#9 What Is Bringing You Anger During Times Like This?
Joy can wait. The online pressure of positivity & your favorite activist is the Wizard of Oz.
Hey everyone,
Today’s meet-up is a concept of joy, freedom, and terror, which many have discussed and I hope we continue to add more and more thoughts as the years go by. Below you can visit the concept more after this, to get more perspective and more details around this concept and idea and the general public notion that happens among mainly many abolitionists, poets, and writers from different genres.
https://poets.org/poem/freedom-terrors
A tweet that reminded me how much I hate the question “ What is bringing you joy”
I use to bury my anger, file and store it someplace else to deflect and remove it from the narrative of an angry Black person. We’ve always been forced to be joyful and appreciate life ironically while we witness our life being dwindled, threatened, and murdered.
Telling people to remain positive when offended, when murdered when experiencing loss, when in fear, when in paranoia, when in a surreal state every day is something that I don’t just loathe my dear friends, I find the use of positive language and putting pressure on positivity and colorful vibes, during horror to be violent and a repetitive tool used to subdue and keep Black people subservient. Whether we know this or not, our desire to keep your smile on has a history.
Our desperation for joy during terror is understandable, escapism is my favorite song, but when is it appropriate?
So what do we want? More freedom! How do we get it? You’re not gonna like this one… By confrontation, and disruption of our own comfort.
Listen, fighting for freedom considers a role of critique, one of ourselves and the systems we love, so looking for joy during violence shows an intentional lack of attention to what is happening.
During consistent moments of violence, we have a choice to confront that there is, and always has been an attack on Black bodies and the Black community as a whole. What emotion is appropriate, and ask yourself why it’s that emotion. Why joy? And obviously, not joy that people have died but why are you stepping away to seek joy in this particular moment, this is a nightmare. I wouldn’t tell someone who just woke up from a nightmarish sleep and ask “ Hey while you were running from the headless monster did you happen to look for joy?”
Back to freedom, we should have an understanding that as we seek freedom it will always be under attack and will always be criminalized, because freedom means breaking a cycle of one that is capitalistic one that is oppressive one that is inherently violent, and because of this, that interferes with our collective joy as there can’t be liberation or any separation from a systemic choke-hold if we’re not confronting the genocide of Black people around the world. Joy comes in the morning!
Joy can’t exist during violence and erasure, but don’t worry something better comes to the surface. Anger.
We should allow those the option of anger, and remember that anger is what brought us rebellion, it’s what has created warranted fire. After the maroons in Jamaica who were enslaved defeated the British they danced in the Blue mountains for days. Escapism and joy are the gifts anger presents. There have always been rewards after anger, I believe we’ve gone on to shame this emotion. Not allowing ourselves to feel angry is a betrayal to a body that was colonized a body that has never forgotten, a body that carries generational stories of terror.
The idea that anger hasn’t gotten us anywhere, sheds no truth in Black history.
Here, I have a question.
How can we not be allowed to talk about violence but are expected to experience it?
Our privileges our proximity to whiteness our escapism in the digital world, cannot provide an ultimate safe space for joy or anger, only avoidance.
Outside of the force and pressure for us to find joy during times like this, there are also many demanding to discuss Black suffering. Which leads to who we follow and who we choose to lead us to understand what is happening and what we could be consuming online.
Black pain, Black suffering will be used online to invoke emotions and shock, shock that leads to no action but will continue to mold a brand that is profitable. As monetizing Black bodies has existed since the beginning of time. Right? Since slavery, we have always been currency and money is technology. The engagement with money and Blackness has always moved our society no matter what direction, it has always been connected. Are you seeing the cycle? Still with me?
The monetization of the Black death will always exist, there’s always been some kind of profit that someone is gaining in regards to devastating loss, in regards to erasure, and in regards to this genocide of the Black community that we are currently living in, one that we have been currently living in for hundreds of years, and the cycle is going to continue because it’s one that no one has put in the effort in to break.
It’s such a good piece of machinery this cycle, that we’ve now used Black people to be those monetizing and profiting off of Black suffering. So it’s up to us to question what we want to consume.
What feels productive to you? And what feels exploitive, what feels transformative to you, and what feels like another post or article monetizing Black suffering? I don’t want to tell you what to do, this is for you to ask yourself these questions, what are you consuming what are you fighting for, what are you angry about, and what makes you angry? What brings you anger during times like this, and for me:
What brings me anger during times like this, is seeing the cycle continue
What brings me anger during times like this, is seeing how many people are competing to be the first to discuss loss and the first ones to gain from it.
What makes me angry is how we completely isolated abolitionists
What makes me angry during times like this is how we completely isolated real people that are dealing with violence every day.
What makes me angry during times like this is how we ignore people who are doing the work in the streets and on the ground.
What makes me angry during times like this is our fixation on performance
What makes me angry during times like this is feeling helpless
What makes me angry during times like this is feeling stuck
What makes me angry during times like this is not focusing on these names:
Ruth Whitfield
Celestine Chaney
Roberta A. Drury
Andre Mackneil
Heyward Patterson
Aaraon Salter Jr.
Pearl Young
Katherine Massey
Geraldine Talley
Margus D. Morrison
What makes me angry during times like this is being confused about what to center and not having the answers, I don’t want to center whiteness but I know what the cause of Black suffering is.
What makes me angry during times like this is how easy I’m going to move on from this grief.
What makes me angry during times like this is the desperation to seek joy rather than confrontation and the critique of America
What makes me angry during times like this are people that are going to say “what do you want us to do, I’m not the government.”
What makes me angry during times like this, is that people are not going to see what’s behind the glamourous curtain of your favorite online activist because the illusion they cater to you tastes too good, and if you stop consuming their words, you might actually have to do internal work you might actually have to be angry.
What makes me angry during times like this is that we enjoy the short-lived rage the faux rage from our online activists, because we know it begins and ends online.
What makes me angry during times like this is that white supremacists aren’t afraid of us and I think they should be.
What makes me angry during times like this is the question
“ What brings you joy during times like this?”
-C