This Week's Opening Thought: July 29, 2024

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.

This Week's Opening Thought: July 22, 2024

This week’s opening thought: If you weren’t willing to defend, stand with, and support Black and Brown women before now or were waiting on the “right opportunity to be an ally” to Black and Brown women in the United States, guess what?

The f—-g time is now.

I mean, I don’t know what the hell was wrong with you before now (what were you waiting on, a formal invitation?). Still, if these unprecedented times (side note: I am SO TIRED of “unprecedented times.”) we’re likely about to enter into during this presidential election don’t have you ready to step up and chin check every raggedy, racist, sexist, anti-Black person in your workplace, family, and neighborhood that tries to drag the Vice President, Black women, and Brown women through the mud with unfounded accusations and discredited stereotypes built on racism and white supremacy that have nothing to do with their skills, intelligence, and insights then you should keep your “thoughts” to yourself and own that you never intended to get off the bench and get in the game.

Sh--’s about to get more real and dangerous for many communities than you could ever imagine.

Yo’ ass should've been in the game, but you're still milking that “ankle injury” from practice to cover up your affinity for bench warming and participation trophies.

P.S.: This is not a conversation about the veep’s record and past. We’ve had that conversation ad naseum and we’re not going to rehash that in this space. We’ll revisit that conversation at some point. This particular conversation is about standing with and supporting Black and Brown women in real-time as the threat to their overall safety inches into dangerous territory. This includes offering your support to Kamala Harris. Yeah, I said it. I asked for it. Some of y'all are gonna want to drag me for it, but I will always stand with and support Black women, period, especially in the face of people who would prefer to go back to chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and no rights for anyone but wealthy people of pallor.

This Week's Opening Thought: July 15, 2024

This week’s opening thought: All that violent shuckin’ and jivin’ this past weekend, and there still won’t be one piece of realistic and tangible gun legislation drafted to try and ensure this kind of thing is mitigated or outright eliminated.

If they weren’t going to draft and pass bipartisan sensible legislation to protect children, they sure as hell aren’t to protect people like you-know-who.

Meanwhile, this high-profile event was one of four mass shootings in the United States this weekend, bringing us to 37 mass shootings in July alone. As a whole, 430 people have been killed, and 1,405 people have been wounded in 341 shootings in 2024.

But you know, the right to bear arms and whatnot.

And the beat goes on.

This Week's Opening Thought: July 1, 2024

This week's opening thought: I call people in and out as needed. And I get called in and out, too. I'm not immune to being called in or out. I welcome it. I'm fallible, and sometimes, I need to get checked. I believe that part of being a decent person (not a "good" person, mind you, but a decent person. That "good person" schtick is christian values-driven patriarchal white supremacist nonsense in western culture) is being able to be called to task for your actions or behaviors and to learn from your missteps. I'll only kick it with those willing to call me in or out when I mess up and do harm. But real talk?

Some of you hold yourself to a different or non-existent standard of accountability and self-accountability, and it shows.

I have had to block a lot of folx lately—like, A LOT. And I'm usually not sad about that. Block and delete exist for a reason. But it's been a little bittersweet lately—I'd argue even a little sad. Why?

I've had to block a lot of people of color and intersectional folx lately.

I'm not naive. I know how patriarchal heteronormative white supremacist ideology works. I understand how self-loathing generated by centuries of generational trauma manifests. But it never feels OK to have to check melanated folx and intersectional folx who are so deeply entrenched in patriarchal white supremacist ideology that they are inherently tools of their oppressors.

I feel for them. I can't imagine what unresolved and unearthed traumas sit in their brains and bodies to engage in oppression willingly. To be willingly oppressive, to have hateful views in a world that has been conditioned to hate you for just existing, has to be quite the internal struggle. I can call them in. I can educate. I can empathize. I can also hope they find healing and wish them peace and mindfulness. But they can go find that peace and mindfulness somewhere way over there, away from me and mine, because it's no one's job to coddle someone and give them countless opportunities to do you, and other people harm when they refuse to unpack their sh--. People often show you who they are, and you have to eventually take in the messages you're receiving or become an accessory to their oppressive views and trauma.

You can't teach anyone who doesn't want to learn or believes they know everything or "enough," identities or ethnocultural heritage connections be damned.

Block 'em, delete 'em, and ask someone to burn some sage for their soul while they stand downwind so the smoke can hit their asses far away from your vicinity.

That's as close as you can get to saving someone's soul.

This Week's Opening Thought: June 17, 2024

This week's opening thought: Michigan Republican primary congressional candidate Anthony Hudson posted a video on his TikTok account in which an AI-enhanced voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr endorsed him.

Anthony is a person of pallor, but I probably didn't need to tell you that. You probably knew it as soon as you read the first sentence above.

Anthony is also uber-conservative in the most dangerous ways, but I probably didn't need to tell you that, either. You probably knew it as soon as you read the first sentence above, or at least knew it by the time you finished the second paragraph.

I'm not going to post the video. I've heard it, and it's not something I'm willing to subject others to. It's triggering as hell. But here's what the AI-generated voice of Dr. King had to say:

"I have another dream. Yes, it is me, Martin Luther King. I came back from the dead to say something. As I was saying, I have another dream that Anthony Hudson will be Michigan's 8th District's next congressman. Yes, I have a dream again. OK, now I am going back to where I came from. Goodbye."

And, of course, Anthony is unapologetic about the whole thing after claiming he would fire the volunteer responsible for creating and posting the video. He's made a complete 180. But I probably didn't need to tell you that, either, if you know anything about white supremacy and how it intersects with self-preservation and pious idiocy.

Anthony believes that if Dr. King were alive today, he would, and I quote, "endorse me and my vision for a better Michigan because he would be disgusted at the complete suffering of Flint, Michigan residents under the current administration's watch."

Yep. You're right, Anthony. Dr. King would be disgusted at the ongoing suffering of the people of Flint under every President's watch for the last 12 years.

He'd also be disgusted with you trying to use his voice to suit your anti-Black, uber-conservative agenda propelled by racism and white supremacy.

What a way to prove you know nothing about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his work, or civil rights in general, Anthony.

One day, some person of pallor will read Dr. King's work, absorb its contents, and understand what he's talking about so they can check every other person of pallor around them using Dr. King's words to suit their own hateful agendas and beliefs. I probably won't be here when that day comes, but I hope someone from the Black delegation is there to witness it.

Like I needed another reason to loathe the application of AI in our daily lives.