This Week's Opening Thought: July 29, 2024

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This week's opening thought: I recently turned 42.

I'm not one to celebrate birthdays, achievements, or milestones. It has always felt wrong. For decades, I thought I disliked celebrating little moments because I felt they weren't worth the time and energy. Real talk? I walked across the stage for my high school graduation and ran to one of my two jobs without fanfare. I graduated from college and was like, "Meh," when my wife wanted to celebrate my achievement. I stopped celebrating landing jobs or opportunities long ago, looking at them as blips in my timeline.

I have spent most of my life lumping these situations into not being worth my time. "I've got sh-- to do" is one of my favorite lines to mutter when people want to celebrate me. But as I get older, wiser, and healthier, I've unearthed why I don't celebrate birthdays, achievements, or milestones.

I'm Black in the United States, and everything feels like borrowed time.

I didn't start embracing joy until my 30's. I didn't start doing anything for my birthday until my mid-30s, and I'm still reticent to do more than some meals at cool restaurants. There's a trauma that I've spent time unpacking over the past few years, one that is deeply embedded in my soul. At its root is a simple yet complex question:

Do you celebrate today if it always feels like there is no tomorrow?

I find it hard to celebrate much in a society that allows police officers to walk into my home and murder me without provocation. It's difficult to tap into joy when I could be lynched at a moment's notice, and my family would get no justice for my Black body. It's unsettling to know that for every high, racism and white supremacy are dangling over my head like the sword of Damocles waiting to "take me down a notch."

I'm learning that I don't want to live that way anymore.

White supremacy does not get to dictate me taking a victory lap every now and then for how awesome I am. (Yeah, I'm feelin' myself.)

I've embraced joy. Now, I know I need to embrace that regardless of how dangerous the world is around me, I deserve to be celebrated. My achievements deserve to be honored and acknowledged.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I deserve a fresh huckleberry lemonade.

To all my Black people: celebrate you, your people, and your achievements. Don't let this "white-a-betes" that systems of pallor want to inflict you with take away from honoring your family, friends, and your achievements in the face of a system that has never believed we should exist.

Enjoy your lemonade.

[Image description: This is a picture of me at Solstice Restaurant in Hood River, Oregon. I'm making a whimsical face while holding a freshly made huckleberry lemonade.]

Image description: This is a picture of me at Solstice Restaurant in Hood River, Oregon. I'm making a whimsical face while holding a freshly made huckleberry lemonade.

Joy

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I'm not going to sit here and say things like, "Everything's gonna be alright," while the world is literally and figuratively burning because I think that's a lie. Everything is not alright and hasn't been alright for a long time. I think many of us know this, and our families have carried this trauma for generations. So many of us are fighting for a better, safer world, much like our ancestors were, and we're feeling the weight of it all like our ancestors did.

None of that means we can't have joy.

None of that means we shouldn't love our families and communities and continue celebrating and elevating our people.

There's still a lot of life to live.

I get it. It feels heavy. In these trying times, joy might even seem like a privilege. But joy is not a privilege - it's a right. You have the right to love life, your people, and all the positives and happiness triggers in your life.

It's not easy to find joy when the world seems dim, but we owe it to ourselves to seek out and embrace the things that bring us joy. We owe it to our families to model how there's still joy and wonder in this world to engage with. Unbridled joy is one of the many things that stop us from mentally, physically, and emotionally breaking under the weight of our oppressors. Joy is fuel to fight for the things you believe in and the people you love. Joy is protest. Joy is rest.

The possible future ahead of us could try to take many things from many of us. Please do everything you can not to let it take your sunshine.

Embrace joy.

This Week's Opening Thought: February 13, 2023

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This week's opening thought, especially for white people and Black people who have used Black women as the holders of their trauma and enmeshed white supremacist ideologies for centuries: Black women don't owe you anything.

They don't owe you knowledge or advice, labor, or entertainment. They don't owe you an "incredible" Super Bowl halftime show based on what you think you "deserve" to watch. They don't owe you 60+ hours per week in the workplace to do work you'll take credit for while still talking over them in meetings and disregarding their needs. They don't have to meet ridiculous capitalist and anti-Black expectations - expectations and pressure that you're harboring in your body and won't process yet expect a Black woman to hold and process for you - to be considered incredible or excellent. They don't owe you ego-stroking to cater to your white supremacist need for comfort. They don't owe you the opportunity to force them to shrink themselves, their goals, their joy, and their identities so you can feel good about your self-image, intelligence, or work ethic.

Black women owe you nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

But many of y'all owe Black women the world and then some, and you have for a very long time.

It's about time y'all paid what you owe.

This Week's Opening Thought: February 6, 2023

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This week’s opening thought: a lot of generational and societal trauma comes with being Black in the United States. There’s no way it couldn’t. But the existence of this trauma does not mean that being Black is a joyless experience.

Far from it.

Please believe that Black communities live joyfully and engage in growth, love, and creativity despite the constant trauma outside our windows. Black joy is a daily occurrence, not a one-off or a unicorn. It always has been, and it always will be.

If you’re non-Black and you’re reading this (especially if you’re white or benefit significantly from your connections to white privilege and white supremacy), don’t allow the white supremacist-driven narrative that existing while Black is unhappiness and pain to permeate how you view Black joy. Instead, take a moment to understand and digest the amount of Black joy you witness in the music, art, culture, fashion, innovation, and discovery you get to consume every day. That joy and expression, regardless of peril, are what being Black truly is. Then take a moment to respect that joy, not as something unbreakable (the unbreakable myth is bullsh--) but as something vital to the health of our minds, bodies, and souls. View Black joy as a tool of Black survival and mindfulness in a world that views us as less than human. And acknowledge that when this white world hurts us, it can also harm our joy but never make that joy go away. Black communities find ways to keep those joy tanks full because we know how integral it is to breaking the chains of generational trauma. It’s not unbreakable; it’s like water.

Recognize that Black joy is Black history, a history crafted with hope and love despite the hatred that led to our enslavement on unceded land and the vestiges of that hatred that we are still subjected to every day. Quit looking at Black history as Black misery. It can exist as both pain and triumph, heaviness and joy.

Also, please take a moment to digest that the byproducts of Black joy we share with the world are beautiful things you’re getting to witness and engage with that impact your life daily. It’s not for you to commodify or exploit. It is for you to see the strength and glory of a people who could’ve easily succumbed to white supremacy yet are still here, thriving and contributing to a world that views our existence as dangerous with love and joy. Pay your respects accordingly.

And to my Black folx reading this: I wish you all the joy, not just during this short-ass month they “gave” us but the other 337 days of the year too. You deserve joy. Embrace your joy. Connect or re-connect with your joy. Let your joy fly freely. I am sending all the love and support I can from my soul to you and yours.