Stop Assisting The Agents Of Our Demise

You have more power than you think

When you are Black and living in an anti-Black society among people who love to pretend they are more progressive than they actually are, you quickly learn that you can do everything “right” and still be wrong. You learn that you can follow all the rules and still be expelled. You can follow every direction given and still fail. You learn that for some reason YOU are the problem and you spend decades of your life trying to obey, shrink, jump, and contort yourself into a solution only to eventually realize the problem is not and has never been you. The problem is the people whose identity is built on denigrating, coopting, and destroying your existence. The problem is the people who claim to be civilized by murdering everyone whose existence and ways of living contradict that belief. The problem resides in a different appearance, a different body, a body that has decided that you are here to silently, smilingly submit to an existence of servitude or be destroyed on sight.

We know this. We started learning this hard lesson the moment we were forced into integrated spaces. We watched mediocrity be rewarded. We experienced lies becoming “truth.” Many of us endured and adapted and accepted that we would do more, receive less, and be punished for being competent and punished even more for being…