I woke up with weight this morning.
On my chest. In my throat.
Extending from nape of neck, my clavicle maybe(?),
to everywhere.
And attempting to pinpoint its origin (even in this moment) is only making me more dejected.
So I’ll keep this as simple as possible.
What’s happening?
I think part of me is doing the thing I love - being still and slow-moving enough, so all that I have felt/been feeling/desire to feel can swallow me - if only until I must begin moving again.
And then part of me also knows this is the day when so many of us will spend so much of our day telling other people what is appropriate for them to feel, appropriate for them to celebrate, shaming them into denunciation of even personal tradition, minimal, performances of joy.
This is the day when so many will quote Frederick Douglass into the ground.
And we will be well within our rights to do so.
And still.
As I consider the actual blood shed, and lives and time and emotional and mental and psychological wellbeing lost, in the struggle to free the 13 American colonies from British control, I can’t help but to focus on the fact that “Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 8,000 African-descended people participated in the Revolution on the Patriot side, and that upward of 20,000 served the crown. Many fought with extraordinary bravery and skill, their exploits lost to our collective memory.”
On each side, there were our “exceptional” or “noted” (or, those of us whose names they chose to remember):
Phyllis Wheatley (I will gladly DM for days with source material from my dissertation about how often we underestimate her influence on the Revolution)
James Armistead Lafayette et al.
This post is about something much smaller and more intimate and also much larger than me saying, for instance, “stop shaming Black folks who want to eat ribs and drink Hennessy on one of the few elongated moments of reprieve from capitalist toiling.”
It also includes a bit of “trust that if Black folks can fight for the freedoms and values of a country in which we haven’t even been fully included as human beings, if we can continuously plan and execute on a future that somehow includes the descendants of the individuals who have and would again (if given the choice) literally kill us dead, then we can eat wings and potato salad on a porch without losing sight of the fact that we’ve been mistreated (understatement of a century) by the very government that is (actually, only tangentially) celebrating its victory of a kind of freedom so many of its citizens have begged (and fought) for without ever seeing.
Friends, sitting in the sun doesn’t literally make us stupid. And our present action or inaction steeped in judgment doesn’t erase the efforts of thousands of black folks who - enslaved or not, willing or not, believing that Freedom from the British would actually free them from white supremacy or not - fought on behalf of American Independence. Our self-righteousness doesn’t erase the efforts of the millions of Black folks who continue to give their lives on behalf of making this country a little more free for all each day.
What might help?
I can’t tell you whether to celebrate the Fourth of July or not (and honestly, on today, what does that even really mean).
But, if in the middle of a global pandemic (where people have lost and are continuing to lose so much of their livelihood) and global protests for Black liberation (where people have lost and are continuing to lose so much of their livelihood), you deem it fit to “not my holiday” black and brown people into the ground instead of lending folks a little compassion around the complexities of both dying under and thriving within an oppressive regime, then just like … cut it TF out.
Take a break. Find a seat. Or a nap. Or a hammock in the shade.
Whatever you do, don’t use your power and privilege to be mean to someone who looks like you but doesn’t believe like you. You’ve apparently got the rest of your life to choose that path. And we’re all living the effects of so many others having already done so.
with <3,
[sources: https://www.history.com/news/black-heroes-american-revolution; Running Out of Time: Radicalism, Resistance, and The Future of African American Literature (my dissertation)]