It is February 4, 2024. I woke up this morning after not sleeping next to a white woman who calls me nigger. It is a good day. Today’s entry is from the year 2013:
While I still share some of the sentiment contained in that post I have a lot less respectability politics in my blood these days. This is one of the reasons why I don’t ever intend to let this blog go. It is the evolution of me, the experiences of me, the growth of ME. I am not the same as I was in 2013. I am not the same as I was in January.
One might read less respectability politics and think less respect but they would be wrong.
One is about holding the Blacks to a standard defined by the colonizers and failing to attain that standard means we get what happens to us no matter how egregious. The other is respecting the existence of Blackness in all its variations from colored to coon and saying yes that is us but hey don’t judge us by Clarence Thomas.
I don’t know the comedian, but there was a joke I saw in a stand up once and the overall theme was you won’t meet anyone more ‘racist’ than an old Black man. I laughed. I could toss out all the reasons that is still ‘true’ in this moment but instead I am focusing on countering that type of intolerance.
Countering the sexism – LGBQT phobia – hetero standard – that stems from that type of intolerance. I can’t cure the world of that ails it but I can show others how to expand beyond those limitations. Today is the first Sunday of the month and the first audience show of 2024 for Da Smoke. Da Smoke is one of those spaces where we dismantle and send the lessons learned to infect the rest of the world. I don’t mind being a virus.