It’s hard but it’s true . This impeachment was a farce from the begginning and it will continue and end as such because the DEMOCRATS/ Liberals / Radicals / Policy Makers. etc .

Had the NERVE to demand what they wouldn’t do.

They want Republicans to admit that their is a high good than in group partisanship and incivility.

They won’t. You’re pundits are soft racists who won’t admit concentration camps exist, who won’t acknowledge non affiliated experts , who steal ideas Willy nilly and défend Nazis .

They went in with this but demanded different from Republicans.

Had Democrats LEAD with a reconciliation minded politic , had they LEAD with their responsibility and an honest assessment of their own complicity and comeplacency. We would have something.

Imagine if it had started with an impassioned apology to the lack of voting rights , an acknowledgment of harm done a real discussion of and public events to match these unfoldings

Imagine if that ha accompanied voter registration and actual support . Nope . Gotta be condescending assholes

They didn’t no we’re here . Oh well

TL ;DR : I am giving a track keynote. I’d rather report what people who are affected by the work we’re talking want us to know. Take this survey. Password :darkwing

Hello folks , I want to try something and I need your help.

I’m Sydette ( Blackamazon on the Twitter) and before I had a work life around how we communicate, I communicated (often loudly and profanely)about how decisions are made about people in tech, movements, media and government. Especially around how it involved Hamiltonian “rooms where it happens” for credentialed people making pronouncements .

I was the Community Lead for The Coral Project , I’m currently an Editor of Web Properties at Mozilla, and do independent research in historical communication and it’s effects on modern society especially around culture, performance studies, information architecture and blackness. I’m a systems and theories kind of gal.

I now have a work life around communication and I am part of the system and the inherent problems of the system I critiqued (and still do loudly and profanely. I’m giving one of the Civic Innovation keynotes at the Code for America Summit and part of a workshop on decolonizing civic tech.

I’m also one of two pictured black women speakers. As Beyoncé said so succinctly

“Ain’t that about a bitch”

I’m honored to be there. I think it’s important to have the BEGINNINGS of the discussions that need to happen. I also don’t think anything I’m talking about will be accomplished just in those rooms or by having me on stage. I’m not even sure it’s the right place to have it

AND

I also think we are in an oh crap moment about what tech is doing to and for people, and I’m gonna take every second I can to go “ OH MY GOD CAN WE PLEASE DO SOMETHING ELSE BECAUSE CECI N’EST PAS IT FAM”

I’m a systems and process gal. So while I have a talk on backup I’m more interested in what the people I am on the internet with and for , who don’t get to go to these spaces would say .

So I’m asking you to talk so I can listen, and then so I can have people who come see it listen.

So I made a survey and I’m making these agreements :

• It’s anonymous and I’m not collecting IP’s . However it is password protected so I ( pray) I’m not bot flooded. It can be shared on Facebook.
• not getting paid for this talk . I’m asking the internet to do work for me so I’m putting $100 to SisterSong and $100 to BAJI after the conference. Receipts will be posted
• I’m doing this manually so it stays open for 7 days. I reserve the right to close it with that time if it gets to much, etc. I will update on Medium and Twitter.
• I will write it up and post an open accessible version of whatever talk I give.

This may work it may not but let’s give it a shot.

This is the write up of my SRCCON:WORK talk ( transcript here)and my hope for news .

When Ryan says I fearlessly advocate and be a strong voice for people online. I’m like, that’s such a nice way of saying, when I get pissed off at people, I cuss a lot and I get angry. One of the things that I wanted to talk about especially after the two weeks I had? was

I’m not supposed to be here.

I’m really not and we need to talk about this systemically, we need to talk about this structurally, we need to talk about this actually, and we need to go through all of the reasons why I’m not supposed to be here, why I am here, and what conversations we need to have, and what that means about the communities we represent and serve.

I am black, if you have haven’t noticed. I am also Guyanese, which is in South America. It is not in Africa and I am not sorry about it. I don’t like the phrase “unapologetic blackness.”

I like to say unrepentant, because we treat Blackness as a sin. I’m constantly asked to mitigate the fact that I’m black, as if I will be cosmically punished and I don’t. And that’s often why I’m in trouble, and been in trouble for a couple decades. I’m only 33, you do the math.

Let’s be honest about why.

First generation Guyanese American from a mixed documentation background. When I said the past two weeks, I actually should have said my life. But if I did not work with an accepting newsroom, a co-project with Coral, at Mozilla, I would not have a job. I would not have a job from something you cover every single day. I am 33 years old. Every decade of my life, I’ve had a family member in prison or deported, This isn’t academic to me it’s life

If you have ever tried to organize a round of deportation when family has disappeared, families disappear, or trying to organize lawyers. Shit is rough. Other rule is if I start crying is let me cry and move on

I actually have some money( not a lot because being poor early costs a long time) now. It is STILL hard. I disappeared from my job for a day. I sent a text to my boss and said, they took my cousin! I don’t know where he is! and I still had it .

You can’t say that in most newsrooms. You will not be allowed to say this. I would not have a job. My mom was a home health aid worker, a maid, and an organizer. My father was a mechanic, entreeneu . My father was undocumented and was deported. Nobody in my family voted until I was 12 years old. I voted in exactly one more presidential election than my mom did. My mom is 67. My parents have GEDs.

Journalism is not for or made for about people like me.

Troublesome.

I’m black. You know the diversity statistics of your newsrooms. I’m a black woman. You know what it is. You know the coverage that is in your newsrooms. More than a five you especially work at a major paper, some of whom use Coral products have with my full name, my title, and my gorgeous blue check, and I haven and continue to promise to fight ’em. I’m not kidding. What they write puts me in danger, and makes my life harder. I don’t go to news functions because if I see them, I’m going to put these lovely, gorgeous, Violet Timberland boots right into a chest.

A certain kind of person is supposed to excel a certain kind of presentation, from the way we talk to the way we wear our hair.

” Why do you have a political hairstyle? You mean my hair grows out of my head? My response was to dye my hair blue. I try to be as aggressively black as possible in certain spaces because we don’t have a discussion about why blackness of a certan kind is so startling

I’m Guyanese . New York purebred, but I’m built Ford Tough

Which leads me to my next poing do not insult me, my community, or my intelligence by saying I’m diversity, or that I have imposter syndrome.

I don’t. I’m an early access adopter of social media. I was the first five people who had Facebook. I think it was XXO, I was on Friendster. I was on Twitter in 2008. I’m a multilingual millennial baby Xer, Y, whatever,I’m under 35, and I have disposable income, so I’m still in the area that matters.

I am not falsely modest. I am one of the smartest people you know
and I’ve got documentation to prove it .

I am an aberration. And I say that with the best of love for myself. I’m a Prep for Prep kid, Contingent XVII. Prep for Prep it takes the highest performing scoring students from low-income schools and puts them through a battery of tests. You usually start at ten, I started when at nine. You’re psychoanalyzed, you’re tested, you’re IQ tested, leadership training, 14 months of school except for Sunday, between fifth and sixth grade. I did that two years early and the attrition rate ranges from 25% to 33% . I have been psychologically profiled to be a person to make it through a system like this. I was built for this. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania here in , Class of 2005.

I’m trained in history, performance, and sociology. I spent my academic career studying the structures of why I shouldn’t be here because I spent my academic career trying to transform myself into someone people would think should be here and I did it two years later. I graduated from high school when I was 16, and I graduated from college when I was 20 — I’m bad.

( at this moment a baby in the room goes “ YEAH you’re bad” Everyone should feel this moment )

2005 is also the year that my father was deported. So if you pick up any of the graduation pictures from the University of Pennsylvania, you will see someone a Guyanese flag walk across the stage,because my father was in a detention center. People asked me why I was “disturbing” the sanctity of graduation. That’s my life,that’s what people are going through, that’s what people in your communities are going through every day. And if they had to try and do that process in some of the newsrooms we work with, they wouldn’t have jobs.

Because I believe in the work. I am not here to save your job , I want to save the work and we’re here to work. So what are we working for? Why are we here? Those are the questions that we need to ask. What are the communities that you want to serve, what is the work that we want to do?

Not how do we save journalism or papers because as I said before, a couple of y’all I’m going to fight them.

And it’s uncouth, but we didn’t talk about the people who wrote reams and reams of reductivist insulting racist thinkpieces about everything from Beyonce to Black Lives Matter, ignoring how it hurts and shows we don’t care Our audiences think we don’t care , have no answers and are condescending while being wrong .

New York Times, New York Daily News, the Wave. Do you have a metro section anymore?
When was the last time you covered Far Rockaway,not the beach, or the Williamsburg Ferry, or the Patty Smith?I’m from Far Rockaway. We’r one of the most food deserted neighborhoods in America. It is a 45-minute drive for me from Far Rock to New York Times, it’s a two hour community if I’m good.

So what do we do? We have to ask ourselves, our audiences, our structures, and our fundamental way to do work. So we’re asking, with the Coral Project, lead by the fantastic Dr. Meridith D. Clark and this took a year, thank you, IRB gods, we are doing a focus on marginalized voices in comment spaces. We are asking women and non-gender-binary people of color, specifically to tell us about how they consume news, what they feel about news, and how they comment in news.

This has not been done. We spent a lot of this time looking for, who has that? Oh, no one. We adjusted this search. It’s now open to everyone. But what I’m asking you to forward this to specifically to your non-news people. The people that we don’t think about. The people and getting their news from other places because they are done with us, and they have every right to be.

#myhopefornews

My hope for news. These people. #myhopefornews . Stemming from a workshop I colead with Gaba on Ally Journalism at SRCCON journalists. OpenNews asked us what we would do next.

So I asked for the most out of the box thing I wanted and expected to walk it back.

“I want to take journalist whom we respect, who have the experience of walking around the way I walk the way I do and talk to my hood and try to form a group of people to do right by all those identities that say I should be in “those rooms” And because it’s OpenNews.

They said yes

So these people, these amazing, wonderful, wonderful people, came from Cali, Wisconsin — LA, jumped on a plane, came to CUNY, and said, let’s get on a train and let’s go to Far Rockaway. People came to my neighborhood from across the country when the three newspapers that were considered newspapers of record, in any way, won’t go down the A-train line.

That is hope for these people, I would do everything because they came to work, we walked in the cold, special shout-outs to Jennifer, who when I said, it’s going to be cold Wisconsin was prepared.These people sat with members of my community,and listened and hopefully with RYTF ? We are gonna work more.

Also, Monique came from Compton to New York and back in two weeks and then we found out that we’re actually cousins. Like blood relationships. because Caribbean . These people when I asked them to come, came, when people told me no one would want to . When I was told it was not possible and they came to work . And these Ministers of Grace said

“ I’m just a worker.” I’m not a person who gets up on stage. “I’m not a person who builds a career. I do what I do well.”

We need workers . This is the moment we need workers most of all. We need a Neutral Net so we can access this work. We need workers that reflect the people we claim to work for.

This is our moment for . If we can focus is not just our careesr, or industry but the work we do, and the way it affects not just the our audiences and ourselves and the entire world, I have hope.

I don’t like just being up on stage I like getting stuff done. I’m not supposed to be here , blue haired New York Tinkerbell, is not supposed to be here But fam?

. I’m not supposed to be here but I’m here now. We may not win, but we still have work and if we have work we can do ? I have hope we can do it.

*these views are only mine and don’t reflect the views of my employer*

*written to “Long Live the Angels” but specifically Oh Sweet Architect by Emili Sandé”

Dear Jack,

This took a while but I’m trying to be generative because I am furious .

Twitter has given me so much. It has given me love, it has provided me with shelter, it probably got me my career and honestly some of the best people I have ever met. It has let me know my childhood heroes actually see me and some of them adore the person I have become.

That knowledge, those emotions are what pulled me back in our last exchange, and that’s why you’re matching #Dacaovernight. #Dacaovernight is the kind of gift I have always dreamed of being able to do with my community, and your match ( and I’m gonna push you to go a little further and you’ll see why ) is beyond that and whatever else I am ever grateful that you gave me the chance to be part of that with the platform you built. I want you to understand that.

I need you to understand, because if I had answered the way I wanted to on Friday? You wouldn’t be matching, I’m not sure you would’ve let me stay on Twitter . ( I wouldn’t have let me , so that’s not a judgement)

I am furious Jack. I am furious with you for what Twitter has become. I am furious with how we got here. I am furious that I have to thank lucky breaks, angels on earth, and years of abuse to even be able to write this letter.

I am furious that the amount that you’re matching is less than the bar tab of the first two hours of your holiday office party, and for the people you’re about to give it to it is everything but you promised. You promised to change twitter, you promised to “explain further” and you did. So I’m going to trust that you’ll keep the promise to you made me in the thread, as I am keeping mine.

Because what I am most furious about is that people keep pretending this is just you or Twitter, like this hasn’t been going on forever with many of the people, shouting about your responsibility avoiding theirs.

I’ve been on Twitter since 2008, it helped me do this, these are my people. I need you to match my people, the donors, the donees,the choosers and the dedications. They are my hope, they are my work, they are how I go on. I told my people I would give 200 and they gave the following, I need you to match my people.

What Jack’s Matching

Day Of

1. Please match or more $450 in information withheld donations in the form of a donation in respect to my father, Andrew Losowsky,and Elon James to the American Friends Service Committee . Andrew is the Project Lead of the Coral Project, it’s why I’m blue checked and it’s about bringing community to journalism. I told him what I was thinking and in 15 minutes he had done it. His donation is one of many protected ones done directly because people were to scared to ask in the hashtag.Elon was in my DM’s within 10 minutes willing to put it every where .The AFSC is a Quaker organization that brings attention to those in the centers the people who can’t speak to what’s happening. My college was founded as a Quaker school and a detention center is where my father was on the day I graduated.
2. Please match or more $200 to The Latin American Coalition in honor of Twitter user Franzia Fanon . Because they just sent out applications on faith and were going to figure it out later. They did the work and hoped. Franzia Fanon connected us.Twitter answered that hope

and that’s it of the people who asked . #Dacaovernight raised over $5,000 in one day and we only got to direct donate $650 dollars because people were scared to ask. They didn’t believe, they didn’t know or they didn't want to bother anyone. And people tried to return parts of the $650 dollars because they didn’t believe that there would be enough , so they wanted to make sure others had it.

If you read #Dacaovernight as a hashtag, Jack ? It’s mostly me begging people to ask because I know when you get unheard for so long, long you stop asking. They didn't expect anyone to care. I had to research and ask because while people often talked about their sorrow? They didn’t tell me how to help . So when you issued your tweet stream saying your listening, I snapped out . Who were you listening to, because it sure as FUCK hadn’t been me or my people. I need you to listen ( and read) now.

After #dacaovernight Donations

1. Please match or more $500 to IDEPSCA in honor of it’s ED (and my girl) Maegan Ortiz and my mother. My mother was an 1199 rep homecare worker. . She’s poor, black, immigrant and couldn’t vote till 1996. She’s only voted in two more presidential elections than I have and I’m 33. She’s a mean old lady who survived deportation, hurricanes, and strokes. She’s shoved governors out of her way to feed the poor. Maegan is my fellow “problem child” of the feminist/non profit world we weren’t supposed to be here and here we are.
2. Please match or more $528.81 to the Queer Detainee Empowerment project, which was donated on National Coming Out Day and dedicate it to Tony K.Choi. Because when I finally threw up my hands and asked who helps the immigrants who don’t fit narratives, Tony stepped up .
3. Please match or more $1000 dollars to BAJI in honor of 25 special,beautiful groups of Black Women on #thedayofthegirl who held and hold me up ,a black 1G woman who was born in 1984 living with the problems Twitter started focusing on in 2016. Please donate for Dominica, and the USVI and Barbuda destroyed and forgotten. Learn their names especially CaShawn , a woman like my mother who helped make a moment by seeing us and gets so often callously left out.
4. Please match or more $500 dollars to the Indigenous Interpreting Program, which was donated on National Indigenous People’s Day. Please dedicate it to my Yamin ,Rustbelt Rebel,Adriana Gallardo, Liza Sabater and Aura Bogado. For constantly trying to tell stories that most can not even put into words.
5. Please match or more $500 dollars to Taller Salud and $200 reserve for Bianca Laureno in honor of her mother to any charity giving direct medical aid to PR. Please dedicate the money for Taller Salud to Professor Jessica Johnson, Blog Diva, Mi Adela, Maegan again ,and Lin Manuel Miranda. Jack I was raised in the Queens and the Bronx, Puerto Rico is like an element, I can’t comprehend. What is being done to
6. Please match or more $450 of donations to “Keep Sydette’s Ass Alive and Explain Banking to her so she doesn't over draft” to Neolithic Sheep, Linda Tirado,the Holzman Tweeds and Bookoisseur . I’m passing this to CCADI, who let me in early to work on emails, where I sat next to generators for PR, and said nothing when I sobbed on the floor of “Liminal Space” because it was the first exhibit of my homeland, and the last words spoken on “The Seawall” we’re the last words my Grandma said to me from Guyana before she died.
7. Please match or more a donation of $300 to Council De Manos , chosen by TL Lewis. In honor of Keah Maria, Vilissa Thompson, Mia Mingus and Neal “ Lives His Life in The Paint” Carter ( yes I would like it written like that). Because it’s all of us or none of us. And they refuse to let us forget the deaf/disabled community.
8. Please match or more a donation of $200 dollars to my friend a teacher who works solely with ESL students and I will not name. In her honor please give it to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
9. Please match or more a reserve ( aka when you find out how to actually get them money let me know ) of $300 to KoRoot honor of Philip Clay, a Korean born American deportee who died by suicide upon being forced to leave the only home he’s ever known. and dedicated to Jazzagold, who was so worried about me she went about an hour in the wrong direction on the A train
10. Please match or more $700 to the Immigrant Defense Project in honor of my Wifey and the Mommy of my Birthday Stealer and Emily Gorcenski . These are brilliant women who have come to my defense, and the tangible defense of others when it was theory to everyone else

And What It Means Now

Finally ,Please match or more 206.48 to Law at the Margins in honor of KC . Who was not Bitch/Lab but Ilykadamen. KC remembered me as a girl, not a monster . That’s my personal donation , Chaumtoli Huq and I spoke at meeting of Independent School Technologists and said the year 1996 and I rejoiced. She like KC , saw me .

That’s the hook Jack, my father wouldn’t have been saved by DACA,it’s almost a decade too late and he’s wasn’t a “good” immigrant. Like I haven’t been a good survivor , or online target. I’ve been talking about this since 2005, the year my father was deported and since 2008. Jack I know what it’s like to be screamed at, used as a symbol, and have no resources and just give up.

The hashtag that resulted from Mikki Kendall reminding me why a man admitting he abused me did nothing to move feminism ,generated MILLIONS of tweets ( watching Jessica Valenti yell about ignoring abuse or hear Laurie Penny and Amanda Marcotte talk about centering WOC only stopped being traumatizing last year, now it’s darkly comic). I analyzed how this behavior foretold a disturbing innoculation to black suffering. I’nasah Crockett grounded it historically in 2014. I’ve presented,attended, and organized conferences with Andrew about it.

I also had to fight. I have to fight my industry, Nazis, this government and now quite possibly my Alma Mater. The fuzzy generic language makes me a target for the moderation you claim to be aiming at hate groups.

Jack , fam, I’mma be honest I told someone I would put a Timberland boot through their chest THIS WEEK, and what I called an Apple DJ in the name of hip hop is something I hope my momma never sees.I have a list of some folks who just gotta fight me many of them bluechecked , because in the silence you ,social media ,tech , history and journalism I can’t go silent. I had to SCREAM and committing to fucking some folks up.

I had to because until two weeks ago? I didn't have much else but my voice. I can’t stop talking, even though I never expect anyone to listen .University of Pennsylvania, The Quaker school that gave me the skills and training and cachet to be able to be here writing this analysis to make you run my people some funds, is trying to fire a teacher who centers kids like I was in their teaching and I only found out about it on Twitter.

Do you understand what it feels after all that to read that “you’ve reached out to Rose’s people” only to see that someone slapped a target on my back on Twitter for someone on YouTube.

That my response was not profane in three languages , two patois and a creole is a gift from universe. I need you to give that gift.

Jack, I have been dealing with this so long and so heavy that I have multipurpose critiquing you, detailing where your money is going , airing out my college, on a speaking trip, before a work event. Funds I KNOW you can match, but can you match my HUSTLE?

Not for money, but to not explode in a world that let’s what happened on your platform be directed at you? Because that’s mine and I’m trying to match even greater hustle, with less reward.

I’m actually trying to match the hustle of the reason I didn’t cuss you clear across creation and give you every reason to ban me from Twitter. Two donations : $3 and $5. Two people on fixed income donated to cover tax and buy me a cup of coffee. They sat and made room in budgets so tight that $3 and $5 means they denied themselves basics because they thought someone else might need it and because they wanted to make sure I could keep going.

You can’t be talking to these people, and frankly neither are the people yelling at,about and to you, if you or THEY were? we wouldn’t be here. Jack I am part of a group called #resistandgive and we give every month and you know what breaks us ? Not the money but the volume , the sheer volume of need.You didn’t start it but you helped it grow, and on everything I love you better help. Jack people in the #dacaovernight list can not stand each other, some of the donors can’t stand me, and they gave. You can do more than “match”.

Because the thing I am most furious about is that I’m terrified . Not for me but for “my people”, because if you don’t make that kind of $3 and $5 dollar room, if you don’t listen I just put my people in danger for nothing. I can’t look at #dacaovernight now because for a non trending hashtag it’s already full of the kind of people who want me dead , lead by the kinds of Nazi you won’t ban, connected to the government that is killing us. What being on Twitter 8 years has taught me is that even if you don’t listen ? The people who hate us are. Almost everyone I ask you dedicate in the name of has a paypal or patreon ( and if ya can please give to them too) but I’m scared .

Jack, this is so desperate that I am risking the thing I hold most deep in the world. The love of my people. If you don’t make good and make this worth it I have exposed the people I love .

Jack I have yelled at you before this and will go right back to it but in addition to matching ( or more … and bruh BRUH come on) the total of $6,035.29 my people raised , I need you to try to be the $3 and $5 dollar person, stretches, who gives understanding how desperate the person on the other end needs it.

I need you to be one of my people for a while and if you feel a way about what I’m saying ? What I am asking of you is just a little more of 1/100th of what was spent to protect the Nazi who built his platform on wanting my people dead. My people did that. You can do better

My people are worth more than that but they get so little I’ve got to risk it for that much.

Take care of my people , Jack . I love them . They ARE your platform.

My people? Don’t got “people” , we all we got.

This started and stopped a couple times, the original thrust was the sheer feelings tornado that came up around HBO’s announcement of Confederate and the hashtag #noconfederate . The hashtag is a place to start. Ta-nehisi Coates has an excellent article about it historically .I get stuck in a swirl however that alternates between laughing uncontrollably, crying like a wounded dragon and being utterly confused. But

Sydette on Twitter

@ava I am Sydette of House Harry, first of my name . Sigil: A gold machete in fist above blue seas against black sun Motto: We shall cross.

I live my motto. I shall cross.

On time 75639 of trying to get this out so I could work on work more clearly . I looked down at my forearms and I got it . And like you’re average Millennial …. I yelled at Judd Apatow on Twitter a little

Sydette on Twitter

Except it's not censorship. It's reaction to centuries of instinct that has kept us whole https://t.co/bE7xGILiD3

(ok so I yelled at Judd Apatow on Twitter A LOT)

And then Charlottesville.

It’s about the difference between the mottos and maxims of institutions and the actual lessons we learn about life.

David Benioff was an English teacher when I was in seventh grade.

David Benioff is a graduate of Collegiate and Dartmouth and then taught at Poly Prep, where he helped teach me, after I finished Prep for Prep after I finished Phillippa Schuyler but before I went to the University of Pennsylvania.Benioff (who I want to call Mr. Freidman on pure muscle memory), and well me are plugged into OBNOXIOUS systems of privileges, and we’ve both been told about it since we arrived.

Confederate in general irks my soul , but when you understand the kind of access and privilege that comes from the places I just obnoxiously named dropped, it doesn’t make sense . Simply being an alum means that one phone call would have produced a ridiculous network of people to run this by without having to default to the “black folks he knew” BEFORE the whole “Emmy winning producer television of the moment thing”.

The announcement confirmed what I have always known, that what I LEARNED about race, privilege, and survival was violently different from what he did , and the violence that shaped how we even met are alternate reality paragraphs in a press announcement to him, while being visceral reality to me. Built in places that are still battle grounds .

Built on blood and soil, and returning to their origins.

These places, like the Houses of Westeros have mottos, and what the feels tornado that I unloaded on Apatow’s head brought out is how all of those mottos hurt me, some by lying but others by having the audacity to tell the truth.

But I am Sydette of House Harry, First of my name . I live my motto.

I will cross

Phillippa Schuyler ( I.S 383)

To Whom Much Is Given Much Is Required

When I went there Phillippa Schuyler was the performing arts academy and it was run by a principal who broke not even the tiniest amount of bullshit. One year before IIRIRA goes into law and makes my father , the felon, deportable.

IIRIRA makes your deportation as dangerous to American conditional not on the time you are sentenced or even serve , but on the maximum available for your crime. I have no idea what my dad is convicted for, I do know it’s the post crack, pre hipster NYC and he’s black and immigrant . I know he isn’t in for long but is a model prisoner because save one or two memories I have little recollection of his jail time.

I also know that this is when I am told that I have to be better and do better . I know the whispers around my family grow . I know that both in school and at home it is drilled I must be an example .

Money we had saved begins to go to lawyers, clothes must go further, presents are smaller . My mother says we are a house at war. My cousin is shot, I barely avoid being shot, two of my cousins get 10+ years , my mother has her first ministroke. My commute is 90 minutes each way . I am “gifted”. My principal says we are black kids in the arts . We have been given much to deal with , we are required.

It is true we are given much , no one said what we were given were gifts

Prep For Prep ( c 1978)

Excellence · Integrity · Commitment · Courage

One year after the Bronx burns and the Birth of Hip Hop 25 Students begin Prep for Prep.

Seventeen years later while still at Schuyler ,so do I . I am two years younger than average. I am tested within an inch of my life. I find out under stress my IQ goes up. I am grilled and prodded . Excellence

We read Black Boy and Dickens. For 14 months the only day off we have is Sunday. We have two school work loads. My report card is submitted every quarter to lawyers, immigration agents, and reviewed by committee.The words are lofty, the intentions good but the truth is evident. We’re the “Talented Tenth”, We must work harder and smarter and stronger than other kids. We can’t be good. We have to be above and beyond. Integrity

Years later we jokingly refer to it as the Mafia, or the hood’s nerdiest gang, We atrophy at nearly 30 %. My two hour commute means I forget to wash . My mother has three fainting spells in 14 months. I pass out , my classmates pass out. My parents send thousands after lawyers. I am told bluntly “ You are black , you are female , you are not cute. You have to make sure the never question you . You go to their school but you are not them” Commitment

This is your way out .

We learn Latin, debate.They are preparing us for education as combat. My father begins getting picked up and threatened while I’m on 20 hour school days . We owe these schools,Prep, ourselves for accepting our company. Courage

Poly Prep Country Day School (1854)

Virtus victrix fortunae
(Virtue is the victor over fate)

I never had Mr. Freidman. I remember him subbing once or twice. He was the dreamy young idealogue to my POC and old hippies in English and History ( Dear God thank you for the looking out).

I am at Poly because I refuse more prestigious schools that would make me repeat the 6th grade , are too far , and my mother is far too stubborn to accept me not going to a “name” school and I? I’m the most exhausted 12 year old this side of the Verrazano

I am a “leader”. I am a nigger . Reminded I’m on scholarship . Denied AP classes ( IN AMERICAN HISTORY) where I take the exams anyway and score higher than kids who take the class.

Every first chapel a head master talks about a blank slate , and we sing this song

Far down on the heights called Dyker,
Overlooking New York Bay,
Stands a school with a tall white tower,
Greeting ships that ply their way.
Her young, as they leave her portals
With visions of worldwide fame,
Carry with them the fight of Poly,
Where they learned to play the game.

So I play the game. Every moment a reminder that while manning multiple clubs, a high GPA, and so much leadership training I try to slit my wrists, I owe them .I roam the streets looking for Angel, work out payment plans for a “god given voice” that can never get cast or solos but am required to attend all performances because they “can’t lose my voice”

I am on the verge of a breakdown and maybe ten people notice .I Peer Lead with a young man who I don’ really trust alone with younger girls and whose family net worth is probably more than Guyana’s GDP. I’m selected to inaugurate our head master, a three season athlete, still two years younger and when I get into college , people whisper “Affirmative Action”

One of the ten people who noticed whispers into my ear before I leave

“ You made it through . Give them hell”

Carry with me the fight THROUGH Poly, where I learned this ain’t a game . My virtue is survival , my victory is getting the fuck out of dodge.

University of Pennsylvania (1740)

Leges sine moribus vanae-Laws without morals are useless.

*Sydette lies down and cackles in black girl immigrant *

I told it before . I watch the Twin Towers fall, I watch the Patriot Act pass . I am called a nigger at the oldest university in the America and I am famous for having a Guyanese flag so big you can see it from the bridge and I walk it across the Franklin Field for my father when he sits in an ICS detention center. My university swallows the surrounding neighborhood and is built on stolen land twice over. Once form the indigenous people and then on top of the Black Bottom

My best friend is my best friend because we bond over being bright eyed idealists who love theatre and social justice …. and sat together holding a black student who was scared about the men who stole little black girls and the cops who never came. The law without morals isn’t useless it taught us and her.

United States of America(1776)-

“In God We Trust”

I look at the institutions I attended, and even if walking around while black hadn’t taught me the lie in this. They would have.

Institution after Institution whose focus was not on trust in god, or faith or unity.But power , privilege, of how by virtue of existing in their halls we were “chosen”. Of places so drenched in the reality behind the lie that they prepped me for the next ones like it was war. How over and over merely by existing, by being alum or faculty . We were magical beings who were connected and should lead .

I remember Prep preparing me for this like it was war, because it was . It was the war we had not recovered from, it was the war of that made this country, it was the war that made my university, the truth.

The war where I would ever be equal , where in by black skin I would be equal had never stopped.

I get stuck because not only am I less than six degrees of separation from David Benioff.

He helped teach me this war. Why on earth does he need millions of dollars to to imagine it when centuries later we still can’t get the truth?

Sydette Harry (1984)

Drapetomanic Amazonian Virago & 7 Red Strings

So back to me yelling at Judd Apatow because I am looking at my forearms . I have tattoos on my forearms . On my right three words : Drapetomanic Amazonian Virago. It sounds beautiful, it looks gorgeous. They are fancy historically accurate words for Uppity Nigger Bitch. I chose them and I chose them to be here so I could see them.

Because I had lived by others mottos and I had met the challenges and I was still this. But I was still real.

And on my right is a seven string,seven knot red bow.

I looked down at my hands and it clicked. I had tatted myself on my sword and my shield hand.

My sword hand came first always . Even in my body art I prepared for a war, around my blackness around my body. Even though Kalava, warding off mal ojo, and the begging of favor from Rachel are in my culture(s). I had lived in a world that taught me that I should remember to fight so much that i tatted it on my body to never forget.

That my existence was so devastating , white boys in tiki torches would march across institutions in hopes of striking fear in the hearts of students like i was . That they would plow into crowds to kill a woman like my best friend.

I look down at my own body and realize the war that they wish to imagine with Confederate hasn’t even ended on my own body. and Judd Apatow thinks one glib tweet explains away a reality so deep I dug it into my skin because the world taught me

A world where my blackness causes constant war, my privilege causes constant awareness and history means even a man who helped teach me English can’t use the oceans of resources available to him to see how upsetting that could be ,and I’ve only been black in America for one generation.

There is no war to be imagined , I live it.

I am Sydette of House Harry,Given of Much Required of everything, Victorious over Fortune , Survivor of Laws without Morals.

I am Sydette of House Harry , Uppity Nigger Bitch with scars chosen and inflicted written into my skin

I am Sydette of House Harry. First of My Name, A Golden Machete in A Golden Fist

We shall cross .

Fox cancelled Pitch. I felt it coming but I was hopeful. Between Firefly and Sleepy Hollow I shouldn’t be surprised but I am .

I didn’t expect it to last long but I had hoped that if nothing else it would get to tell a complete story. Not only was it SUCH a story for the moment we are in now but it hit me in some special spots. I doubt if anybody is listening but if I can convince ANYBODY to let this play out to a real end I’m doing it . And if I can’t I want to at least pay tribute to one of the best series on American identity and the effect of women in A WHILE

Learning America Through Baseball

I am a Mets fan .I swear I remember the Mets championship. My best friends call bullshit.The fact that I was 2 means they are right, the fact that they are Yankees fans means I reject their reality and replace it with my own.I’m a Mets fan, good sense, perspective, and consistency aren’t part of the package. So when I say I’m a baseball fan, I think of a cosmology I catalogue rather than a sport.

Baseball to me is the American Parthenon . Iconic structure, transitory use finite in creation. Baseball was made for America, what happens inside tells you what America is at the moment, but the structure itself tells you how it began. To me this is everything, because I taught myself America. So Pitch was of course RIGHT up my alley.

We’re Guyanese.My father desperately tried to get me into cricket or soccer or boxing, hoping to shift my toddler enthusiasm for a bad boy team using more white powder than a bakeryplaying “ that long long game that looks like rounders” This is also where I tell you that Kylie Bunbury being Guyanese-Canadian means I’m mandated to root for her

I played T-ball in mixed gender teams , well . A broad shouldered bullied 7 year old I got good at intercepting things flying at my head and sending them back at high velocity. Real ball costs money, and when I figured out that few fields meant little practice and because I was a girl no one would take my dreams of being Gary Carter seriously so I quit. I still loved baseball and upon entering my chi chi private school . I set my sights on getting back in the game .

I didn’t.

The time my peers who had resources and practice being too big to surmount . I learned money when I didn’t realize my phone calls and room service meant I got no deposit back or Christmas. but “my cute accent and manners” meant the Florida deskclerk disappeared some charges and let my mom wire me cash . I wasn’t going to be Gary Carter because I couldn’t activate a team around me or guide a pitcher . I learned that losing your tooth to a softball to the face that isnt taken care of because “ she can’t be in that much pain” as a black girl will haunt you FOR A GOOD LONG WHILE. But to this day I have a damn cannon and ended being a fine shot putter.

I’d never be the black girl in the MLB and I might never see her .My childhood dream was over but I could still be awesome.America can surprise you.

It gave us Pitch .

“I’m a robot in cleats and I’m malfunctioning”

If one line/monologue got me all into Pitch . That one line let me know WHATEVER else happened in this show someone in that writer’s room was a black woman trying to talk about something real.

We don’t often get to see the emotional lives or work process of women creators, especially black women creators and athletes are creators.

When black women are rarely seen as people and celebrities are victim to a special kind of game, we don’t get the kind of layered nuanced profiles of their mental states or emotional lives that we get from male celebs or athletes .

We don’t deserve it.

When Beyonce can’t even be pregnant without it being seen as a challenge to motherhoood or compared to others , or when Serena Williams is dissected on an atomic level where even “friends” make racist dehumanizing jokes …. black women who pursue excellence don’t share.

Except when the world is misogynist and antiblack , black women don’t even have to be aiming for Beyonce levels of acheivement to be constantly barraged and we can’t talk about it , for fear of being weak or not up to task.It has to be Ginny Baker a fictional charachter , one who we can sneak in to the private rooms and spaces where women black women specifically hide behind before we “suit up”. Especially when doing the things that only have worth when you get to a certain level, levels usually denied women and black women in particular.

Feminist media analysis often defaults to power. In larger systemic relationships power is important. Shondaland has made an amazing empire of women dealing with power in professional and civic spaces. But people understand teh value of Dr.’s, government operatives etc. You don’t become worth it as an athlete or creator in many eyes till you make the big leagues. We avoid talking about excellence

And the price you pay.

While ghost dad was a bit much , the idea of practicing till you hallucinate, of being the first in , the last out till you are actually delusional is real. And finding that actually getting the thing doesn’t make you happy but you don’t actually know how to do anything else . Ginny Baker was what a real groundbreaker would be, a pitcher with lollipop softball but willing to work herself beyond what anybody else was willing to do and Pitch was finally series tos how it.

And what happens when the reality of you succeeding changes the ENTIRE ecosystem of where you do it. If I learned American through Baseball, watching Pitch was like watching America relearn itself with someone like me actually included. Watching the run up to the election and the aftermath what better backdrop than America’s game to see what that fight looks like with SOME distance .

Watching people who aren’t terrible but still exist in systems that make them predisposed to hurting you, watching people use you as a flag for their own causes, watching people love you but be completely unable to do that well. Watching people hate/love you for WHAT you are not who. Finding love/lust/friendship in the oddest places and knowing it can slip away.

But still needing to suit up and play. Even when it was off watching Pitch actually deal with that was a wonder.

She’s a Gamer

It’s my mom’s fault. The kind of competitiveness in a woman I have and love I blame on her.

(this memory brought to you by childhood myth making and about 26 years of distance)

My mother was fast when I was young. On track field days she dusted the women , But the best ever was 1991.Only three women wanted to run adult and my mom ATE them. They declared her the adult women’s winner and moved on to the important race.

The Men.

Two heats passed where none of the men beat my mother and our PE teacher had jokes . He needled the men when all of their times were slower than my mother’s and slower than his. I watched my mother. The element of hawk that passes through our blood line more present as her face gets getting narrower and angrier. It’s one taunt to many

“ Y’all so sure eh? Lemme run?”

“Mrs Harry , I mean these are men”

“ I know . Lemme run . If I can’t beat em I can’t beat em”

It’s not even a contest. A 40 year old women in a polyester pink romper after a full work day could go. Her woolworth sandaled feet kick slapping the schoolyard as her Jheri curl droplets cross the finish line before men who didn’t even think to include her in the conversation. Because it’s New York somebody has to pop off . I don’t remember exactly the words that led to this but I do know my mother turned to him and said

“ If yuh scared and tired . I understand”

The race is on. My mother kicks off her shoes, and walks to the chainlink fence.PE teacher makes elaborate stretches .I watch my mother.

“ GO”

This is a contest . She falls behind , he leans forward but it’s close ...until she see’s his back . The Hawk is awake .Her legs churn and a blur of barefoot pink and activator zoom past him and the chalk line . She runs so hard she catches herself on the big buildings wall 20 meters past the finish line. She can’t talk , she is stumbling but she won.

“Well you earned your trophy I was tired … blah blah blee”

“ Which trophy do you give the fastest person?” PE is stunned .

My mother points “ Mrs Harry that’s the men’s trophy?”

“ And I beat them . All of them”

I would love to say she gave me a big speech but she didn’t . It wasn’t her way . But that trophy is still in her living room.

She’s a gamer and she won. That she really didn’t care about the race didn’t matter . That she honestly was as unsure about running and motherhood as Ginny was about baseball didn’t matter. If she was going to play she was going to win.She wants what the winner gets.

“You do this for you, You do this for your team or you don’t do this at all”

Evelyn Sanders is the story I’m going to miss most of all, without question. A brillant black mother, trying to navigate what it means to be a wife, a parent, and a friend to a bunch of high strung infants while actively listening to herself.

It’s so small but was continually stunning in it’s realness and how stark it made the absence of it anywhere else . A smart beautiful black woman who could be supportive and there for everyone else AND recognize that , that wasn’t enough. Pitch took a charachter so often a prototype or cardboard cut out and made her real. Watching Evelyn Sanders THINK and process had a dramatic import all it’s own. In a landscape where twists ,explosions , reveals and external machinae are the order of the day , Pitch made storylines of one woman being smart and thoughtful and changing her mind amidst others drama arresting.

Pitch used baseball to look at people .An absolutely fierce agent who gives it all up because she wants to mother something real and has the attendant issues A good hearted manager who eats shoe leather for breakfast but raises an independent amazing daughter . A former player trying to be an executive while battling folks who don’t love the game or father figure that made him An aging catcher and a rookie pitcher making the battery have a whole nother kind of charge.

( We all take a moment of silence for not being able to see the ABSOLUTE Daddy Glow Up of Mark-Paul Gosselaar anymore and general fine that populated this cast. Mo Mcrae’s face is an artistic treasure.)

I didn’t expect Pitch to last long between merchandising, PEAK TV and the fact that while I love it? Baseball even with these folks can be the most boring sport ever , but more than anything I wanted Ginny Baker to be able to finish telling a whole story. I hoped that with the power of the producer of This Is Us, the shame of Sleepy Hollow, and the absolute fervor of Pitches we’d get at least that.

But if we can’t ( and I am making big brown eyes at anybody who sees this PWEASE with the knowledge I ain’t got that juice) I couldn’t rest with the last thing made of this incredible story being a young black woman alone in a tube scared for her future.

Pitch went into the Parthenon of America ready to play. Pitch wasn’t afraid of the hanging curveball . That space between the release and the contact. It meant something special and no matter what it changed how we learned about America , and even if it’s one season? As a Mets fan, I know more than most a season can last a life time.

My mom keeps reminding me of papers she sometimes forgets she is a citizen and talks about threats of deportation in the present tense.She calls me about my facebook statuses “ Be careful they don’t protect people like us”Tomorrow a bill will be signed making special lists of people who will be regulated and walls will be built and people have thoughts and .

I have memories .

I don’t hear deportation and proceedings as a theoretical abstract. It’s real for me .

I feel it. It is a trauma 12 years is the kind of semi healing

I remember soliciting letters, of submitting report cards or phone calls and gut wrenching sobs .I know that some people are about to join me in a fraternity that frankly I never wanted to be in and would love to not induct anybody else into.

I remember being silent in hopes that looking “good” would bring favor or help. It didn’t .

So I’m gonna get a little loud because I have memories and I know someone needs it tonight

So here’s what i got for now as really important :

Focus on us not them

You don’t grow gardens just to kill bugs. you want fruits,vegetables,flowers . Think of politics this way . The doctors of decorum will constantly try to tell you what’s civil or what “we “ believe. Ask who the fuck they are talkinga bout when they say we. If you have to fight to defend your ability to grow never let anyone shame you for that.

Forget Passive Aggressive. Be aggressive. Be mad . Have real beef

This makes STRANGE bedfellows. The fact that we deeply despise the same person is not the same as common goals . Don’t force it don’t hide it. Admit it . Throw hands . Be real. THEN get together on common ground. I got a couple people I’d fight at MSG for fun and for free but we agree on abortion/SNAP/libraries. That’s good enough

Sacrifice no one

Everyone is learning this the hard way , but big barks then rolling over to show your belly ( looks at Democrats) does nothing. Be willing to lose. Principle matters . Sarah Kendzior said it best . You dont get rewarded for rolling over you get punished. If they gonna be mad anyway let em be mad while you keep your dignity.

Figure out what you need,want, need to prepare.

One of the most common properties of bullies, cult leaders, dictators and also general assholes is making you feel you are lacking when you aren’t. They then like infect you with the belief that there isn’t enough to go around.One, so that you don’t notice how much they are stealing/taking up and two,so you don’t talk to people about finding ways of life that don’t center their whims. Dream big . Budget well then

GIVE IT AWAY ! LIKE IT IS GOING OUT OF STYLE

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY Donate. Take people out of debt. Pay it forward. Fund rafts of birth control. Make it rain on your local library, Adopt your school. Give to national parks. The aesthetic will always be contrasting the opulence and richness of the “deserved” to the squalor of the undeserved. The goal will be to scare you and all of us with what could happen if we fall out of line. I’m being utterly hopeful with the heart of a child but if we take care of each other , it makes it harder to sell those lies. Take some credit but also do a good bit of it anonymously. Make it look like they don’t understand the country.

Books .Art . Intellect.

Get deeply into SOMETHING anything,you can make and create. Learn it’s history . Share it. Use your library systems . Go to museums. Remember the NEA and NEH announcements /threats/whine propoganda came after no celebrities would join. They will tell you art is not of the people, it’s “unaffordable”. Please pad the everliving FUCK out of these numbers. Research them, respect them

PRESERVE THE DATA

Keep journals, save websites, back up hard drives . Take notice . If people and things you care about suddenly want you to have a whole bunch of info … they’re scared . Knowledge will be challenged at all points.

Lose the Info

Sometimes taking care of each other will involve playing the hell dumb. If something don’t smell right ? If somebody you don’t know wants all this info on someone you do know. ain’t none of their business. Ask why like it’s going out of style.

People have been here in this space for years/centuries. Respect that.

People been marching and getting surveilled and since slave catching days. People been scared and terrified and talking about it forever . Mala said it best “ I learned from Panthers and Lords” Stop trying to write them out . Stop trying to pretend they aren’t here. And if they don’t have the bandwith to teach you respect that. Living under the stress you are just now feeling is ACTIVELY killing them. which brings me to…

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LOOK AT HOW YOU TREAT PEOPLE CLOSE TO YOU AND WHAT YOU ALLOW CLOSE TO YOU AND NOT JUST AS PROPS

Here’s where I lose people. Everybody and their momma including black folks owes black women apologies , and some specific black women checks. Just straight up checks . I have archives and I am not alone of shit I said in 2007 that people are crying about in 2017 where THE SAME PEOPLE laughed at me. it is exhausting tiring

and some of the worst offenders are other black women/activists/and the wokey mc woke brigade.

If you find yourself favoriting everything by someone and you don’t say their name when money or prestige comes up? You are part of the problem

If the only thinkers you like are camera ready or credential high you might be part of the problem.

If your respect comes from how good the selfie or styling i

If your discussions about certain topics are more about what you need to as x than what the people living through it are talking about

Do you get where I’m going with this because

Handle your shit and admit when you don’t know shit

If you want to know what will make the biggest difference between us and the goosteeping mothball hair cuts and soul hoovered death eaters passing as governance.

It will be admitting and accepting faults ,flaws, specialties, and allowing for the space that can bring. Don’t bluster , don’t take up air time. admit you have no clue , point to someone who does.

What you do know ? What you are willing to step up and do . Do it well. Stand on your work. forget their lies, they’ll do it like they draw air. Make what we need and do inviting by making it full of the love they can’t have. and finally

Be Kind

Not nice. Not civil. Not stupid or a push over , but kind, Mindful deliberate , caring. Self aware. People are in terrible states right now, some have never left them. People are triggered, People are overestimating and underestimating themselves . They are being human. Humanity is hard and messy and this is hurting people. Not in the grandstandy speeches way . but in the a kindergartner is going to cry their eyes out and wonder what about them is so bad they can’t have a parent or a home

A 19 year old is more worried about if they’ll be deported than a term paper

and yes this 32 year old will probably sob her god damn guts out randomly tomorrow/today.

It’s not over , I have not yet begun to fight but they have just begun to hurt and with what little I have with all I can muster . I’m gonna do something about it.

I hope you will too.

You can imaging how strong it is after this election ,all of it’s build up and the aftermath.

From the “alt-right” to Hamilton to swastikas to identity politics to Bernie bros and the spirit draining chaff that passes for analysis from the coasts on the other 80 percent of the country.There is the complicity /inanity/ fear in media, the non discussion of racism/ the fact that for some reason we can’t call Nazi’s Nazi’s even when the salute and scream Heil in the middle of Washington DC.People are tripping over themselves to say I don’t deserve everything from political consideration to actual life. I am beyond angry. and everybody is angry.

Anger is free and easy right now. It’s righteous and right . I am good GOOD for a cuss out. The list of people I am ready to fight/scream at/ meet on Jamaica Ave or Tremont Ave to shoot a fair one and just pray I don’t get my ass whopped is LONG .

The world has shifted . This is shaking , startling and disconcerting .Some of you are here for the first time ,rejected by systems you swore loved you at least enough to put us in an America where duckbilled goose stepping Nazi saluting dude bros into GQ fashion spreads and call it analysis .

They ain’t going no where . So I am going to do and ask for something else. Across the board and for multiple reasons. So listen close and deep from someone whose been here for a while

Stop. Take a minute. Take a breath . Shut the fuck up about anything not about you directly and personally for a moment( more than two days ) , talk to your therapist, your preacher or whoever you need to but PLEASE STOP.

Stop with the blame. Stop with the trying to be smart. Stop with trying to explain . Data may hold the answer, history , certainly racism, but right now that’s not whats most important.

This is a marathon relay not a sprint. .It’s always been a marathon but now more know exactly what is nipping at our heels. The secret is that hating these people, or what they stand for isn’t enough. It won’t take you to the end of the week let alone the aiblity to dig in for long work of dealing with the sheer awful they are about to send our way.

Who are you ?

I learned to justify because I lived not being what was wanted. Constant negation creates desperation . It creates a need to be something that deserves or earns it survival. It shrinks your world to reactions and explanations.

Of why you are here and why you deserve to be . It makes you nothing but what they aren’t .

You are more than that and you have to know what that is. It’s hard and they will make a game of ripping it from you.

So

STOP . AND TAKE A FUCKING BEAT.

Spraying your confusion into the mentions and spaces of folks who have been dealing with this for long with the same supemacist attitudes you claim to be fighting isn’t “building”

Trying to assure people who don’t care anyway that you are more than willing to throw POC under the bus isn’t a strategy or a thesis statement.

Explaining parts of the country you joke about avoiding isn’t smart or useful no matter how much data you drag around about it.

Trying desperately to cling to a moral high ground or avoid hypocrisy does isn’t character when they will swastika a play ground and call Nazi salutes ironic.

At best ? It’s various stages of grief being filtered through lifetimes of assured entitlement, the sureity that the America that coddled you or promised you for so long would correct itself if only people did things your way , or these complicated “others” stopped messing stuff up. That if people put more faith or demanded less accountability your illusions wouldn't be shattered

At worst it’s an advertisement that when push comes to ineveitable shove, you’ll reason with even Nazi’s till you run out of breath as long as they are can put together a jazzy enough outfit or string together enough appropriately collegiate words.

I don’t know what way you’ll go , I have my hopes but it’s less important than what I know , and what I’m asking you to know.

I know I love some things. I like some things . I believe some things . And I will fight for them .

Some of those things particular order : caramel pudding ,my family, Guyana, rap,black women,jewish people, good gin , dance,NYC etc

Are going to be why I’m here and why i do what I do.

And what that doing is ? Is going to be upsetting to some people. It’s going to be against people I may have never expected to be against, it’s going to make some people mad.

Oh well.

This is exhausting and it’s going to be MORE exhausting. We will see things we can not believe , hear things we thought never possible, and we will be angry .We can try and have “solutions” that make us believe it is a little less worse than what we are threatened with. We can figure out who we can sell out to bargain with the devil just a little longer.. We can exhaust each other,trying (and failing) to appease people who mask their love of power and dominance, with smoke, mirrors and shoe polish. Chasing smoke and mirrors to “point out the REAL problem” so that when it’s time to raise our hands for justice we can’t get them past our shoulders. We can make what we hate the center of our world until we become it.

But it won’t be what we love, it won’t serve what we love , it won’t protect what you love ( no matter what Adolf von Esquire tells you) , and the moral high ground isn’t the same as principle.

Other people have really good guides. If you care, I like you will be looking and building from them . But right now ? Stop . You’ll build bridges right off the edge of cliffs, and compromise right into the abyss.

And none of it will be about what you love or who you are.

So FOR THE LOVE OF ALL GRIEVE . STOP. TAKE A BREATH

It won’t be by beating them at their pace or their game. It won’t be easy , it won’t be called fair. The system is officially against us ( it always has been but I said I wasn't gonna do it in this one.. much) .We will fight, and because I have more hope than sense? I believe we will win. But it wont be by trying to go where they go or won’t go.

If they do not gain another yard , it’s because we did not move another an inch . We have to plant roots to plant ourselves. So

Stop. Breathe.

Begin.

The Dr.

I look like power .About 6ft tall, bigger than 250 pounds, with Enid’s ’s resting bitch face ,Gwenny’s cut glass cheekbones and Faye’s ford the Essequibo frame .

In good shape my voice clears auditoriums of unruly teenagers, swooping and trilling over four octaves against thousands stampeding for Black Friday sales.

The first person to grab me by the pussy told me I needed to get used to it because that was what men did. That was where power was and everyone wanted it .

The one that broke something in me was “helping” and “intrigued” . Darwin with my body the HMS Beagle, finding his power contributing to the world using science a rickety brown ship. People watched as I screamed, as it went on longer than it should , got angry when I fought, and gently reminded him he had other “things to do”.

I would make some man happy one day. I had a “power”, he wanted to see it . To try it.

It was his right, because he was who he was and I was who I was. People like him get to play with power when her they want

I piss blood for three days, and can’t sleep on my back to this day

A****/C****/L*****

I have a certain kind of power . They even let me lead freshman. I’m fat black and babyfaced while taller than most everyone.

I’m a prude and a virgin and a killjoy

I fool around less than I want in the backs of busses but I’ve learned the world male chauvinist and I let that choppa spray.

I will fight anyone and anything and I’m too distracted to know I’m not being cool.

I also don’t tell secrets.

I notice when someone in my dance glass and her friend tense every time the football team walks by.

I notice when girls cry in corners. I hear “ he brought friends”

I talk through all the “ So my friend convos …..”

I scream in the hallways at boys who say I drink.

I punch boys who play with my mouth in the stomach when they say I should be raped . I still lay on them.

When I bring up I’m uncomfortable about how we talk about sex and how we shrug it off .

My “partner” thinks I’m a prude and have no right to critique his relationships.

He’s on the football team. He’s beautiful. He’s white.

Nobody backs me up . I swallow it . I get along.

No one stops telling me stories . I never tell.

I

Jian/Hugo/Mark/Clyde/????

I have a certain power

They say all the right things .

I say smart things but I’m black and unprofessional and unforgiving.

I don’t forgive . I’m black and talk about machetes and I want to have fights and I live in Far Rock and not Williamsburg or the East Village.

I’m just a blogger working retail

I don’t fight a mysterious patriarchy or the system .

I fight you.

I point out your white girl bullshit. I yell about your Male feminist crap. I shake and weep and fuck up and leave spaces I represent on stage because I’m black and I’m here and I did the work when you couldn’t find the @ button .

I sit on list serves when the laugh and smug about how unprofessional and uneducated and MEAN I am.I rage about closed room meetings in public and cuss “ your fave “ out on Twitter because they pop shit on facebook.People leak my info and my emails and threaten and want to know what’s my problem because THEY have a right to self defense .

I am who I am and I’m from where I’m from and they are white or smart or prominent or political.

But I have a certain kind of power

I notice how slow you are about Melissa Alexander and how fast you are about Emma Watson . How quickly you lift my ideas on pop culture and how slow you are to google my thoughts on anything else

I nuclear detonate beloved friendships, professional opportunities,academic girls crushes, movement relationships because I won’t stay silent. I’m really wrong some times

I’m a conciliatory reformist. I’m a radical loose cannon. I’m a traitor and an identity politician

But other times

I get anonymous tumblr mails about “safe spaces” that aren’t safe .

I put 6ft of body between a “real revolutionary” and the cute college student.

I ask why the only girls “not in the know” look like me , or sound like Mississippi or grew up in trailer parks instead of super cool feminist spaces

Someone links to talk about their rapist professor .

Someone says thank you about their dad.

Someone thanks me because their girlfriend was beating them and screamed fuck the patriarchy when the fist landed.

Someone thanks me and tells me they couldn’t do what I do .

When someone confesses they’ve abused me for years it makes the front page without me.

An admitted assaulter gets sued and the left in countries in not from “don’t know how it happened” . I cuss everybody out till they follow me , then I block them.

I sit in a Massachusetts classroom after everyone is gone and listen to how National doesn’t listen and she needs this job and she’s gotten good at avoiding him.

I comb the comments of my anonymous essays and find one person begging for help. Who doesn’t know what to do . People are too busy calling me stupid to care

Trump

Has created a certain power

It’s appalling. and people are enraged and how dare her

And it looks like everything else .

He’s wrong and awful and he’s RUNNING for president. IT MATTERS NOW

He’s like the Dr. and the boys from school and the feminist men and the socialist bros .

HE is important. A President shouldn’t be like this. His victims have power. They aren’t supposed to deal with this . We don’t have to care . We have to DO . It matters These shake us .

A Dr. ? Some high schoolers ?A writer A professor , a director ? that’s rape culture

But this is a travesty.

Culture don’t talk. They are stories they are statistics and “culture” and “powerful testimony” we care but we don’t do.

They’re important but not important important.

They don’t have a power he does and we want it

And we’re gonna scream and yell and maybe he won’t win . This time .

We have power. And we don’t know where this came from

I do .

I have a certain kind of power