matter-ing
something matters when it has a tomorrow-ness—a certain future utility.
my mother saw it as her duty to pull me into the future, to lug me forward with packed lunches, goose grease and honey and little witticisms every morning.
cleanliness is next to godliness.
she was worried about me. i can’t imagine how much fear she must’ve kept neatly locked away behind the glade plug-ins and fabuloso. i think the sayings comforted her too.
a hard head makes a soft behind.
she danced and sang a lot, but she valued order—the sense that a grand purpose was always working on us. she didn’t tolerate a messy room. there was a special spot carved out for me at the kitchen table where i’d do all my homework, except the science assignments where you had to draw copies of pictures of cells and mitochondria. her attention to detail made her a marvelous textbook copier.
it’s not the aptitude, but the attitude, that determines the altitude.
it got harder for her to say that one as i got older—this notion that simply being kind and pleasant in the world would help me thrive. her calculus shifted because pulling me into the future started to mean something different. she knew that her witticisms had a shelf life—and that the precarity of my black life was beginning to reveal itself to me.
i don’t know what samaria rice said to tamir the morning he left for the park, but i know she planned on making lasagna for him that night.
there’s a reason why 60% of white americans now say they support the black lives matter movement, up from 40% a few years ago. there’s a reason why mitt romney is marching. to deny that black life matters is to rob us of our future utility. it is to wage war on our tomorrow-ness.
but there’s a world beyond mitt of white leaders and public intellectuals whose default psychic state is skepticism of all things black—the BLM movement included. the skepticism ranges from outright refusals to say the phrase to calls to tone down the rhetoric—all of those efforts constituting a willingness to set the terms of a war that shouldn’t be happening. imagine being told what to wear and how to behave at your own execution.
so let’s be clear: at its core, BLM stands for “the freedom and justice” of “black people and, by extension, all people”—the de beauvoir-ian (and lazarus-ian) idea that one can only be truly free if everyone is free.
BLM does not stand (explicitly) for the removal of confederate statues. BLM does not stand (explicitly) for the defenestration of white corporate execs who’ve benefitted from shallow, performative ally-ship. those are just the things that happen when enough people are moved to action by what cornel west calls prophetic fire. but separating BLM the idea from the actions taken in its name is crucial. and it should be easy for white public intellectuals to grasp, given how adept they already are at quarantining the most noble notions of americaness from the bloody reality.
we don’t all stand for defunding the police. some of us don’t stand for reparations or tearing down monuments. and many of us knew how quickly IG feeds would return to normal after juneteenth. but when you stand for that phrase—black lives matter—you stand for mornings where black mothers can look at their children and confidently say
there’s always tomorrow.
i released a new music video and song, please check it out and consider following me on spotify. this week’s playlist is for the mornings.
-ciggy