I launched this thing in February and had every intention of posting regularly. But with every week that passed without a post, the idea of jumping back in here got more and more intimidating. See, I’d have to explain where I’ve been (short version: at the f*cking crib, not getting on planes, wishing I was anywhere but L.A.—a place that I am still unenthusiastic about calling home for the next ten or so years.) And things that feel like obligations for me are not very appealing, as I wrote that one time.
Yet, I have been writing, writing, writing. Not as much as I’d like, but I’ve written more in the past two years than I have in any two-year period since my blogging days ended in 2011. Much of that writing has been for a big project that I will finally be able to tell you about soon. And some of it has been for this very newsletter. I just haven’t been able to release it from my clutches yet. I’m not the 25-year old who once fired off blog posts as readily as the 30-year-old who fired off Twitter essays. I cook with better seasonings and take my time now.
For the past couple of years, the vast majority of my published work has been in the parenting space, but my career begins with cultural criticism, musings about race, gender, and how they influence where we show up in the world with a specific focus on Black women and girls. I’m coming back home, and I’m both glad and scared about that. I’ve talked openly here and, in some interviews, about the toll that negative backlash for my modest advocacy has taken on me. I am still grappling with the extent to which it stole my voice as a writer in recent years.
I deeply resent being thought of as a hater of Black men. It hurts to know that there are Black people, men and women, who hate me because I ‘dared’ to challenge the right of a famous R&B singer and once-beloved TV star to use the bodies of women and girls as they see fit. I take nothing personally, yet the amount of intention against me hurts to the core, if that makes sense. It probably doesn’t, nor do the insane lies made up about myself and my family as part of the backlash.
There have been a number of times in which I wanted to fire off an essay, to say more than what a Tweet or five could hold about a particular issue (and my Twitter era is long dead, I am clear that I don’t have the voice there I once did, nor should I at this point in my development as a writer if I intend to do serious work that lasts and not best known for what I could articulate in short bursts of thought), but I didn’t have what it took to deal with what might be said of or to me in return. It’s taken a lot of therapy and self-care practices to navigate that. It’s not that I take anything personally, so much as I am deeply demoralized by how much and how badly so many people are invested in protecting those who harm Black women and girls under the guise of racial uplift.
As much as I be wanting to say, “Man, fuck them n*ggas,” it’s not that simple and it never will be. Cause I love them n*ggas, I am them n*ggas. I am them, they are me and we are us. Our experience in this country, on the physical plane, has never been divorced from one another. We just pretend.
I spend more time than I would like to in states of grief over the conditions of Black women and girls, specifically, in all our iterations; I know this has made me on occasion, and perhaps for eras, intolerable, prickly, sullen and other unpleasant ways to be. Grief doesn’t look good on Black girls, who are routinely criticized for not smiling enough. At least that’s how it seems until you are smiling, you are satisfied, and then someone who should feel like family feels an urge to knock that peace off your face.
Be clear, it isn’t that I don’t have great sorrow over what happens to my brothers at the hands of the nation-state, because I absolutely do. However, there’s a through-line that exists between much of Black women’s trauma, and how we as a community have chosen to process the conditions faced by our men—a line that seems to connect from their most broken parts directly to the pain points they are able to touch within us. In other words, the face of our loves, our fathers, sons and brothers is not always different from the face of our horrors, and there’s a particular kind of love a sister develops for other Black women and girls when she realizes this. When she realizes that all, and I mean all, we got is us.
In light of how the state and these white folks have done them, our communities have refused to hold our men accountable for a number of actions that demand accountability. We have prioritized the safety of our men and boys over that of our women and girls, and we have refused to recognize the extent to which our women and girls are victimized at the hands of Whiteness and Blackness as a result. Of course, that doesn’t extend merely to Black women and girls. Black LGBTQ and non-binary folks, too, are rendered inconsequential in what may seem to be the face of Black men’s needs.
Consequently, for many of my people, Dave Chappelle’s recent commentary on trans and gay folks 'versus’ Black ones sounded like Critical Race Theory game spun by a master teacher, as opposed to a series of deeply disappointing, intellectually bankrupt, and illogical statements that could be easily disproved in a couple of TikToks. As such, I’ve spent much of this past month upset. Mad that people, men and women, who claim to know what “we” are up against as Black folks can so easily disregard the fact that Black people are gay, are trans, are not posed opposite to those groups in any fashion because we are all up and through them.
If this were a few years, or maybe even a few months ago, I’d keep those feelings to myself, fire off a few tweets, and jot down some thoughts for future long-form expansion. I wouldn’t want to once again be the b*tch coming after a beloved Black guy, because it is abundantly clear that you could put every bitch like me—and the ones who roll with the patriarchy’s program gladly—on a rocket ship to the moon before you could get one of our beloved ones to be held accountable for mistreating b*tches, gays or trans folks. Because to a frightening number of us, we simply don’t matter.
Alas, I’m writing about Chappelle and what his latest commentary says about all of us. I am admittedly shook as fuck. I’m over my word count by a few thousand spare expressions, doing my best to plead the humanity of those made most vulnerable by the comic’s words, while honoring the great trauma that makes it so compelling to punch down in the first place. Not 100% sure what the publication date will be, but I’m submitting it this week.
More soon,
Jamilah
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I am new here…not sure what it means for you to be back…but I’m glad you’re here 💕