I was 11 when I realized that the color of my skin in America was a problem. Well not a problem but that because I was Black, there were additional weights I would have to carry. At age 11 I should have been playing with dolls and dreaming of being a princess or whatever I thought I wanted to be back then. Instead, I’d been raped once already and now I had to use my 11 year old brain to figure out how to walk through life as Black because my women weren’t equipped to explain that to me. They wanted me to be a respectable negro. They never told me that my respectable negro ancestors got hit with fire hoses in their Sunday best and that there were historical photos of their broken necks beneath nooses and perfectly starched collars.
I am not different than most Black girls in the United States that I was not allowed the childhood of my yt counterparts, because my Black skin demanded I learn other lessons. Learn them early. Learn them often.
Sometimes we ain’t meant to be free
I didn’t get to learn how to be Black in high school. I was too busy trying to not die. The trauma of leaving St. Athanasius for the Philadelphia High School for Girls almost took me off this planet. I’d been equipped to embrace my otherness, without being told, I am not other. I may have been the only Madonna fan on Limekiln Pike, I may not speak like my 2 friends who’d been public school educated their entire life, I might have delusions that the life Molly Ringwald lived could also be mine. I still wasn’t other. There were millions of other Black girls like me, and like me they would eventually find out, we are only other as long as it serves their purpose to allow us to be other. When they deemed otherwise, we’d be just another nigger.
My first ‘real’ job after high school, because I had not yet realized that not going right off to college was the first clue my American Dream was really a nightmare…that first job was in a building with Black people. I met my first trans person at that job. We’d end up on opposite political ends eventually but Rest In Peace still Larry. Being around that number of Black adults was eye opening. That small building in the middle of the hood with less than 25 people still managed to carry all types of Blackness. I mean the receptionist at the front desk was an obese ‘man’ in a bad wig and makeup, forced to use ‘his’ government name and not allowed to use the name ‘he’ chose. I still hadn’t learned all that I would need about being American and Black until the Philadelphia Police Department.
I was a civilian in the department, never sworn. That is tough enough. I was a fat Black woman. Harder still. I was smarter than my sworn supervisors, and not at all interested in trying to fit in. Up that difficulty level more Nicole. Then toss in some old fashioned refuse to be the sacrificial lamb for the yt department who offered the jobs of seven Black men and women up to the crowd which demanded justice for an ain’t shit yt kid who died and we are now at boss level difficulty. By the time I left PPD I knew what Blackness was like for me. I knew what Blackness was like for millions of others.
As I travel this life with my Black skin, on a Saturday morning as I type on the porch of my Black ass neighborhood, side eyeing this yt man delivering on the porch next to me, I remember names. Too many names. Names that were on the news as I was a child. Names that were known in my neighborhood. Names known only to other neighborhoods. Names known to my ancestors of past who no longer have a voice. Names of my ancestors. Names of people I knew. Names of people I will never hear because video cameras were not a thing in 1492.
Too many names. Too many men. Too many children.
Hundred and hundreds of years. The trauma is now a part of our DNA it runs so deep.
Too much trauma on the shoulders of Black men women and children.
If that nigga want me dead I can’t let the nigga breathe
Why its hard for me to smile ‘cause I seen a lot
I recall most of the conversations I had with MM. They weren’t all ugly. One in particular stands out, so much so that I broke my own rule and retweeted it to her.
“2020 is that 1968 would have been if George Wallace won”
40 years later, on the shoulders of a generation who carry the trauma in their DNA but aren’t burdened by the baggage of their parents, the fires have started.
I can’t type here that I condemn them. I do not. I support them. How do I not? Those children out there are ripping apart the fabric of that which harms me.
I watched the 3rd Precinct burn as the crowd cheered and set off fireworks. Fireworks like those that happen on the 4th of July, or Independence Day in the good old USA.
Treason day. Riot day. Property damage day.
This nation was built on violence bones and blood. It’s gone unchecked for centuries. It’s killed black and brown people. It’s contaminated the soil which should be growing our food. It’s created a system of wealth which costs the masses and feeds the handful.
The economic disparity is painfully clear during the current pandemic, people not just the black and brown facing death have lifted the curtain and understand what supporting this system costs them. Not all of them obviously, but enough that movement happens. I can’t truly condemn that movement.
That movement could possibly on the other side of this create an alteration which sees humanity and not dollar signs.
If a few buildings have to burn for that chance I have to rock with that.
We’ve been silent. It continued. We’ve asked nicely. It continued. We’ve marched and begged. It continued. Today and in the days after this, we speak the language which created this nation and this climate. Perhaps that will interrupt the continuation.
Fire is cleansing. It is destructive as hell, it is also powerful. Planting on burned soil brings a different quality of crops and let’s take a look and see what that fruit tastes like. We know what the current fruit tastes like.
Burn it all, and give those of us who survive the opportunity to plant something which feeds everyone.
Or just fucking burn it all.
Putting out the fire is not the answer.