Reflections On The Last Year

For Those Who Know Me & Those Who Wonder

Admittedly, there is only so much I can say about how I arrived to my current condition. Those who know, know and those who have made assumptions well, go where God and good sense lead you.

This has been a year that seems to have lasted a few lifetimes for me. I have been so deeply exhausted. I have felt and been betrayed. I have felt and been used. I have felt and been manipulated. I have felt and been abused. I have felt and been utilized as little more than a show negro on a leash. This has been a year that seems to have lasted a few lifetimes for me.

I have been so very, very tired. I lost almost 20lbs and my hair began falling out last February—Black History Month (the violent irony)—as the public, private and professional attacks against me ramped up in earnest. Some people who I had come to see as tangentially like minded—people I had sat on panels with, folks who I had spent hours counseling, those who I had intervened and held space for, those who traded on my name and reputation for the benefit of themselves, their families, their careers and interests—were siphoning from in ways that would make Drakula blush and likely garner praise from the Cheeto President.

This was happening, so much was happening, while I was travelling the country giving speeches, lectures and workshops on the importance of holding steadfast to our Ancestral inheritances; on listening to our bodies and spirits and refusing to be undone by the powers that be and insisting on the truth of knowings—particularly that African American knowing—that demands truth, in the face of a warped reality proffered by precedent and revisionist histories. I cajoled folks to speak OURstories, to speak THEIRstories, even if they must whisper it at first, in order to speak more, in order to sustain life, in order to provide care and cover for the children who come next.

I also knew that I was dying inside. My therapist was a steady hand. My fiance a rock, that seemed to be able to withstand any weight. My grandmothers were reminders that worst things had come, that I could endure, but rightfully questioned whether I should bear the costs and the scars that come with it. My friends steadfastly upheld “The Friendship Pact” demanding I share more than I wished, so that they might offer the reciprocity that those we see as civilized and professional had long since as abandoned. My peers, mentees, mentors and students acted as soldiers on the warpath; ignoring my projection of calm and disinterest, ensuring that care work was a practice made manifest and death worth would have no safe harbor near me. I knew that I was dying inside and prayed, to the Spirits and My Ancestors and slowly, surely, I woke the fuck up and remembered my name.

I am ever thankful to the existence of Cole Arthur Riley, whose words and works, spoke life, spoke rage and spoke God directly into me from This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us:

“Seeing a person or piece of creation trampled should always disrupt something in us. It should always do something to the soul. And when you trace that trampling back across generations and systems and powers, a quiet sorrow is born in you.”

“How boring to spend the whole of my vocational energy trying to figure out if I am choosing the right work. It is of much greater interest to me to talk about how I’m going to do the work with integrity. How am I going to protect dignity as I work? And what truths are calling out to me as I work?”

“Audre Lorde said, “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings…. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.”

“It takes time to undo the whiteness of God. When I speak of whiteness, I am referring not to the mere existence of a person in a particular body; I am referring to the historic, systemic, and sociological patterns that have oppressed, killed, abducted, abused, and discredited those who do not exist in a particular body. Whiteness is a force.”

“In community, we can push back on the expectation that we exhaust ourselves.”

and BLACK LITURGIES: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human:

“INHALE: I don’t have to hold every pain at once / EXHALE: I can feel and not be consumed”

“Climb back inside your body … You are alive.”

“ … there are forms for sadness that survive in the mouth of despair. A kind of sadness that does not want you well … Do not let your grief become a locked door.”

“And in divine integrity, we must stay near to ourselves.”

“Don’t be mistaken, your anger doesn’t have to look like that of those who seek to destroy you. There is anger that affirms dignity instead of degrading it.”

She reminded me to pray:

For those who left their bodies to survive
For those who don't trust spiritual spaces
For those who have forgotten how to cry
For those who doom-scroll
For when you need to run and hide
For Black people who had to smile through it
For healing from church abuse
For when you grow too familiar with hurting
For when rest feels like a risk
For those who have forgotten how to play
For Black Twitter

and:

“God of the prophets,

We confess we have demonized anger, confining it to an interior prison instead of granting it time and space to be free, just like any other piece of our selfhood. We have not acted in defense of those who’ve needed it. We have let fear of how we might be perceived keep us from the truth-telling that others are worthy of, that we are worthy of. We have ignored anger in our bodies, disguising it with whatever mask feels good to us. We have valued the comfort of the wounder over the dignity of the wounded. Have mercy on us for all that suppression has stolen from us. Forgive us our emotional numbness and grant us access to self-rage, collective rage, a rage that liberates. Amen” (115).

Of course, I could write an entire book, a series of books, on the impacts of the books she has written, but for now, all I will say is thank you.

This has been a year that seems to have lasted a few lifetimes for me. I think, indeed, that that was the point. My faithful friend and mentor, Dr. Christina Sharpe, often reminds me that these are “violent lessons of comportment.” Their intended effect, as Toni Morrison notes, is to distract us from our work:

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

I spent so much time in “conversations,” “investigations,” and job “interviews” attempting, in response to implicit demands, to explain my reason for being, the importance of my work and defending my legitimacy that it felt as if I had fallen into the sunken place—recall the movie “Get Out”—and had no way home. I had lost my map, my me, my litany for survivance. I was exhausted, downtrodden, angry—no, mad as hell—and felt as if I could do nothing but return to the survival practices of my very turbulent childhood; that is to say, to press forward, at any cost, by any means necessary. I felt as if the career and life that I have spent twenty years building had been taken away from. I felt as if my world had been stolen and that I had to fight, even without faith that I could win it back.

Today, I have come to know that nothing that is mine can be stolen. That, as Paul D. told Sethe:

““You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” His holding fingers are holding hers.

“Me? Me?””

And this knowing has brought me to this present moment, where I am charting my own my way forward. I know longer attach one iota of my value to universities or my place in the academy or any accolades I may receive from the outside. (Hell, if a civil rights museum could disinvite and unaward Angela Davis—for criticism of Israel’s settler colonialism and Jim Crow policies—what then, could and would they do to me, with grins across their face?) In the past, these things were evidence, proof, that I was not what the world had attempted to reduce me too. These pieces of evidence were my shield and sword against antiBlackness, antiBlaQueerness and the racial contract and racial capitalisms that undergird our society and facilitate the death dealing that renders Black life as always already disposable and readied for for, and deserving of, all manners of violence; violence that is visited upon us so often that it has become rote; violence that is so normative, it is as unremarkable as the air we breathe; violence so handy and natural that its wielders feel it is merely part of their essence, their duty, their identity and their God given (or mandated?) right.

This substack is born of the violence and ruptures that I have experienced since I first uttered my critiques against the coming Israeli genocide against Palestinians, on October 7th. It is born of the ethics, integrity, love and care that is my inheritance from the Ancestors who were first hearded on to ships and forced to make a home and empire for their captors, midwifing and paying a blood dowry, for the liberty (of those) that would later become the very matter that made up their chains. I may never teach another class again, after this semester. I may never again be a law professor, or professor of anything for that matter. And now, I am ok with that. In many ways, in serious, material ways, I have been made free from a plantation I once called home, tended to, and defended as mine. Oh, what a fool I was.

This substack is born of the violence and ruptures I have experienced. It comes from fertile ground watered with tears, loss, betrayal and innovative violence. It will be something else though. It will be the place where I write and speak with care and truth and integrity and love and vigilance. It will be a space where I am home and all those who value life will be welcomed. I’m contemplating what is next. I have book that is long overdue—Tanya if you’re reading this, I am sorry, for the delay and disappearance, but it is now time to write—and I have a mind to create a firm that will operate as the perch from which I offer mediation services; meditations; lectures; keynotes; legal aid, advice and carework; podcasts; essays, poems, poetic prose and books; spoken word; classes and seminars; and various recipes and nourishment for the soul. This substack is the beginning.

I could say more; but I won’t just yet. I invite all of you to become paid subscribers to this substack; so that this work continues in earnest and so that I might turn to it full time in the next few months. Please share it. Please speak about it. Please interact with it. I know that I invaluable things to offer this world, and beloved, so do you.

I’ll close with quoting Toni Morrison, first Beloved, once again, but this time with the words of Sethe:

I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing, I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner; it cost too much!

The only thing I’m running toward is freedom. Won’t you join me?

I tell my students, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you’ve got.

-Toni Morrison

And finally, one last quote to leave with you with, because though we are hungry, though we are hurt, though we have been humbled; we are primed, and ready, to work for the world we deserve, that we have always deserved.

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine — and you?”, I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election…” I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

I thank you for your time and pray that you’ll join me on this journey to something more, something unthought, something we’ve always deserved.

*an audio version may be uploaded later to the podcast on both Apple & Spotify*