I’m Tired of Your Racist Imagination

Why I Rarely Write Media Reviews Anymore

Photo from Canva

When I wrote media reviews, it was with the naivete of someone who’s been conditioned to assume the best in people. It was with the irrational belief that people couldn’t intend to cause harm. They couldn’t intend to marginalize people and they didn’t mean to silence folks. I genuinely believed that they wanted to be humane rather than cultural and sometimes actual cannibals of Black people and people of marginalized identities. I gave people the benefit of the doubt and truly thought that if I wrote enough about where they went wrong, someone would read it and change.

Then I realized that it is intentional. But it’s not enough to wake up to the intentionality of the violence. I had to believe that the violence of marginalization and erasure was intentional. It takes work to maintain that belief — we’re conditioned to think the malice was merely incidental. That it was a mistake. That if the intent wasn’t to be violent and cause harm, then it was merely an unfortunate but unintentional consequence. I doubted myself time and time again because the pain of living with the belief of intentional violence was so abhorrent that I convinced myself that I needed the lie. Every day it became harder to believe the lie, so hard that I often wished for death because who wants to navigate a booby-trapped life that had no…