Author: ayannaha

I was a nigger for twenty-three years; I gave that shit up. No room for advancement.

The truth really sounds funny. I’ve been wondering a lot about why that is. What it might come down to is that it’s unfamiliar, foreign even, and the struggle to locate something that is unfamiliar within the context of what is familiar can feel uncomfortable or even painful. Still, that’s  the only way to internalize new information, to find a context for it inside of what we already know.

I’ve been thinking about the way that pain comes in degrees, tickling being at the lowest level. And here it seems to come full circle! The truth is uncomfortable, sometimes painful, and pain is something you have to laugh at. Sometimes–

Richard Pryor said that. “I was a nigger for twenty-three years…” He said it in 1971 during a special that not a lot of people have watched, or at least not to my knowledge. People don’t talk about it like they do, Live on the Sunset Strip. I watched it for the first time last night, and I know why it’s not as popular. It’s really fucking sad, and more than sad, it’s so uncomfortable.  It appears as if he’s off of some drug- he admits that he hasn’t had any cocaine all day- and for forty minutes, he tumbles through a wide range of topics all having to do with his trauma.

It’s all very truthful, the things he’s saying, or at least it feels truthful and sometimes that’s the most important thing, that it feels true. Richard Pryor’s mother was a sex worker. Few can be certain that his stories concerning time spent at the brothel are truthful- I don’t know the most humane word for a brothel- but he tells them with such genuine hurt that at least his pain is undeniable. And of course, because this is stand up, the pain isn’t on the surface, it’s in the way his eyes search the room; the way that they’re glazed over; the way that every question he poses to the audience begs them to restore a tiny piece of his humanity. They refuse him. His audience refuses him.

Live and Smokin

I’ve been trying to think of WHITE PEOPLE as little as possible except that they’re everywhere. They were all throughout the audience during Live and Smokin. It’s not an overstatement to say that they were the audience.

White people laugh differently, I’ve observed this phenomenon in my own 23 years. All of the laughs on that recording sounded white. White people’s laughs sound a certain way because everything is so foreign to them. Whiteness is so narrow in its scope that it leaves a lot of room for what is or can be foreign, and in this way, it leaves room for discomfort and humor. Between the truth and what they perceive to be lies, white people should be able to find humor everywhere.

A few people have said, “this time feels different.” I think I can take some refuge in that. This uprising, if nothing else, feels different. There’s a pandemic happening; an unrelenting white supremacist is in office; Kim Kardashian just became a billionaire. Hopefully that changes things, and the outcome can be different this time. Maybe not.

I do hope that respectability politics can die with this one. Elijah McClain, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor were all murdered by racist police officers. Each of them was unique in their humanity as is the case for all Black people.

Perhaps more than the others, Elijah McClain’s story underscores the notion that Black people can’t do anything to evade the hatred that is embedded in whiteness. There is no level of “excellence” that one can achieve to outpace whiteness. Having acknowledged that, “Black mediocrity” is a lie. It is oxymoronic and it does not exist either in theory or in practice.

I watched Arthur Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death over the weekend along with lots of other people on the internet. As I watched, its two most striking images were that of the Black mother addicted to drugs who can’t be present for her son and Serena Williams crip walking at The Olympics. The seamless transitions, which eventually link the two clips are evidence to the falsehood of Black mediocrity. Both women are equally deserving of praise because they perform the incredible feat of blackness in every moment of every day.

To be Black is to foster abundance out of the scarcity that whiteness constructs and white people uphold. Every Black person, and I truly mean every one, holds within them an abundance of life that is beyond description. It is Lucille Clifton writing, “come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.” That may be at the root of Black mediocrity’s impossibility, that for as long as I or anyone else is Black and living, we prove the failure of whiteness. I did that before I got a degree; before I started writing and speaking in the way that white people would best understand me; before I knew what a white person was, I and he and she and they were excellent as Black people because we were and are.

The evidence is out there. It’s Matt Damon asking Prince if he lived in Minnesota and him responding, “I live inside my own heart, Matt Damon.” When The Dream sings about his search for “somewhere (he) can feel safe and end (his) holy war,” it elicits thoughts of our being a people with no land and having our roots burned- a people who continuously fashion a home within themselves that is completely inaccessible to whiteness- this is at the root of the universality of Blackness.

Even our language, the language that was forced onto enslaved Africans as their many languages were ripped away, was never meant to be ours and still we made it the dominant one all over the world. It’s Jay-Z making “the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can.” No one cares about American English without it coming from Black people. And it starts with the most “average” Black person you can find, that is the person who feeds the collective to be what it is. The person whose existence makes our language, culture, and survival possible. Again, Black mediocrity is a lie.

The second half of Live and Smokin is where the discomfort becomes almost unbearable. It is so uncomfortable, so truthful, so funny. Richard Pryor plays a “wino” and a person addicted to drugs and he does an excellent job at both- it’s believable and there’s a lot of feeling in his performance. A lot of people, many in that audience, might see him as placing Black mediocrity on display.

What’s happenin? What’s happenin? What’s happenin!? I see you motherfucka.

Richard Pryor as the drug addict is so funny because he asks his white audience for answers that they don’t have, which is something like catching them in a lie. Richard Pryor as the drug addict knows the truth. He knows they don’t have the answers. The drug addicted Black man knows that white people don’t know what’s going on. Black people see white people, we see everyone- including and especially ourselves, and that is just excellent.

Watching Dave Chapelle’s newest special, Richard Pryor’s influence is apparent. Just be on stage and tell the truth, or at least your version of it. What I noticed about Chappelle’s stand up is his focus on Black men. The only time he really invokes a Black woman- apart from a brief mention of Azealia Banks- is to talk badly about Candace Owens. He doesn’t mention Breonna Taylor, but he speaks of Candace Owens with such hatred.  It made me think of the ways in which the world feels that Black women, very specifically, owe their labor, and when they’re murdered in their homes, there’s no need for mourning because they’re ultimately fulfilling their duty, they owe their lives to the world. Maybe that’s why Breonna Taylor’s death became a meme, it was so truthful that some mistook it for a joke.

To be clear, the truth isn’t always funny, but humor is almost always truthful. When Maya Angelou honored the woman who helps us to survive by writing, “The Mask,” she acknowledged the joke of putting on a show, wearing a lie when you know the truth.

It was our submission that made your world go round.

“The Mask”

I’ve been coming to terms with this idea especially as I’ve seen lots of “Black at…” forums arise out of this new era for Black Lives Matter both as a phrase and a movement. There were a lot of truthful conversations that Black people at predominantly white institutions held only in private because maybe they thought they had to or because they thought no one would believe them. Now, people are feeling more empowered to tell the truth, but it happens so rarely that they say the names of the people who hurt them or attach their own names to these confessions. It’s often anonymous and no one is particularly placed at fault, no one but the institution. This is a problem for me because of course whiteness is an institution but it is upheld by every white person.

Having considered these ideas, I celebrated my birthday with an Airing of Grievances on Instagram Live. I think social media is weird and funny, and I relished the opportunity to take up space on the timeline- within a racist algorithm- and hold a public conversation with other Black people that centered a Black audience. We showed our faces and we named the people who were racist towards us. In school, these people were often nice by the rules of white womanhood- I went to an all girls school- that had at one time indoctrinated me. They also acted violently and associated with violent racists. This violence wasn’t necessarily tied to physical blows, but to their overall way of being, the things that they said and the spaces they took up without regard for others. During the live, we didn’t acknowledge comments from white people because the intention of our discussing and exposing our experiences wasn’t to educate white people, to be a catalyst for someone’s growth, but to stop hiding, to stop being so scared of our experiences and our abusers that we couldn’t discuss them publicly.

Many people who went to school with me between the ages of 10 and 18 watched my Airing of Grievances, causing me to think about who I was when we were still in close contact with one another. When I look at my younger self, the person that they knew, I see a child who believed in respectability politics to a certain degree. At this point, I’m so profoundly invested in the fall of respectability politics because I see that its practice is so plainly rooted in lies. And more than anything else, I see that lies are killing me and the people I love. My hope is that the truth becomes so big and unavoidable, so ubiquitous that it swallows our everyday living. I want the truth to be so inescapable that it’s no longer funny. In short, I think everyone should give up on being a nigger because to be a nigger is to be white and gorge yourself on lies that only whiteness can tell.

I was a nigger for twenty-three years; I gave that shit up. No room for advancement.

Disclaimer: This is full of lies. It reads like fiction, but more-so it’s one example of the way that I narrativize my life and sometimes that includes lying to myself.

“Our people, you’ll see this, we don’t need the drugs or alcohol. We just need music. We thrive off of feeling”.

I was weeks removed from my trip, but the images still did laps around my thoughts with no signs of stopping. It rained at least three times while we were there. The air would get heavy, and my hair kept losing its curl pattern, turning into a scribbled mass that cloned itself many times over on the heads of people passing by. We hurried back to the hotel and they went to the waterfront.

I tried to breathe only through my nose, knowing I might be forced to confront the smell of human waste at any moment. It kept happening that my worry would dissipate as I allowed my attention to get caught up in some ornate architecture or a group of children dancing to their own music. On each occasion that I became fully immersed in the way that my surroundings were both new and old, the scent would force its way into my nose, my mouth and throat. It shot me back into reality, trying to suppress my gag reflex. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing out as someone’s dinner would waft by a few seconds later. If only I hadn’t been so afraid, then maybe I could taste it.

Even before we knew to go to the water and watch them praise, I had a feeling they’d welcome a storm. I waddled through the streets with some difficulty, trying to prevent my thighs from chafing any further. A woman sat on her stoop with three young children and sang out to us. The song said something about America, but that was all I could make out. I’d wasted twelve years on French, a language that couldn’t bring me any closer to these people, which is to say it couldn’t bring me any closer to myself. Her face was mine if I didn’t look for too long.  We were stopped repeatedly.

They’d touch their skin and then touch ours and say, “we are the same”. They loved us once for our color and again for our ancestors’ forced, ocean voyage. By no choice of our own, we’d ended up where they’ve always wanted to go. I tried to understand why you would want to leave a place like this. A place where people look like you, they embrace you. They dance in the streets.

“America! I have a brother in Miami. He’s a doctor, and you know they don’t pay doctors like they should here. I’m an artist, so it works for me. But he had to get out, and you know that means he can’t come back.”

Every explanation that we received for how this place functions came from an artist. It seemed they had a kind of unique ability to put this experience into words and to know when exactly to stop putting it into words because at a certain point, silence always becomes the best explanation. We met the man who cautioned us against trying to understand inside of a shrine. Another man had covered rooms and buildings, walkways and benches with colored tile. I could only see labor when the sun shined on this place. In my mind, this shrine needed to be unique to this country and culture because I’d never known these circumstances anyplace else. If I had seen this kind of security, it only created a space for thinking and debating, for one person to assert his rightness over another. It hadn’t created a space for beauty.

I’d be lying if I said that in this place, life was beautiful for everyone when children descended from high rising apartments to gently reach at our elbows and ask for any amount of money. I couldn’t understand them completely. Both language and experience failed me.

“What are you doing?” My classmate, Lesley, must have been looking at me for a while because when I turned, a smirk had cemented into her pale cheeks. She seemed certain that I would be embarrassed.

“I’m trying to fall asleep with my eyes open. I think I figured it out. You just have to focus on something in the distance- I’m looking at the map- and then you just fade. But instead of fading out, you fade in!”

French class was halfway between breakfast and lunch, which meant that my energy was always very intense during this hour and fifteen-minute portion of the day. All I could think about was when I would eat next. It’s slightly easier to mute a language when it isn’t entirely familiar, and my thoughts were pre-occupied with food concerns. This is how I first began to consider the portion of the brain that someone told me lies dormant. I never bothered to research their claim. Instead, I preferred the kind of endless possibility that comes along with wholeheartedly believing in this untapped, intellectual reserve. I would think, from time to time, “If I could just focus enough on accessing all of that brain space that isn’t being used, I might fly.” I imagined it once in French class. Having grown tired of trying to sleep with my eyes open, I envisioned myself opening a window, flapping my arms, and gliding down Connecticut Avenue. I saw a lot of Volvo wagons streaming beneath me and very few obstacles ahead. Soon enough, the vision was over.

I wasn’t embarrassed. I was proud, if anything. I couldn’t bring myself to care too much about what was going on at school, and that felt kind of pure. Just before class, I’d seen a girl crying because she didn’t think her English exam went well. She was struggling to no one in particular, piecing words together through gasping tears. She wondered aloud, “How will I tell my mom?” I didn’t know her name, and frankly, I didn’t think it was my place to intervene. I figured if you were crying in a rarely used stairwell, you’d gone there on purpose and probably didn’t want anyone disturbing your solitude.

I was sitting in the senior room later that afternoon, trying to fade into the “hottie wall”, a collage of magazine cut-outs pinned to a bulletin board, at least 100 white men and exactly three black men, when someone mentioned the girl’s tears. Really she mentioned her puffy, red eyes and flushed complexion and weak voice when she went to fifth period. Apparently someone had asked the crying girl what was wrong and she said it was just allergies. After a long, silent pause, another person burst out, “That’s clearly not what it is. Just tell the truth!”

I didn’t think the girl was necessarily trying to be mean. It could be frustrating to know that everyone was struggling and no one wanted to say so. We walked through hallways, decorated with the names of girls who graduated many decades ago and remained only in spirit because they had performed well. They had received “good” grades and gone on to “good” schools. They had contributed to prestige and were rewarded with a kind of immortality.

I felt bad for the girl, but I didn’t want to.

The man in the shrine said, “Don’t try to understand my country. You have to be born here to understand. Just enjoy it”. It wasn’t hard to do. The colors and the architecture were visually arresting, evoking the same feeling you get when you see a picture of your grandparents, taken in their twenties.

I had to keep side stepping puddles that seemed to have no source, sweat was running down the insides of my thighs and I could feel every point of contact between my clothes and my body.

“I didn’t come here to just sit in a hotel room. It’s not even raining yet.” My brother is a self-proclaimed “man of the world”. In preparation for our trip, he’d given himself a part in the middle of his mustache, intending to blend in with the people. I was thoroughly annoyed by how successful he’d been. When our distant relatives approached, they spoke to him first. Then they turned to us and said, “You know he really looks like a Cuban. If he was dressed a little differently, we might think he was from here.” It didn’t help my feelings that he knew Spanish, or rather he had learned Spanish and then Italian but retained enough to get us around. With each linguistic crisis that he conquered for us, I grew increasingly resentful of my French, wondering why I’d wasted so much time. We’d only been sitting for ten minutes before we were back outside, having been thoroughly shamed out of taking a nap.

It felt like the perfect time to take a tour. Three hours of sitting in a car and being talked at. We had no desire to be seen as tourists, especially knowing that these people saw something of themselves in us. As a result, we took a taxi, and not one of the larger convertibles that had been kept up since the 1950’s.

Anton was our driver, he lived next door to our Airbnb and was highly recommended by our hostess. The car’s back windows didn’t open in the 82-degree heat, and we could feel every bump in the road shock through the car and into our bodies. I became one with my surroundings in a way that I hadn’t wanted to. My back ached from the way that this car carried us on a journey through space and time.

As we drove down their embassy row, I couldn’t resist the urge to make comparisons. Nothing about this country was like our home. Still, despite having been instructed not to try to understand, I needed to try. I leaned into my desire to uncover something that I had the words for.

My brother had a running dialogue with Anton throughout the car ride, pausing every few moments to relay a bit of information about what they were discussing. I couldn’t suppress my frustration when he paused from friendly, removed conversation and pointed out the Russian Embassy.

“That’s the same style as the one in D.C. It definitely looks like what you’d imagine. Very big, very dark.”

All I could do was continue to voice a steady stream of my thoughts and hope that one of the ideas would stick. It was the only chance I had at being heard, and I needed the attention.

“We should try and find Assata!” I said this to no one in particular. “I wonder if she lives like a regular person, or if she actually has to try and stay hidden.” No one responded.

I noticed Anton waving to many of the traffic officers. They looked very stately in their black uniforms, a button-up, short-sleeved shirt and work pants with shiny, black boots. The uniform was crowned with a cap that conveyed their authority. Anton seemed to know all of them, he’d honk repeatedly, sometimes scaring me as we crept into the intersection. Some of the officers donned very dark sunglasses and maintained severe expressions just until the point that Anton’s rolled-down window was a few feet away and his smile unlocked something in them. He told my brother that he met them all because he does so much driving. I found this out many hours after we finished the tour as there was no way for me to understand when Anton said it in the car.

My brother is a leader. This is due, in part, to the fact that each day my dad tells him to be a leader. He’s said it so much that they now rely on the acronym, BALT. I didn’t know about any of this until I was two years into college and my dad texted me those four letters by accident.

“Hey dream, have a great day! BALT!”

“Wth does that mean?”

Because we’re so close, it’s never occurred to me to filter myself when talking to my parents. My dad sends me the same text every day, and I was thoroughly surprised to find he’d strayed so far from our normal course that I couldn’t decipher his meaning.

“Sorry that was meant for Hakeem.”

“What does BALT mean?”

“be a leader today.”

I stopped responding. Every day of my life, my dad has told me to have the best day ever. After 19 years, I found out that he’d been telling my brother to be a leader. I couldn’t help but reflect on hours wasted in French class, along with most other classes, and the way that I’d only ever given the amount of effort that felt comfortable to me at that time. It was immediately apparent why my brother could navigate space and conversation in the way that he did, “a man of the world”. He’d been groomed for it. My only understanding of a good day was one spent in my thoughts, so that’s where I thrived.

A woman touched me on the street. It was just after we’d been to the water and the air was heavy with the smell of fresh rain. I was passing behind her when it seemed like she was trying to give directions, or maybe just talking with her hands. Whatever the case, she needed more than words to communicate her thought. When she gestured at whatever she was motioning to, or maybe waved to relay the scope of her subject, her right hand swung down on my shoulder. I’d assumed that like most other people on this trip, we would have no words for one another, but instead she turned and touched me with intention. A gentle hand on my back accompanied words that I didn’t understand. I nodded my head with a knowing expression, briefly looking her in the eyes to say it was okay.

I wondered how much of my experience here was gendered. If people would be less likely to come up to me and engage because I was with my parents and older brother and because I was 21 years old and because I hadn’t been told to be a leader. Maybe they could see I only wanted to have the best day ever, and maybe that made them assume I wouldn’t want to talk about how similar our skin tones are or that they had a brother in Miami and a cousin in Los Angeles and an ex-wife who stays in Harlem.

It was loud. It was so loud that the sound swelled in my body. It wasn’t in my ears so much as it took over my chest and my belly, my fingers and my throat. I could taste the water. It was the exact surge of energy that I always wish will find me when I want to cry but can’t. If those booms could come and knock the tears out of me, I might be more like the people in the crowd.

They worshipped as the waves crashed down and the streets flooded. Some had phones out to record as waves climbed as high as trees. Many others stood at attention, speaking to the water. I couldn’t understand the prayers, but I understood the feeling. It didn’t match my experience, but I thought I may have seen it in a dream, if not while I was sleeping then while I was awake. Or maybe I’d been tuning into something in the distance, in a sleepy purgatory. I could imagine myself feeling something then. I’m certain I was certain I’d known the feeling of the waves before.

“Have you ever tried to learn where your ancestors are from?” Lidwina and I have been friends since our freshman year of high school. She was single-handedly responsible for getting the three black men on the hottie board. I didn’t realize how important that was until some time later.

“No… I think I should though. I’ve been thinking I might grab a buddy, go to Africa, and roam around. Hopefully someone will stop me and say, “Hey! You look like you’re from such and such place.” You wanna go with me?”

I hadn’t actually thought of that. My brother said one of his friends had discounted the accuracy of ancestry tests because they can only point me to a region that has undoubtedly been turned around by a long history of what we should all try to imagine but will never be able to, a portion of history that invokes feelings so unlike what I met at the water. My brother decided on the roaming method for charting our lineage. I don’t know how safe it would be for me, but he was willing to give it a try.

“Sure! Or really I just think you should do whatever you can to try and figure it out. Maybe you could even research broadly. I ask because I’ve heard that it can bring you a lot of peace to learn how your ancestors worshipped and then use their practices. My sister practices Santería and she says it brings her peace”

“That makes sense.”

A way of reclaiming heritage through practice, going through the movements in order to catch an ancestor’s feeling and repair the trauma that had left us so far removed from one another. It really made sense that I might find meaning in feeling and find feeling in movement.

Not much time had passed on the tour before we encountered flooding streets. Anton asked that we trust him and his seemingly untrustworthy car. He slowly, but deliberately, transported us through several feet of sitting water. At the flood’s deepest points, I began to notice my shoes were damp because water was seeping through the slight openings beneath the car doors. Anton kept up conversation with my brother as if nothing had changed. I couldn’t tell if our “man of the world” was ignoring the circumstances because he was genuinely unbothered or because he’d gotten so good at performing. His name is on his high school’s wall more than once.

At a certain point, as my feet grew more wet than damp, I began to focus on something in the distance and hope that if I didn’t panic, the car might make it through the dramatic puddle.

Beyond the flooding, the streets appeared to be deserted. Through Anton’s window, I could only hear relative silence.

As we approached the water, I could see where everyone had gone. Hundreds of people had abandoned their posts for the day to be at the water and worship. Looking out at so many in the crowd, I wondered if we’d crossed paths with any of them before. I recalled that as we waited at the bank to exchange currency, a pregnant woman arrived and went directly to the front of the line. An elderly man did the same not too long after. I tried to envision their faces and place them among the crowd, not only because they were familiar, but also because of what they symbolized: a sense that things might be right.

The skin between my legs had gone raw by the time I was at the water. The effects of having walked for hours in the heat were only made worse by the subsequent sitting in the back of the taxi, squeezed between my mom and the car door.

When the first wave crashed down, it was as if every feeling that had moved me to pain became a source of comfort. My clothes held me as shadows for the water’s force. They told me exactly how the waves had touched me and stayed in place until they approached again. The cool water soothed every portion of my skin, regardless of whether or not it had been irritated to begin with.

The water brought me in and made me whole. I tried to turn back to see the crowd behind me, to see if anyone had followed me in, but the waves forced me to keep my gaze away from the shore. When I started to worry that if I didn’t look back again, I might lose the people behind me forever, they reached out. We were tied to one another underneath another crashing wave. The water took us.

At the risk of falling into the potentially dangerous pattern of asking and attempting to answer incredibly big questions, on the eve of 2020, I’m writing about who I am. In preparation for this new year, which I expect to bring lots of love, joy, and good practices, I spent the day doing things that I want to continue on tomorrow, the next day, and hopefully for the rest of my life. I began outlining a pilot script; I worked out; I did errands; I FaceTimed friends and family- all practices that I could happily carry out for the rest of my days.

It’s possible my most important moments of today came at the beginning. Following my mom’s suggestion, I read and finished Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul. Before continuing, I want to offer my whole-hearted endorsement and say that I absolutely think it’s a book worth reading. I mention it here because the text begins and essentially ends with my title, stating that transcendance lies in recognizing that we are all a consciousness through which energy flows and if we can accept that life is change and allow changing energies to move freely through us, then we can achieve a never ending, unqualified state of happiness.

I agree with everything I read and at times while reading, I experienced a euphoria that brought me to tears. But while the book encourages us to relax into our consciousness, and question this “I am” if we must question anything at all, I found myself cleaving to a conversation from yesterday. I didn’t know how to feel about cleaving to this past exchange if the goal is to open and effectively let go of everything and every moment as a temporary element of the present that is constantly fleeting.

The conversation I’m referencing was with my Lyft driver, Tigist, as I left LAX. A lot has changed for me this year in the sense that I moved from DC to LA to pursue tv writing with no real leads and all of my friends heading in the opposite direction across the country. I graduated from college knowing that I needed to do something and I wanted it to be something that mattered, but I didn’t have much clarity beyond that.

In the four months since I first touched down, a year to the day that my brother moved here from San Francisco, I’ve had a lot of high and low moments relative to my confidence and even my faith that things would be “okay.” I now know that according to Michael Singer and my mom, those low moments were encounters with “closed energy” and I feel comfortable letting them go, but the fact remains that I’ve had lots of reasons to question who I am in the last year.

Before recognizing myself as a consciousness, I saw a collection of ideas and identities, which have mostly fallen away with routine life changes and the release of long held feelings. The two identities I find most fascinating and which take up a lot of my thoughts when I’m actively thinking are those having to do with sexuality and race.

In my conversation with Tigist, I got to ruminate on race a bit more than I already had having seen Slave Play over the break. Soon after I got into her car, she asked if I was Ethiopian because of my name and my features. Although none of my Habesha friends see it, according to more than one Lyft driver, I look like I could be from Ethiopia.

We had a sprawling conversation about why I moved here and her daughter’s desire to go to Howard, study law, and help empower black people. For my part, I gave my enthusiastic support for this plan along with a list of reasons why an HBCU, and Howard more specifically, is a great choice for a black student- especially one who’s smart and motivated to help Black people.

By the end of our ride, I seemed to have made some progress on behalf of Tigist’s daughter although she worries there’s no money in serving your people. Still beyond my potential contribution to Howard’s community by some kind of funky transitive property, I was mostly taken with the affirmations that Tigist offered me- that I have a bright future here, that my parents should be proud(they are!), and that she would be happy to have me as her daughter.

I’ve been struggling for some time with how invested I am in the affirmations that I received. Even though I think it’s a part of the human condition- to relish in affirmation, I feel a level of guilt that I’m sometimes a little bit proud of my tears, like the depth of my feeling makes me any more human or that I like when people recognize me for completely subjective traits and achievements. I hoped to finish this by midnight but see that the time has arrived, and I don’t know exactly where I was going with this.

Sometimes my only hope is for my writing to be a vehicle for me to ask a question. Sometimes I know my answer and sometimes I don’t. I also wanted to memorialize a conversation that felt big for a moment but might not feel the same later on. Tigist kept telling me that I should learn Amharic and visit Ethiopia so that during my visit, I could pretend to be from there. The only words that I remember saying to her verbatim are, “there’s so much to learn.” This is where I’ll end, as I think it’s a fitting summary of my title question. I am, and we are, everything and everyone and there’s so much to learn and that is very good. Happy 2020! I’m looking forward to all of the beginnings that the future holds.

Coltrane’s “Why was I born” has been swelling in my chest. Often if a piece or a person resonates with me, I feel this swelling sensation- something like my diaphragm is filling with water, but it’s comfortable. A gentle drowning. Upon my first encounter with the song and in many encounters after that one, I thought it was meant to be melancholy. I imagined someone, not unlike myself, perhaps arriving at the realization that she is an unemployed, recent college graduate with few ideas about how to move forward, only knowing that it’s necessary to do so- she must do something and go somewhere. This person at this point in time might get a little down and ask the question, “why was I born?”

Today, which will be yesterday by the time I’ve posted this and maybe “many days ago” by the time you’re reading, I began to interpret the titular question in a different and decidedly more joyful way. In this new reading,”why was I born?” became the start to a realization of the self, and this realization requires the kind of search that gets lost if you never have time or take time to reflect on the many big and small questions that arise in the course of the day.

I’ve been trying to figure out a lot of things in not a lot of time, and while that doesn’t seem very fair to myself or the subjects that I’m examining, I’ve arrived at something. The something is that there is no way of knowing, at least definitively, why I was born. But if I can consider my purpose for being in the same way that I encountered the Coltrane piece then I might think about how I reframe. I mean to express that I first received the Coltrane piece in one way, but some days later, for no real reason at all, it became something else. Likewise, it seems that my purpose can’t be one thing because I am constantly forced to reevaluate myself and the world around me, to the point that many of my previous interpretations are now outdated.

Essentially what I’m saying is that there are so many starts and instances of being “born” so that there are infinite opportunities to have a purpose, which can never be the only purpose. In these instances, after the birth story that we all have in common, the important detail becomes the how and not the “why” of being born, the circumstances and the self at that very particular moment that coalesce into a new beginning.

Recently, a friend said that twenty-two sounds “so old”. As a gift to myself on my twenty-second birthday, I’ve written this hopeful reframe.

I first became a fan of Aminé when he responded to my comment under his Instagram post. The caption asked his followers for movie recommendations to watch on a very long flight. I suggested that he watch “Terms of Endearment” followed by the “Jimmy Neutron Movie”, and he wrote back, “you the goat for this”. I am an avid social media user and have been for the last five or six years, and still this was my first time ever feeling that it brought me closer to someone that I did not already know. Following our exchange, if you can even call it that, I listened to Aminé’s album from start to finish and realized that there is far more to him than the penetratingly catchy “Caroline”.

Since my foray into his debut album, “Good for You”, I have seen Aminé’s fan base grow with every new tweet that he uses to commemorate a milestone in views on his “Spice Girls” music video. I also witnessed his ability to go viral following a performance on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. He devoted a portion of his five minutes or fewer on national television to shine a light on the hatred and racism that pervades American national identity, and is progressively less reserved since Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. When I saw the notification for Aminé’s recent Tiny Desk Concert on NPR, I should have known to expect another moment like the one on Fallon, time taken out to say something meaningful and delivered to a soothing melody, as is his style.

This time Aminé brought attention to non-black people saying “nigga”, and I’m really glad he did. I was reminded of the Ta-Nehisi Coates clip that circulated on social media throughout last week and the week before. In the video, a white Northwestern student asks him how to explain to other white people why they aren’t allowed to say “nigga”. In short, Coates answers that words exist in specific contexts, and it is due to certain present and historical contexts that white people cannot use the word, as there is nothing in its meaning or history for them to reclaim. He goes on to say that white people believe they can and should be able to say “nigga” in song lyrics because they have access to everything else in America, and more broadly in the world. Coates says it would be a good practice in trying to understand the black experience if a white person would refrain from singing the word because to be black is to be denied experiences, time and time again.

I thought a lot about Coates’ response, which is undoubtedly astute, and decided that I would have gone further if I were to answer the Northwestern student’s question. I think Aminé knows where we should start, not simply with white people but with anyone who is not black. A headline on an article profiling the Tiny Desk Concert shows exactly why we must be deliberate in outlining who can and cannot use the word, because despite the fact that Aminé raps “if you’re not black don’t say it”, somehow the publication heard an address to only “white fans”.

In trying to explain non-black people’s continued “nigga” use to one of my best friends who is white, I drew on the popular feminist theory that women’s work is undervalued and under compensated in the public sphere because it was first devalued in domestic settings. Women’s work at home is an obligation associated with womanhood, so ascribed that it has long been forgotten as anything other than a woman’s responsibility. This labor has become core to women’s existence, and its performance is to the benefit of others. So then, non-women receive women’s labor as a right rather than a privilege.

Much like discussions of the word “nigga”, dialogue surrounding black labor and product in America must begin at slavery. Black labor, black bodies, and black product all began in the American domestic sphere as property belonging to everyone who was not black. As the country has grown, black people remain the most denigrated, and I would maintain that our labor, bodies, and product have been taken up as every American’s property.

This is the problem in diluting Aminé’s message: it isn’t just white people who think that they can take up black culture at their own convenience. All non-black people are at fault to a certain degree. So I ask that when we have these conversations concerning black product- because at the end of the day, “nigga”, with all of its cultural appeal, is a product of the hard labor that is “black cool”- we are careful not to forget nuance. We must hold everyone who is not black accountable for their role in black people’s exploitation.

A poem:

I think he hopes they hear all of his words. Yellow can be too loud. You get stuck on happy and forget all that lies beneath it. Caroline, don’t you see that… if you’re not black don’t say it. I think he’s just trying to be a whole person. And when you’re a whole black person, it’s hard to hear them, see them say it.

It is difficult to be a free, Black artist in 2017 or in any year for that matter. I cannot, in good faith, say that Black artists of the present face more numerous or fewer challenges than those of the past, but the act of surrendering one’s art for public- and often white- consumption takes on new meaning in an age characterized by continuous and immediate critique. If on any given Saturday night, a singer was to walk onstage as Nina Simone did in 1976 at the Montreaux Music Festival, take a deep and dramatic bow, and stand silently at attention to the crowd for an entire minute, she would do so with thousands of phone cameras flashing. Those images would immediately transfer to a number of social media platforms and within seconds, millions of people might have conjured a response to the single, simple act. This act of resistance, cutting at the cage that traps every black artist, would face immediate backlash by millions for fear of what occurs once the Black artist breaks free.

Audiences very rarely want Black performers to prove their humanity. Many fully commit themselves to denying the uncomfortable truth that once a Black performer stops performing, despite her talent or wealth, her Blackness remains- not only the rhythm or soulful tone, but also thoughts and feelings of joy and pain born out of a history pregnant with injustice. White fear placed hurdles when Billie Holiday first attempted to perform “Strange Fruit” and brought Lauryn Hill’s career crashing down when after producing her debut album, which won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1999, she released a live acoustic follow-up perforated by a tearful collapse and didactic breaks between songs. Black artists exist, for the most part, as slaves to our culture. Audiences drain them of creativity and, more precisely, of love- in my opinion- then throw those artists away, rung dry of any life force. To be a truly great artist is to give one’s whole self to creativity. So, as audiences absorb art in its many media and do little to restore the artist as a human being, they effectively work at killing that figure by willful neglect.

James Baldwin once asserted that America and the world will be free when Black love subsumes white hatred. The kind of love that Baldwin described is not a love reliant on displays of affection and adoration. Instead, it exposes its object to difficult truths and forces that object to apply truth to itself and to its surroundings. Throughout history black artists who dared love white people through their work by speaking truth risked and suffered literal and/or artistic death. That history is present and visible in the lives of contemporary artists such as Kanye and Solange who persistently love with truth. And while they experience astounding popularity among white audiences, it comes with a cost.

I love James Baldwin for all of his thoughts and writing. But his assertion, that it’s only by black people loving white people that America can be set free, is flawed. It won’t be enough that white people acknowledge and embrace the truth. If black people are to survive, white people will need to give something beyond reparations—that is freedom from their self-conscious oppression. An oppression born out of the belief that without systems designed to affirm white value, their value is made null.

Over time, Black artists have consistently reminded us that it is a cruel reality, which allows black people to find their only hope in mining goodness beneath centuries of systemic racism. The Last Poets’ “Hands Off” performance describes a nameless figure before asking, “What manner of man is this, my friend?” to which the speaker answers “needless to say he’s white” and continues,

So take your hands off of me, white folks, I’ve done you no wrong. I’m only guilty of making you strong. I’ve built all of your cities and I’ve worked in your mines. I’ve fought to protect you many a time…I taught you to dance and I taught you to sing. You repaid me with treachery and slavery and chains.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w07YhdjtWGE)

It is an admission of the love that the Black American has long given white people only to receive deceit and imprisonment throughout all of history. This Black love, as The Last Poets explain, made white people strong. It built their cities and nurtured their children. For free. And yet present day slavery exists in the form of the prison industrial complex, and evident treachery persists—the election of a candidate supported by the Klu Klux Klan just after the country’s first African American president served two terms and the acquittal of every police officer who shoots an unarmed black man or child.

These are the ugly facts that Black people must heal with love. It would seem that as news networks and social media feeds project such events and imagines, the truth is apparent. Anyone who cannot see that truth does not wish to see it. It’s as if a certain cognitive dissonance abounds, a willful ignorance that bars white people from returning the love that is so freely given.

Let’s look at Kanye, arguably the most prominent Black artist of today. Kanye is, in many ways, the black community giving its love to white people and receiving very little in return. Onstage at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, given thirteen minutes to spend however he pleased, Kanye said that he does not enjoy awards shows. He also confessed, “I just wanted people to like me more. But fuck that, bro! 2015. I will die for the art—for what I believe in—and the art ain’t always gonna be polite.” (http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/1231121/kanye-west-vma-vanguard-speech.jhtml) His message illuminates the struggle he faced over more than a decade of giving his art and receiving mostly criticism in return. At the start of his career, Kanye famously responded to Hurricane Katrina by stating, “George Bush does not care about black people” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI) and since then he has increasingly shied away from the added punishment that comes from being a black artist who speaks against injustice.

So often Black artists are told to gag themselves if words against injustice rise in their throats because those are not what they get paid to speak. Solange’s album, A Seat at The Table, was hailed in 2016 as an album consumed by Black self-care. In the past month, she revealed its inspiration. In 2013, Solange called out white critics’ credibility to critique a Black art form when she expressed that if they don’t know who Brandy is, they shouldn’t speak on R&B music. A New York Times writer, feeling targeted, took to his podcast with another white, male writer to say that he had been to a Solange concert and seen her audience (a reference to her large white following), and that she should be careful not to “bite the hand that feeds her”. Solange’s response was to do just that.

Returning to Kanye—he gave himself to his art and to loving people who do not often return the favor. For that he has suffered “temporary psychosis” which recently sent him to the hospital for some weeks.

In order for Black people to be liberated and liberate their country, be it Kanye West or any other black artist, they must bite the hand that feeds them and see that as an act of Baldwinian love. By biting the oppressor, they force him to feel, and to bleed, and to eventually heal. However it is imperative that we demand love in return. Once white people truly know and feel the harm that they have caused, and can put that harm into their own words, then America will know freedom. So Baldwin is right to encourage love, but to say that in a liberated future white people will only be the receivers is simply incorrect, as Black people have been giving and white people have been receiving for a long time. It’s time Black people get love back. Only in this instance will America be free.

The year 2016 marks the 20th anniversary of the original release of the movie “Space Jam.” The film is not only a heartfelt homage to Michael Jordan’s career but also contains some of the most iconic moments in all of sneaker history. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck sneak into Jordan’s home in order to retrieve a pair of Air Jordan 9s. Michael Jordan wears a pair of 11s as he stretches his body to many times its original size in order to make a half-court dunk and win the game that frames the film’s climax.

As many people, including myself, grew up watching Jordan play around with their favorite “Looney Tunes” characters, he became engrained in their childhoods. And over the years, his sneakers have been laced throughout their lives and personal narratives. To be a fan of Jordan and his brand was and still is, in the simplest of terms, a lifestyle. Many people have committed themselves to collecting every one of the 23 signature shoes, an effort spanning many years and requiring many thousands of dollars. The Jordan brand is releasing a special-edition package just before the holiday season, a move that both taps into nostalgia and perhaps also gives fans a gift for their loyalty. The two-shoe collector’s box will contain one pair of 11s as well as the brand’s most recent basketball shoe release: the Air Jordan XXXI.

Knowing that one of my favorite shoe styles will soon be back on shelves (albeit in a different color scheme) has me reflecting on my relationship with the Jordan brand and on how that relationship has evolved over time.

I was four when I received Air Jordan 11s. They are still my favorite pair of shoes that I have ever owned. They were simply a beautiful pair of shoes. The shiny patent leather and red gum sole made them easily distinguishable, and, over time, they became what is arguably the most popular model and color of any Air Jordan ever released. But for me, at four years old, they were a prized possession that I would cherish long into the future.

I lost those shoes. That summer, in 2002, I was enrolled in day camp, and we were required to spend time in the pool every day. We were also required to bring a pair of flip-flops or water shoes to wear. One day, I decided not to change out of my flip-flops immediately after our time in the pool. I innocently roamed through camp activities until assembly at the end of the day. As the camp director surveyed the crowd, she spotted my bare toes and demanded that I go put my shoes on. I found my bag buried under what felt like hundreds of others, although it was more likely five or 10. When I got to my bag, there was only one shoe.

I wouldn’t find the other until a year later, when I was back at camp, one year older and likely two shoe sizes larger. After I lost the shoe that summer, I had watched my mom throw the other shoe into the trash. Now, I stared at the single Jordan 11 in the lost and found, divorced from its once faithful counterpart.

Some people are shoe collectors, allowing their best shoes to sit on shelves to be looked at like art in a gallery. This has never been my approach. I wear my favorite shoes until I hate them (or lose them), when they are so creased and tattered that their resale value might be cut to a fifth of the original price. But I think that’s the only way.

I truly believe that shoes are an extension of the individual and should be worn as such. A neighbor once told me that the most powerful thing that people can do for themselves is to make people truly see them. And shoes, clothing, hairstyles and any other part of a person’s appearance demand to be or to not to be seen. Especially for the marginalized, a loud pattern or bright coloring can be an act of courage, stepping outside of one’s comfort zone in an attempt to discover an even clearer vision of who she is and who she would like to be through the medium of her own reflection, ideally with little regard for how that image might appear to others.

When I was a child, I wore shoes because they had already been validated by the masses. But I now find it almost imperative to take risks in the way of appearance. Linda Rodin, a stylist and general figure in fashion, advised that too many opinions on a product boil it down to nothing. She said the same is true of one’s life and person. And so, I think it was fine as a child to be influenced by everything and everyone, making my decisions of what I liked and who I’d like to be based on what I found acceptable by observing others.

Now that I’m no longer a child, I find it is necessary to stop hiding my individuality because of fear of the opinions of far-off and sometimes nonexistent critics. For the most part, I now try to like my shoes and clothing based on personal taste and ideals of self-expression, an external reminder that just as I transform my appearance, I, too, can transform my person. This progression has allowed me to place a deeper investment in myself. It has made me more mindful and is perhaps the reason that I haven’t lost a shoe since 2002.