I know something about it. If I have to be in pain, at least let me hurt myself. So it goes.
I want so badly for things to be different. Is there a reason for all the bloodshed? Is it true that to be born, you have to swim through blood? We just tryna live? Is that it? When will there be enough?
I started writing this letter angry because I’m not safe in the people I call home. Wondering if ruin is inevitable because niggas ain’t shit, and so it goes. Me looking down on you and wishing you weren’t shit. I can’t let it end here. Radical empathy has got my tongue. I won’t take the bait. Black men aren’t worse than other humans. They hurt us, we hurt them, we hurt ourselves, we die and birth in pain. Racialized capitalism has put us in solitary confinement and only radical community can free us. All we have is each other.
I don’t have the answers. I’m tired too. I barely have hope that things will get better before they get worse. I just know whatever freedom or justice you seek, black men, can’t emerge while your roots are rotten. You can’t degrade me without degrading yourself because we are all spirit. Kindred. The cost of your freedom is not the harm you give to yourself or to others. Freedom is your birthright, a gift from the Creator. Liberation is the highest, most honorable use of this gift. Billionaires have no advice to offer you about escaping slavery; our ancestors left a trail for us to follow.
Til you do right by you, everything you think about is going to morph into a monster and you will have to fight. Til you embrace the softness, the laughter, the fear. Just human. Cry. Sob until it makes you thirsty. Water yourself and grow. Align. If you got something to say, say it. Pain is in your throat because you not telling the truth. I admire all of your strength, I do. What else? What are you afraid of? What made you feel small? Ugly? Who hurt you? Where in your body does the hurt live? Close your eyes and see. You are fertile and sometimes the harvest is enough, even if it does not feed everyone.
I won’t ask you for answers to questions because you are not an equation. Just human. There’s nothing to be figured out except how to lay down enough of your heart’s burdens and be light enough to fly away. This is life’s work. I hope that when we fly, we don’t land somewhere that isn’t safe for us both. I pray that when we get our wings, we can go far away from here.
