I’m fixed within the pages of La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s book, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, where I’m thinking about a mix of things. Today’s letter is a share of some of my reflections - in progress - from this book and what’s been happening in our world.
No doubt, the murder of 21-year-old Ta’Kiya Young and her unborn child was & is both terrifying and a lot to take in. Police violence and state-led murders of Black girls, women, and LGBTQ folks continue at such high rates that they often go unaddressed, silenced, or siloed away. And, the fact that Ta’Kiya’s Mother died just over a year ago, and now Ta’Kiya’s six and three-year-old children are also Motherless, is heartbreaking.
Or, about Roda Bashe, who was physically assaulted with a brick by a man because she said no to giving him her number. What makes it even worse is reading about the men who stood at the scene, watched, and did nothing. So many videos and comments came out afterward about how her overall demeanor and stance towards men justified her assault, as in, if she met the standards of what a good Black woman should and would’ve been, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, or maybe she would’ve been defended.
I can’t.
There is no “perfect” victim, just instead a world that creates, maintains, and profits from a repeating cycle of Black women and Black queer people’s deaths. Black women are seen as “mad” and “crazy” for daring to speak up against the ongoing misogynoirist violence. That, with the way the world operates, we have no right to speak up against who’s killing us, what’s killing us, and narratives that are made about us.
In our world, violent attacks upon Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people are seen as value & virtue-based attacks rather than strategically designed war tactics from the State against us. It's an ongoing policing of our bodies, where and how we show up in spaces + places, and maintaining power & order to keep this world functioning.
We’ve become desensitized to antiBlack gendered violence and this is the daily status quo. It is a communal ritual of being baptized into this, which becomes the basis of our world – not that these violences come out of nowhere. That’s because Black queer people and Black women are seen as objects, as things, as nonhumans, as empty vessels, and automatically owe what’s demanded of us.
When it’s chanted, posted, or repeated that we need to “Protect Black Women,” what does that really mean? And repeating Malcolm X’s quote that “the most unprotected person in America is the Black woman” can’t be the only thing in the arsenal to virtue signal men & people out of communal responsibility. Hopefully, we can move past the performative care of Black women.
Because who does the protection if all too familiar events like Roda’s only continue? Who’s worthy of protection if Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people are automatically seen as guilty first, then maybe “innocent”?
In chapter four - A Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Black Woman of Burr’s book, I’m curious about how patriarchy shows up in the home and publicly. Coincidently, as this letter’s going out today, Saturday, or the Sabbath for my Adventist readers, I’ve been thinking lately about “Sanctuary” and what that means for Black women’s livelihoods.
For sure, Sanctuary implies safety, a “hide me under your wing” type experience for the weary. But what happens when even the Sanctuary no longer provides Sanctuary? In the piece, I wrote earlier this year, “Your Yes Will Kill You,” the Church and the State are two sides of the same coin where both use communal scripts, sacred texts, possession & property, and silence - just to name a few - in similar and uniquely catastrophic ways.
Where the secular communal space would need a “perfect victim” to save, in the Church - mainly through its practices, salvation seems only reserved for the “perfect sinner” - the one who follows the religious scripts and passages of the Bible – who both then can have “legitimate” hope for being part of that “Chrisitian number when Jesus returns” and keep special protection in this physical world.
Only then would the promise of the “sanctuary” be experienced, if at all.
In both cases, safety or salvation remains an afterward conditional. A, after you complete these steps, then you can unlock the protection. We have to continue to build awareness around how the Church & the State materially weaponize protection and safety through the alley of allegiance.
To be out the bounds of what affords you safety leaves you at high risk for financial insecurity, housing instability, social rejection (especially through who you love, if you are “worthy” of love & care, and how you identify), and SO MUCH MORE.
If protection and safety are not in our hands, but through those who can determine who receives them, then safety and protection are volatile assets that, at any moment, can be taken away or shifted to capture a new audience.
So, back to the home + public space.
We can then see the communal space as an extension of the home where nuclear family models of God/State, Father, mother, and children are the social orders that infiltrate the bedroom, the living space, and publicly - like schools, workplaces, Churches, prisons, and more.
Here, the husband/father/male figure won’t have to rely only on himself to reinforce the power structures in place, but literal patriarchs and those who uphold patriarchy can depend on the external home to strengthen this hold.
As in, the public sphere and the internal home are both sites of terror, policing, violence, surveillance, and constant monitoring reinforced through religious messaging, silence, watching when violent attacks occur and not interfering, and still seeing Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people as property to which its “not our place to tell people what to do with their things.”
Then we can see that the deaths of Black girls, Black women, and Black gender-expansive people are a calculated, globalized, communal project that is part ritual, part war tactic to further stabilize white supremacy.
In world making, I see silence as a creative womb for a space & place that that needs Black girls/Black women/Black gender expansive people dead to function.
I see silence/silencing as an immaterial guard within this panopticon prison of antiBlack gendered violence. Its presence or perceived presence kills the greater likelihood of rebellion, where passiveness and neutrality fuel this reality to continue.
It’s how breaking the silence of the body & mind violations within the home are seen as betrayals instead of rightfully exposing what is not well.
It’s where I think about my experiences of being silenced and getting out of that space. I’m thinking about Black women who are silenced from not telling their stories about harm and violence – and also rightfully determining which spaces are equipped to hold them/if they decide to share at all.
Or the silence from bystanders who witness what happens + how neutrality is a killer and the community that thrives on silence and where silence becomes another form of the police.
More to come.
Things that caught my eye lately…
Simone Leigh Lecture Series: Amina Shumake (Vanderbilt University) . I grew hearing so many sermons, Bible studies and explanations about the story of Hagar. But this, this lecture series presented by Amina has wrecked my mind since listening and I absolutely had to share.