Last December, as Insecure wrapped its final season, I logged into Twitter to see a flood of praise for both the show and its star Issa Rae for her “game changing” work on it. Interview clips circulated in awestruck tweets about her refusal to seek out richer, more notable celebrities, choosing instead to “come up with her friends who were just as hungry as her.” Naturally, I was confused. Not by praise of the show, but by the narrative forming that this was “game changing”, or that Issa Rae had ever been “hungry.” A wealthy graduate of a top-three university (boasting a 5% acceptance rate) going on to access opportunities to amass more wealth is literally the game.

I pointed out how wealth affords the opportunities, resources, and access for what is commonly considered success as a challenge to claims that we “all” have the same opportunities making it simply hard work that defines “success.” I didn’t invalidate any talent she may have or work she may have put in — because one doesn’t have to overcome imaginary barriers and adversities or “change the game” to be talented. Nonetheless, my attempt to inject class analysis into the conversation was met with swift and scalding backlash. My edges are still growing back.

This outrage overwhelmingly came from middle class people who self-identified with fictional characters in the show as their entire Black identity, and it would be easy to write the whole thing off as the deranged behavior of “stans.” But the existence of this level of celebrity fanaticism and it becoming so common highlights a deeper issue: the extreme levels of alienation we are experiencing due to hyper-exploitation under capitalism. Years of working multiple low-wage jobs to keep up with rents and costs of living far outpacing minimum wage, no job mobility, jobs collapsing into the gig economy, and the resulting complete annihilation of friendship, dating and communal relationships has led to a state of mass social disconnect. People feel alone and isolated. Thus, they flock to online strangers who form a synthetic “community” that gives them something to hold onto, no matter how fake, fleeting, or dysfunctional. And these social media platforms — owned and run by the very billionaires who profit from and propel our hyper-exploitation and alienation — are primed to take advantage of this among teens and young adults who are the core demographic of these platforms. The result is that antisociality is increasingly becoming a social norm.

In recent years, however, “stan” culture has grown beyond celebrities, with people proudly adopting both the label and the fanatical behavior in relation to influencers, politicians, academics, pretty much any stranger whose tweets, posts, videos, or “brand” they self-identify with in place of having friends. An interesting thing about this shift is that some of the most fanatical behavior comes from verified accounts, politicians, influencers, and people with “grad student” or “PhD candidate” in their bios. This reveals a class interest behind it. At some point, people hoping to benefit from propping up celebrities, academics, media pundits, brands, millionaires, and billionaires started dressing up their middle class career aspirations as “fandom.” It’s now more acceptable to present as an overly-invested fan coping with alienation through parasocial relationships with elites than to admit being a self-invested careerist doing PR for the person you work for, share a social circle with, or hope to someday. Those with power (and those who help them maintain it in exchange for proximity) figured out they can sell alienated, oppressed people “connection”, “community”, “care”, and being “just like you.” That weaponization and exploitation of false community run rampant on social media, made worse by a global pandemic.

We live in terrifying times. COVID (and a government response that can only be described as genocide) is facilitating the complete destruction of economies and infrastructure globally. In the US, wages are stagnant, our healthcare and education infrastructures (which already ran on inequity, exploitation, and anti-Blackness) are crumbling, and housing injustice (including mass evictions, homelessness, gentrification and a lack of affordable housing anywhere in the country) combined with impending climate catastrophe have people petrified. That terror, however, is being siphoned into ensuring that people who are not poor don’t end up like those of us who are rather than ending poverty. Middle class people look at poverty and say, “no one should have to live like that”, then fight for middle class policies, reforms, and jobs to save themselves. The economic anxiety is very real and valid; the non-solution solutions that lead to increased exploitation are not.

The big lie is that these people are unaware of the harm in what they are doing, that they “mean well”, or that they care or are invested in “community” and shared security. The truth is that they don’t care if you win as long as they don’t lose — as long as they can avoid poverty without having to sacrifice their comfort to end it. Celebrity worship and elevation of bougie idealism is desperate striving from people anxious to maintain their way of life — or acquire the life they believe they’re owed — at the expense of everyone and everything else.

The Divine Nine are now penniless like the rest of us, and we’re all worse for it because rather than align themselves with poor folks in a global struggle for freedom, they whine and beg for a seat at capitalism’s table. They sell exploitation repackaged as “Black excellence.” They attack and demean anyone who pulls back the curtain on the myriad of get rich quick schemes currently pushing us deeper into hyper-exploitation while they clamor for life rafts. To maintain their position as capitalism’s middlemen, they dickride capitalists in hopes their “notice me senpai” cries will result in a “like”, a “retweet”, the slightest of attention that could possibly, maybe, one day, eventually, potentially (if they kiss enough ass and exploit enough poor people) lead to a job. It’s as violent as it is embarrassing.

Stop it.

Stand up.

The world is on fire, and this will not save us.

“Middle class life is a bubble of insulation forged by the hope of high salaries and the fear of guns. The insulation where the rest of the world and its class conflict — its struggle, its naked violence — is just a meme, a dissertation, a speech, a discourse.” — my good friend Emmanuel (@anansi0000)

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“I do the work”, “we do the work”, “this is the work.”

“The work” is invoked so often and vaguely by self-described activists and organizers that whatever meaning it had (if it ever had any) is long gone. People brag about “the work” they’ve done without naming what it is, their goals, and who benefits, or use activism resumes as shields from criticisms and calls to action. With the concept of “work” being both hollowed out and weaponized, including against people it’s supposed to serve, we’re overdue for a chat about “the work”, what it means, and who it’s for.

A few days ago, I tweeted my disappointment when activists on Twitter quickly endorsed Noname’s “Radical Hood Library” as “the work”. My concern wasn’t that the library is “bad” but that gentrification by “young professionals” would mean poor Black folks being pushed out of the area can’t access it. I wanted to know if people had looked into this and have a larger conversation about amplifying and engaging in housing justice organizing as the end of eviction moratoriums and gentrification lead to mass homelessness and a lack of affordable housing nationwide. What came instead was hundreds of quote and sub tweets of backlash arguing “the work” is good, and I don’t get to criticize it if I’m not doing better “work.” But my criticism was never of said “work.” My actual critique, which went unaddressed, is of what I saw as a lack of vetting and the thought folks give (or don’t) to who they support, why, and impact on communities.

In response, some have said they know the library will do good because it’s an extension of work she’s been doing for years, to which I would ask how they know that work is good? “The work” is Noname’s Book Club, known for sending books to incarcerated people, something we likely all agree is needed. I have no criticisms of the book club. However, saying “this is good work” without talking to incarcerated members, contacting prisons to find out how it’s engaged, or asking if prisoners feel it’s meeting their needs is counterintuitive to lifting voices of the “most marginalized” and ensuring they are driving “the work.” The question remains, what goes into labeling something good “work”? Because if we’re impressed by any action for the “less fortunate,” how is that challenging the establishment-led, charity-dominated society we live in?

I’m not as concerned about the celebrities and professional activists our social and mass media are saturated with as I am how we engage them and this brand of activism. If the goal is to end power systems, resource hoarding, and hierarchies, I’m not sure how we do that without being extra critical, skeptical, and discerning of people with power. I’m not sure how we do that by assuming anyone who says the right things is part of our (or any) community, that they’re accountable to us or others, or moving as though class divides and opposing interests don’t exist.

This is particularly reckless in the wake of Black Lives Matter, when outsiders who appeared to mean well exploited whole communities for years and won’t be “held accountable” for it because accountability can only come from community, and these people were never part of any community. With Patrisse Cullors, Shaun King, and a whole class of activist grifters not even in our rearview yet, the question for those of us who continue to be trafficked is not an “if” it will happen again, but by who next. When one of the most pervasive harms of the Black Lives Matter scam is making “the work” no longer about sustained community organizing, accountability to one another, and building alternative communal systems to meet needs from a ground level, we have to ask these questions. It’s a problem that mainstream activism is now reacting to single events with no proactive solutions, platforming big names and the projects they announce, and strivers using “the work” to procure their next bag, byline, or book deal.

“The work” should be collectivism and fighting for communities’ rights to self-determination, and telling disempowered people what we need, what is “good” for us, how to resist is not that. Radical and revolutionary organizing is built through talking with, not over, people and strategizing to make sure needs are met, not standing at podiums telling us what those needs are. And “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” can’t work by pretending we all have the same ability or need. It’s the responsibility of those who can do more to do so. When people with fewer means demand this, it’s not “unfair” or expecting too much. You should never defend powerful people from those exploited for power systems to exist, or silence us when we criticize or even question them.

Collectivism also requires abandoning “charity down” activism in favor of dismantling from above. More money and proximity to power come with greater responsibility to dismantle the systems you benefit from through: wealth redistribution, sharing land for community housing, destroying policies that push poor folks into the gutter to protect the middle class, exposing and combating violence in your institutions (academia, media, tech, medical, etc.), building blockades to protect homeless encampments from police and prevent people from being evicted, organizing strikes in solidarity with low wage workers striking, radicalizing your middle class and rich relatives and peers — who are business owners, doctors, lawyers, celebrities, daycare owners, who have money and resources poor people need — to open their clinics, provide free childcare, share those resources with poor folks. If not doing it personally, you should be finding out who is and building connections to create more access.

No stakes, no sacrifice, no moving the needle, but a whole lot of speeches about what’s best for us and insistence they’re “on our side.” As long as “the work” remains convenient charity with no metric for who it serves, people will use it to distract from a lack of progress and to avoid naming who their politics are for and who they are accountable to.

No theory, practice, project, or anything else considered “the work” is inherently good. Who it serves, who funds it, how the community is engaged, and the costs and benefits to the community matter. A project that serves the wealthy or “privileged” while displacing poor folks is not a net good to the community. Neither is a project for poor folks with a million barriers that infringe on autonomy, exploit us, and reproduce/extend carceral violence. Not asking questions can lead to endorsing any of this because it sounded good, and people who know to ask questions often lose sight when it comes to people they place on pedestals and whose “work” they elevate beyond skepticism and critique.

Your “work” is less important than your community and politics. Whose security do you fight for, and whose voices do you uplift? Community is not a job or service you perform. Collectivism is a relationship-based survival process. We contribute in community toward everyone’s collective security based on our means and understanding what is necessary. We do it in love and through linking our security and freedom as tied to that of others. We do what we can, not what we want; what’s necessary, not what’s convenient. We extend ourselves and make sacrifices because we know none of us should eat and leave others hungry; none of us should be housed and leave others on the street.

Because none of us is free until we’re all free.

“I suggest the real contradiction may be that we really are not all about the same thing, the same goals, and some of us are not willing to admit it. Not yet anyway…” — Safiya Bukhari; “The War Before.”

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I buried my friends in childhood
and I was never free to mourn.

There was always school,
and homework,
dishes that needed washing,
and a beating I had earned.

There is no space to grieve loss,
when it is never ending,
when you are slowly being killed.

So I mourn now.
Because I’m safer as an adult
than I ever was as a child.

Certainly, I’m freer.

I feel so many things when I think of this.
One day,
I’ll write them.

I’ll write about the feeling
of being powerless over myself,
of being abused by the person I loved most,
of the nights I thought I would die,
and the other nights I hoped to.

Of other scared, scarred, invisible children
and the ways we tried
to keep each other safe
knowing we never could.

Of gunshots and funerals
and children in caskets and suits,
both too big for their bodies.

Of crying mothers and fathers
and little boys who refused
to let anyone see them cry.

Of feeling invincible,
and also oh-so-very breakable.
Of being broken.

Of tears
and the little girls who wiped them,
mothers before we were ever children.

Of children,
born dying
before we ever got to live.

I buried my friends in childhood
and I never got to mourn.

So I mourn now.

Because I’m safer as an adult
than I ever was as a child.

I’m not against theory or reading, but I am firmly against the paternalism of middle class academics who presume greater knowledge and intellectual capacity entitles them to overtalk and silence us poor Black folk. These people have no tangible or material investment in us, our experiences, our needs, and our ideas of freedom. Instead, they hijack movements by and for poor Black folks and center themselves in conversations about liberation for poor Black women, men, boys, girls and gender non-conforming folks. Because their interests are not aligned with ours, they deflect conversations about our direct repression by the state to why they deserve more access to and power within white power systems. All of this is sustained by the use of academic theory to build gates to keep us out of these spaces and discussions, preventing us from advocating in our own interests.

Prominent and especially Very Online™ “organizers” and “activists” with roots in academia claim that we all must read the same books separately then come together and discuss them like an academic study group in order to be able to strategize toward revolution and liberation. Not only is this claim born of a capitalist individualism that can only be anti-Black, it’s, if we’re being real, also a not-even-a-little-veiled hatred of poor folks that argues poor Black folks can have no knowledge without elites telling us when and what to read. This is a complete negation of African traditions and how we, as Black people, have historically shared culture and knowledge. Their belief is that the people who wrote these books about the conditions we live in have wisdom about our experiences they somehow gained without reading these books. Yet those of us living in these very conditions couldn’t possibly produce similar insights.

When challenged, these same people resort to calling poor Black folks “stupid” and every synonym. They argue that we are “anti-intellectual” or “anti-theory” because their anti-poor sentiments won’t let them engage theory that isn’t exclusive to academia or books. This lets them erase and ignore the ways that poor Black folks theorize about our experiences everyday, and have alway had the capacity to do so. Talking about our experiences together, sharing ideas, and strategizing to get our needs met is theory. Reading books and sharing/teaching the ideas from those books is theory. And none of this work we do daily in community together is less valid than academic book clubs.

What gets intentionally obscured in the pontification, thought experiments and academic grandstanding is that political education is not just telling people to read books or condescending to other Black people about theories and ideologies. Political education also cannot happen without developing alternative systems, infractures and ways of surviving. Would-be leaders love invoking the Black Panther Party, but are not doing what the Black Panthers did, which is to say the Black Panthers didn’t just go around telling people who were unemployed and poor that our conditions were a product of not reading or “not understanding capitalism.” Because Black revolutionaries understood the nature of power and the responsibility of those with the most to sacrifice the most, by choice or by force. With this class analysis and a focus on the needs of the most vulnerable, they radicalized business owners and told middle class folks with money and property that they were the ones that had to be willing to link their material security to the folks who had nothing or else they were in opposition to our struggle.

People have turned “organizing” and “political education” into a national reading challenge to avoid having to make any actual material investment and any of those same sacrifices of their own comfort to aid us collectively. Political education, in the context revolutionaries used it, referenced the sharing of knowledge and ideas through conversations with people in the community while meeting needs. Writings, public speaking, literacy programs, campaigns, and study groups were all methods engaged in the act of developing the infrastructures needed to keep people fed and safe. They understood you cannot organize or fight on an empty stomach. Survival programs were foundational aspects of political education, inextricable from the process, as was being in the community talking with and learning from one another. Meanwhile, liberals who cosplay revolutionaries have spent decades trying to convince those of us living in actual precarity — who are homeless, who are poor, who are hungry, incarcerated, disabled, living under threat of violence from the state — that they are doing us some grand favor by merely talking about how we are dying and calling it “education” and “raising awareness.” We are still hungry and homeless as they profit from our disenfranchisement.

My challenge to Black middle class/petit bougie liberals who claim “solidarity” is this:

Y’all have the money, the property, the access to elite spaces, power or proximity to power within these political, media and academic spaces that you use exclusively to ensure you own security, often by aligning against those of us on the bottom. You refuse to link your material security and survival to ours, to invest your money and leverage your property to ensure our collective security, but join orgs or go to a protest and tell us you are revolutionary and that you are “fighting for us.” You buy $600 Angela Davis paintings for your homes in gated communities and call it “radical”, tweet about how you agree with and have the same ideas as us, call yourselves “abolitionists” and sacrifice nothing. You condescend to us about reading Marx but apparently skipped the part where he said, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”, yet you tell us poor Black folk you are invested in our liberation while investing nothing but words. Which part of that is revolutionary?

So no, I don’t wanna read Marx but if you wanna read Marx and then come to the table with ideas on how to build a safer world for poor Black children based on what you read and with full intent to make the material sacrifices necessary to achieve that, I challenge you to do that. Because this is what “organizing with people” rather than trying to paternalistically “organize the people” entails. You do actual work to make sure poor Black folks get our needs met and the things you read shape how you do that work, but mean nothing without it. Actual physical, emotional and material investment in community, linking survival, sharing knowledge, precarity and comfort is the only way to attain our collective security and freedom.

As it stands, we are the ones who are sacrificed so that you can live.

What is your sacrifice?

“One thing I would add is the acknowledgment of the movements that did center literacy and reading for the development of theories that spoke to their particular conditions. So for example, you will find in Amílcar Cabral’s PAIGC organization and Walter Rodney’s grounded circles, there was a major emphasis on reading with the masses, and coming to grips with various works so that the people could produce their own theory for their particular conditions. And these were very poor people in third world conditions. But what is being done today, is not that. It’s paternalism” — Reny Tay (@RenyTure on Twitter)

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There’s been a lot of controversy over the Netflix film Cuties, with it being categorized by some as encouraging pedophilia and others as a Black feminist critique of the sexualization of girls, without much in between.

If I’m being honest, my personal response to the film upon initially seeing the trailer was disgust. However, many people I respect, admire, and consider intelligent people with an investment in protecting Black girls by working to destroy cultures that harm them defended the film, leading me to believe there had to be something in it that I was missing and prompting me to watch it against my better judgement. What I quickly learned was that this was not a movie for Black girls.

The screenwriter and director herself has said the film was not for children.

“I wanted to open people’s eyes to what’s truly happening in schools and on social media, forcing them to confront images of young girls made up, dressed up and dancing suggestively to imitate their favorite pop icon. I wanted adults to spend 96 minutes seeing the world through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl, as she lives 24 hours a day.” — Maïmouna Doucouré

That intention is very evident in the film.

At the start of the film, I was introduced to Amy — a young Sengalese Muslim girl living in France whose homelife is poverty and drudgery. Her dad is not around and has also taken a second wife, her mom is distant as she copes with her husband bringing another woman into her home and Amy is being crushed under the weight of her responsibilities at home and the oppression of her religious upbringing, while watching western non-traditional/religious — mostly non-Black — girls live their best, liberated lives wearing tight clothes, posting selfies trying to emulate the sexuality of adult icons, twerking, stealing, fighting, bullying and being carefree. Amy envies those girls and seeks to become accepted by them through copying their behaviors, learning how to twerk and parrot sexuality from the media she’s consuming, to lie, sneak, and steal in order to prove her merit to them. She eventually becomes so good at these things that she is even teaching the other girls to be better at them.

Time to be honest again, I did not finish the film. I made it 61 of 96 minutes before it became completely unwatchable for me. At the time I stopped watching, Amy and the other young girls who are central to the film were dancing on a staircase, biting their fingers, bent over, shot from behind with a camera zooming in for close ups of their butts and crotches as they twerked. I can only assume these are the moments that Maïmouna Doucouré and other defenders of the film are referencing when they call parts of the film “uncomfortable to watch” as a cute (pun intended) way to describe sexual exploitation and lewd imagery of actual minor children.

Cuties does not depict childhood, particularly girlhood, particularly Black girlhood in a real, authentic, humanizing and graceful way. And what I mean by graceful is not that it has to be cute and serene and that it cannot be rough and raw, but that there is grace in the ways that we talk about, among, with, and for Black people even at our roughest and rawest that is evident in depictions of our experiences by folks who see the humanity in each of us. Cuties does not reserve that grace for Black girlhood, for Black family, for Black community, for Black existence.

In its effort to show the effects of outside influence — of bullying, of peer pressure, social media — it misses the significance of what happens at home and what home and community signifies for Black girls beyond a cliche, hollow, depiction of Black poverty and an oppressive religious culture. What is her relationship with her mother? How do they communicate with one another? I don’t know a Black girl who, if given a pen to write a story about her life, wouldn’t write about the dynamic between her and her mother or other parental figure. Failing to flesh out the relationships and community that make Amy who she is is failing to explore Black girlhood in a comprehensive way, in a humanizing way, in a way that makes us really understand and relate to this girl.

Which makes sense when you understand the movie is not about the girl. The girl is a plot device. The girl is a means to an end. She’s a political tool to tell an adult narrative, of and for an adult woman. Amy is a proxy to express the frustrations of adult Black women who didn’t feel seen, or heard, or protected or liberated in their recollections of childhood, and Cuties is being defended and celebrated by these same women who want their traumas seen and validated and are fully comfortable exploiting, abusing, and walking over actual Black girls to accomplish this. Any conversation in defense of Cuties is not about children, not about Black girls, not about protecting Black girls as they exist today. It is not about standing up for Black girls but about adults trying to reconcile their childhood, trying to get the vindication they feel they deserve for their childhoods without considering the ways that as now-adults, they are actively violent toward and harmful to Black girls.

“This film is my own story. All my life, I have juggled two cultures: Senegalese and French… As Amy did, I grew up in two cultures, and I wanted to show my personal story. I recreated the little girl I was at that age and what it was like for me to grow up with the Senegalese culture at home and the Western culture outside.” — Maïmouna Doucouré

When we talk about liberating and protecting Black childhood, healing the traumas from our childhoods is important. But protecting Black childhood as it exists today, for Black children as they exist today, is the ultimate goal in that liberation. This movie was actively harmful to Black girls and girlhood, reducing it to stereotypes and cliches of the most obscene behaviors without ever giving girls an actual voice. Cuties spectates Black girlhood in the most disconnected, disjointed, unreal ways, through the lens of someone trying to reassemble fragments of their long gone childhood, with no sense of the children in the story as actual beings. If we’re telling stories of children, why are children not empowered to tell them? What is gained by engaging Black girls not as authorities on their own experiences — as having their own voices and capacity to speak for themselves — but as needing adults disconnected from their reality to tell the world what their experience is through an adult lens, using them however we please in the process?

You cannot want to protect Black girls, and love Black girls, and want to liberate Black girls as they exist today and subject them to all that is this movie and the conversation around it. Dressing actual Black girls in tight clothing and short shorts (clothing specifically chosen for the purpose of the film to make them as sexualized as possible for an adult agenda) day after day, instructing them to bend over, get lower, gyrate differently for adult strangers as a film crew (also of adult strangers) zooms in closer and closer to their behinds and crotches for multiple takes to produce a film that literally any adult stranger can watch in their homes is an indefensible violence. These girls are objectified, exposed and displayed in ways that adult strangers all around the world should not have access to them. Especially when we know how traumatizing these types of roles and acts in filming can be even for adult actors.

This film is not love or advocacy or care.

The insidiousness of how we view Black children is that we don’t see them as real, valid humans experiencing things, living things, learning things, feeling things in real time. We see our own pains that we experienced in childhood, we see the ways that we deserve to be healed from the pains that we experienced in childhood, we see what we feel we would have wanted or were owed when we were children. We see receptacles for our trauma and blank canvases to project anything we want onto. What we don’t see is what we owe to them, how our own behaviors are actively harmful to and exploitive of them, and the responsibility we have to put their needs above our own.

It’s not okay or valid to harm Black girls in the effort to liberate our own childhoods. And this film and the conversations around it do exactly that.

Originally published at http://wildwildfonts.com on October 7, 2020.

You may have heard me say this before.

I’m sure you’ll hear me say it again.

I intend to keep saying it as often and as loudly as necessary until the skies open up and the ancestors send for me, or until I feel a shift in the weight of your words. Yes, you. I’m talking about you and I want you specifically and especially to hear me: the way I see you “loving” Black women do not be moving me.

I am not taken by your performance of love and value for me and people like me that always seems to circle back to reminding me I am a figure of struggle, suffering, and death — nothing more.

You refuse to see Black women and girls as anything beyond ascribed victimhood, an affront to the beauty and power that is Black woman and girlhood in all of its forms. I reject this benevolent misogynoir. Black women and girls matter beyond the ways we suffer, and are victimized within community, or by the institutional violence of white supremacist capitalism.

To confine us within your limited (white) view of femininity, and bind us to your patriarchal (white) caricatures of damsels in distress is an unforgivable violence. You would raise a generation of Black children to believe that to be a Black woman is to suffer endlessly and unloved until death, and that celebrating our strength and power is akin to a slur.

In your desperation to portray Black women and girls as frail, helpless beings who no one loves, cares about, and protects, what is constantly overlooked are the Black girls and women across the country, and the world, who are protecting ourselves and one another. When we’re not forgotten afterthoughts in your narrative, we’re infantilized and transmogrified into some neglected thing.

Our determination to embrace our autonomy, and our ability to meaningfully impact our lives — and the lives of those we love — made into an ugly and unfair burden.

We are told the ways in which we love and support one another are not good enough, because it is not the salvation we should seek from our divine rescuers. How is it that you make a reality where Black women love, and are loved by other Black women, sound like purgatory?

The ugly and uncomfortable (for you) truth is that what you feel for Black women and girls is not actually love. No love for us would diminish us in these ways. Your version of love tells us we matter not for who we are, but for your own pain and guilt that you can use us to assuage, the caricatures to which you can reduce us, mumbling “listen to Black women” and “Black women matter” as you erase the ways we exist beyond your two-dimensional portrayals of pain and abandonment.

It is this erasure that brought us the desecration of Breonna Taylor.

In your conversations about how Breonna Taylor’s death has “become” a meme, what is conveniently left out is how her death was always a meme to you. How you and thousands of others tweeted endless that “no one is talking about” her death while Black folks in Louisville and other parts of the country shouted and marched and gathered nightly — led largely by Black women — demanding justice for her murder. But of course, these weren’t the people you were talking about when you said “no one.” Your “no one” was an acknowledgement of your incessant need to be validated by those you see as real, valid, powerful people capable of enacting change and for you that absolutely is not Black women.

Instead, you tweeted “no one is talking about.”

Over and over.

A hollow, useless, performative and blatantly false statement repeated ad nauseam, viral a dozen times over, written in your articles that produced nothing but a paycheck for you. You reduced Breonna Taylor’s personhood and impact within her community to a hashtag, and converted her death into a social media challenge to keep her name trending by any means, while never actually talking about her and who she was, never uplifting the protests happening for her in Louisville, never sharing the words of her family and community, or information about the circumstances of her murder, or the investigation into the officers who killed her, or how folks could support the work being done in her name.

Just empty words, and the endless taking up of space.

And still you take no responsibility for what the ugliness of your version of love for Black women has brought.

We are six years, six seasons into a production that has brought more harm than it ever has healing and I want nothing more than to see the curtains close on your theater, permanently.

Because you do not love Black women.

Originally published at https://www.rezistansnwa.com on July 31, 2020.

I believe in prison abolition. I am not a perfect abolitionist. I believe that it is not only ideal but essential to our survival as Black people that we defund police, close prisons, and implement practices within our communities that are divorced from carceral systems. And while I am still struggling with what that entails, what those outcomes will look like, and what non-carceral responses to violence and harm embody, I hold onto one thing- what it means to be Black right here and now, in the very carceral society we currently live in and not some distant future abolitionist utopia.

I’ve seen the Perfect Abolitionists’ responses to calls to arrest the murderers of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade and too many other Black people killed by police who have received no justice. The Perfect Abolitionist says that believing in abolition means not supporting or advocating for police to be arrested and charged, which simply continues the perpetuation of carceral systems. The Perfect Abolitionist instead focuses on the goal of total prison/police abolition. And while I understand and agree with the logic in the abstract and respect the work being done by abolitionists promoting and facilitating prison abolition and transformative justice/restorative justice, I can’t ignore the silencing and idealism of this particular ideal in practice.

What does transformative/restorative justice look like for murder by police? How do we “hold accountable” as a community police who kill us, when they exist solely to execute us? And where does that leave the families of those murdered who are demanding their loved ones’ murderers be arrested and prosecuted?

‪I think in our fight for abolition, it’s important we not sacrifice our connections with our communities in treating their needs as less significant than our ideals. I do not and cannot agree with doing so. I do not and cannot support any “advocacy” that says to ignore the cries of my people who are hurting and tell them what they should be feeling instead. I don’t agree that fighting for abolition and doing abolitionist work should involve chastising oppressed people for leaning into the only options to receive any kind of justice that are currently available to them.

‪We know that arresting cops will not destroy the system, that prisons don’t end violence but merely concentrate it, that even if these cops went to jail, others would still be on the streets enacting violence against us. Cops going to jail is not a solution to the police brutality and brutal murder of Black people.‬ ‪But who does it help to condescend to people who are being violated, whose loved ones are being killed right in front of them, who are hurting, who have received no justice telling them that they are fighting the wrong fight? That they are fighting for today when they should be fighting for someday. ‪Even if it’s just small change, even knowing there is still more work to be done, they need something to give today.‬ If we discount anything that isn’t complete and immediate overhaul, where does that leave us?

‪And I know you will say you live these experiences and you are also in these communities navigating this violence while keeping your politics perfect and pure, and that is great for you.

All the cookies.

The other 43 million of us aren’t here for cookies, we’re trying to survive as white supremacy does everything possible to kill us. We can and will still continue to fight and advocate and push for defunding police, abolishing prisons, and all real, meaningful change through destruction of the system while supporting our people crying out for something, anything, right now in streets engulfed in flames. Because they deserve to feel the relief those wins bring them individually as we fight for our collective freedom.

Abolition will come but it won’t come tomorrow so until then, throw all cops in jail.‬

Originally published at http://wildwildfonts.com on June 1, 2020.

“My mother was the first person to teach me that love looks like violence…”

I was awakened to being pulled from my bed by my hair and dragged from my room to the kitchen. I was thrown to the grown and hit in my face repeatedly. I had no idea what was happening or why. I felt the back of my head hit the kitchen floor over and over, before being slammed against the side of the counter. I cried out for help, for it to stop, but no help came and it did not stop. A hand closed around my throat and I thought I would die, and still no explanation was given. She stood up and looked down at me in complete disgust and unfiltered anger. I felt small and afraid. I lay there, as still as possible, terrified to move. She told me to get up, and I started to scramble to my feet, relieved that it was over. Then she kicked me in my face before turning and walking away from me without a word.

I was eleven.

My crime, I would learn later, was that I had cut up a couple of t-shirts earlier that week while trying to be a fashion designer with my younger sister. The shirts didn’t turn out how we wanted, so we threw them in the back of our closet. I don’t even believe we thought we were doing anything wrong or were trying to hide anything by putting them there. But in hindsight, maybe we were. Maybe we knew the wrath we had the potential to face should they ever be discovered. And when they were, to save herself, my sister told our mom that I had cut the t-shirts up. I don’t blame her. She was nine and already fully cognizant of the consequences of our mom’s anger. She wanted to save herself and she did, and honestly I’m okay with that. To this day I’m content with the fact that I took that beating for the both of us because it meant that my little sister endured a little less harm in a world that destroys black girls with reckless abandon.

I know people will read my story and see my mom as a monster, as the sum of her faults and bad choices, as a villain that they can’t see themselves or anyone else they know in. But my mom is not a monster, and if she is, she certainly wasn’t born one. She is what becomes of too many black children forced to grow up in a world that hates us and does everything possible, from birth, to destroy us. She is the product of a decade and a half of her own endured parental abuse and atrocities in her childhood that she still doesn’t acknowledge as abuse or understand that she didn’t deserve.

By thirteen years old, she was a single mom to a child who would be diagnosed with Sickle Cell Anemia at the age of two, and by twenty-one she was raising 3 children on her own. My mom has six children — five girls, one boy. There are four fathers between us, and yet she raised us all alone. Something that was said to me in childhood that I always resented and now understand as an adult is that she did the best that she could do. Not the best that could be done, but the best that she was able to do with the experiences, trauma, education, and resources she had at her disposal — and with the only standards and practices for what “love” and parenting look like that she had ever been shown.

“We tell our daughters that a man who hits them doesn’t love them, after telling them their whole lives that we hit them out of love.”

I posted the above on Facebook last August and had several friends and relatives comment with excuses and defenses for why it’s okay to put your hands on children, and how that act is different from the same violence when committed against an adult by another adult. And I won’t go into what those excuses were, or the countless other justifications I’ve heard, because the reality is they don’t matter. It’s not different. Many people in the many conversations that I’ve had about spanking think what they’re doing to their children is better than what was done to me and my siblings because they don’t “cross the line”. But where is “the line”? And would we make these same distinctions when it came to harmful actions committed against another adult?

Would we say that it’s okay to subject someone else to “a little bit” of sexual assault, physical violence, harassment, or domestic violence as long as you don’t “cross the line”? Of course not. So why then do we play these word games to defend harm we cause our children? Especially when it has been established through scientific research and studies that violence and trauma can transform our brains and even our DNA? Why are we still defending toxic parenting practices that do nothing but harm our children, the people we love most in the world and would never want to harm?

Not only is physical violence against children abusive in all its form and a violation and deprivation of bodily autonomy and integrity, it does long-term harm to children’s brain development and impacts how children learn to connect with the world in adolescence and adulthood. Children who are spanked or otherwise physically disciplined, and even children who are yelled at frequently, often grow into adults who struggle with boundaries (both establishing them for themselves and respecting them in others), communication and managing frustrations in healthy ways. Girls who are spanked are more vulnerable to sexual assault and domestic violence. Because if the people we love most teach us that we deserve to be hit and harmed, why wouldn’t we believe it?

I often find myself crying for the spirits of little black girls everywhere, even those long gone, who will never know what we could’ve grown into had we been nurtured in the sun’s warm embrace rather than stifled in shrouds of darkness. For black girls who do not grow up knowing that we are beautiful, special, capable, valued and valuable and above all else loved. My mother was the first person to teach me that love looks like violence, because it’s what she had been taught too.

What will we teach our daughters?

Originally published at http://wildwildfonts.com on October 9, 2018.