(written Nov 7, 2016, edited 1/26/2020, 1/26/21)
(2021) A conversation with myself about my life… In 2016 I reflected on a country that elected a man that by any account tried to kill and incited violence on my people, myself and many more. In 2020, I took time to read [just a little] and intake some knowledge of what this world is around me- how I am seen as I exist.
(2016) I don’t know what it’s like to be looked at as whole and full. I don’t know what it means to be fully human. I’m not aware. I feel like I’m not allowed to be aware of what it means to be free. To be able to experience simple humanity. My consciousness is not present in every part of my bodily existence. I check every aspect of my compartmentalized self, one at a time, day after day—to sew myself up, patch my existence together again: first for my survival and second for your comfort.
(2020) Breathing, beginning to explain and scratch the surface on what it feels like to be aware of the communities and identities I know I claim. I’m deciding which parts of myself to hide opposed to free… Maybe, I shouldn’t hide them, maybe I should work to conceptualize each of them and assert the ability to exist and to be exhibited by me cohesively, at once.
(2016) I am made aware of my dehumanization on every level of my consciousness, in my dreams, in my classrooms, in my car. In your consciousness, your dreams, your classrooms, your car. Every time my heart is allowed a beat I pulsate by the blessing you’ve given me to breathe. Yet, My heart still called inhuman.
(2020) I’m not sure here—If I’m solely elucidating on tensions between blackness and whiteness in various spaces or… If I am more focused on explaining the poisonous nature of racialized systems to marginalized people. I believe it’s both, particularly because of the use of “human.'“ Because both of those create a schism between what I believe(d) humanity among humans operated as and what I see it to be in practice.
(2016) Each speckle of reclamation I take back from this “semi-existence,” each thought claimed as mine and not yours I cherish and I try to swallow. I metabolize your indiscretions. My ancestors gave permission. I reclaim the names you erased, and I proclaim to feel their loss when one day you acknowledge it as fresh and new because it is still fresh and new. I decide to hold onto their my pain. Our existence is not to permanently desecrated. It is to be understood and to remain and to be reclaimed for you and for us. It is to be fully loved.
(2020) Black noise is here. Now I know I meant the continuation, and perpetuation of blackness; dragged through time because of its symbiosis with whiteness. Black noise almost means one half of balancing a scale, if each side of the scale were whiteness and blackness and weight to be added was power ( maybe this power is autonomy of defining humanity or rectifying the past). Black people and our reclamation is noise.
(2016) I warn you. We are not scorned. We are burned. Our skin has peeled, and our scars are visible. But, We don’t wear masks. We never hide. We can’t. We feel. We see. We hear. That is how we know we are real humans.
(2020) And I am seeking power here. Power from the past, from pain, from scorn for expressing pain and feelings, and proclaiming (now) the black noise will never be quieted. It will change but it’s impact is definitely eternal.
