Reading the Room
I am not a particularly smart person but I’ve learned to read a room. Sometimes just in the nick of time, but still. Like when I was at a party and saw a guy take off his hat, his watch, and hand his camera to a friend. I promptly grabbed the folks I was with and headed out the way. Fast forward 2 minutes and he slapped the shit out of another guy and it was on. The folks I was with asked me how I knew…I didn’t. I was just paying attention.
When Obama won, I started paying extra attention and that alertness has only increased since then. I saw an escalation in violence coming. I saw the white supremacist backlash coming. I had to acknowledge the things I’d been conditioned to ignore because the rules of survival were changing. I had to make conscious choices about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and what it could cost me in the long run. Still, I chose.
From day one of 45’s candidacy, whiteness rose up and started flexing. They have done nothing but ramp up since. The genocide never stopped for Black people, but it had been muted in some circles. The “silence” wasn’t good enough and we knew it. We were all one family member away from living the worst version of the nightmare that is being Black in America, but we all had our own version to contend with. Some of us pretended it was fine. Others blamed victims for not being smart/strong/resilient enough to subvert enough of ourselves to make whiteness feel safe. Others actively punished everyone who looked like them to get them to conform, conform, conform into the image of their oppressor and sold out those who choose not to comply. All to survive and possibly thrive in a system that was designed to exploit us on a whim…a whim we often denied existed.
And now here we are, watching the most vulnerable die. The slightly less vulnerable are exploited and murdered in service to those slightly less vulnerable than them. And up the societal hierarchy it goes, maiming our people while exposing all the ways we’ve been fucked and have fucked each other over to maintain this shitty illusion of safety and prosperity. The super wealthy and powerful keep demonstrating they are untouchable and agents of white supremacy keep protecting them to maintain their illusions…while denying they are also the cannon fodder of the privileged.
Shit ain’t breaking. It was already broken.
Shit ain’t dying; it’s already dead.
We exist in the rot of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, too poisoned to escape, too afraid to fight, and too brainwashed with our illusion of comfort to change.
Vampires, shapeshifters, demons, trolls, and ghouls walk among us and many of us see them when we look in the mirror. This is our reality. This IS our reality. And if it’s going to change, we need to do more than pretend shit will go back to normal. Normal is a lie to keep us fucking quiet and complacent. We need to burn the corpse we call america and build something in a whole other image cuz this shit right here is fucking horrible and needs to die.
Sadly, I’m not smart enough to figure it out. It took me all this time to finally read the room. But I’m fucking here for the people who do because this is crashing and burning down around us and many of us ain’t gonna make it without some kind of change.
Shit. Many of us ain’t gonna make it, regardless. May as well build something better in the ruins of what was but no longer is.
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Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on March 30, 2020.
