Hello Family,
How are you? I hope you are, or will be, well-fed; in all ways.
Welcome to all the new family members who have signed up in between the previous newsletter and this one. I hope you find what I share here of use or value. Some things I say may sting or ruffle feathers, and you might find yourself shaking your head and saying: “Nah, bruh!” 🤣
But I hope that even then, there’s still something compelling enough here for you to stick around or share. 🙏🏾
On that note:
I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving Day.
Its genocidal, bait-and-switch origins make it, for me, heinous and not an occasion for rejoicing, to say the least. People get annoyed when I say this because they think it’s “too woke” of a perspective, which I interpret as too honest of a perspective, given the American investment in and penchant for not knowing. And since they like the traditions that have sprung up around the holiday, they don’t want to hear any critique of it, no matter how truthful.
I get it: I also like the idea of gathering with loved ones and sitting down at a banquet to laugh, love, reminisce, and be thankful. So, instead of celebrating the farce that is the colonists’ ploy, I use this time of year—as I touch upon in the video above (courtesy of BOOKCLUB: Black Like We Never Left)—to express gratitude to my Ancestors for their sacrifices and their survival so that I might be here today; to the First Nations/Indigenous/Native peoples upon whose land I live; and to the Universe for permitting me to exist in the first place.
Living in this world is hard. As I watch the global full-tilt toward fascist government, and witness more and more people choose, on purpose, cruelty as both their defining feature and their religious observance, I feel a deep and abiding fear. Columnist and analyst Jamelle Bouie elaborates on the behavior in question:
“When politicians and other political leaders refuse to play this game — when they drop the pretense of virtue and embrace a politics of cruelty and malice, in which nothing matters but the will to power — voters act accordingly. Some may recoil, but just as many will embrace the chance to live vicariously through leaders who celebrate vice and hold virtue in contempt.”
I’d say rather than hold virtue in contempt, they hold hypocrisy and massacre as virtues—whether they are on the receiving end or not. I mean, some folks are out here with the audacity to be debating whether slavery is a good or bad thing—in 2022!
I’m not going to lie: I’m in a state of despair. I’m mourning the human race’s collective failure to be humane. But even though I’m distraught, I don’t feel compelled to cooperate or surrender. I’m a Taurus; I’m stubborn AF. I’m determined to go down fighting.
I’m not fooling myself about what I just said, though. As frightening as this is to admit, the “go down” part of it feels inevitable. Perhaps I sound pessimistic, but don’t think we can win this war. Conquerors never concede to moral demands because 1. they’re not scared of us because they know we’re not going to band together to stop them as long as divide-and-conquer continues to work (and it’s never not worked); and 2. they don’t have any morals, as Elder Assata Shakur has told us. People who make the rules never abide by them. As the character Kosii observed in my novel, The Prophets:
“Victors gave themselves the right to rename murder ‘triumph’ and adorn themselves with jewelry made from the bones of the vanquished.”
Additionally, what bell hooks called white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (WSCP) appeals too concretely to human nature such that even the people who suffer from it or beneath it, covet, adore, and aspire to it. Most human beings just want the version of WSCP that makes our own specific racial, class, and gender, etc. identities the valued, powerful, dictatorial, and, most importantly, centered ones. Said plainly: everyone hates white wealthy cisgender heterosexual men and, quiet as it’s kept, everyone wants to be a white wealthy cisgender heterosexual man.
Very few people actually want an end to WSCP; most people are trying to keep it intact while figuring out how to remix it so that the beat becomes danceable to their own rhythms. This is what makes it difficult to judge a person friend or foe by just their appearance. I wish the skin or genitals or sexuality or disabilities or neurotype or religion or emptiness of pockets or location could tell me as much as I used to think it could. But no; none of that tells me enough about integrity, depth of humanity, or even sociopolitical orientation. The arduous part is that I have to evaluate individual actions, which takes time; but also, actions are subject to change so that someone who was a friend today can be a foe tomorrow. And while the reverse is theoretically true, it rarely works out that way.
A horrifying thing that I have learned in my 51 years on this plane of existence is that while hate is definitely not stronger than love, hate is certainly more addictive than love; and it is a lot less difficult than love—which is why it is the breeding ground for the emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually shiftless.
Everyone is implicated here. Everyone is complicit. Myself included. We might call the complicity by other, less inflammatory, more conciliatory names; hide it behind gods and pulpits and academies and labels in order to assure ourselves of our own innocence and to fortify our own victimhood. But when you strip away all the gaslighting and deceit, all the throwing of rocks and hiding of hands: there it is. As Beyonce sings in “Heated”: “Whole lotta playing victim, and villain at the same time.”
So much labor expended to make our pain be seen as exclusive, as special, so that only we are entitled to remedy; while other people’s pain can be belittled, rendered inconspicuous or nonexistent or false. Hatred (and I would argue that hatred and self-hatred are the same thing)—implanted and nurtured by the dominant classes; carried and passed on by us—is one of the most powerful forces in creation.
Unfortunately, this makes us easily divisible. Common-sense alliances between marginalized peoples are effortlessly sabotaged. The evidence reveals that most of our species finds it both easier and more erotic to interpret life as a zero-sum enterprise rather than a shared one. And conquering us becomes straightforward.
A recent example of the treachery: the conventional “wisdom” upheld by left, right, and center was that Black men were responsible for any Democratic losses in general and Stacey Abrams’s loss in particular. While that assessment felt cathartic (and I’m implicating myself here)—because of the genuine harm experienced, and because, let’s keep it a stack, Black men have always been a readily available, always-accessible, and already-despised scapegoat upon whom its mad easy to heap all the country’s political and other sins (a population, furthermore, whose most horrendous and vicious members are given the most screentime, the brightest spotlight, and the largest platforms, and are falsely, but intentionally, held up as an accurate representation of the entire group; a group whose pain and death has turned movement into a billion-dollar industry that everybody else benefits from)—it was a lie. What the evidence revealed is that Ancestor James Baldwin was right: the root of the problem, perpetually, is whiteness.
Using Ancestor Toni Morrison’s interpretation as a basis, I define whiteness as the practice of putting human beings on a constructed hierarchy of value (under the pretense that it’s “natural”)—based on all sorts of weird, arbitrary, fabricated, and unimportant things—where whiteness is at the top and Blackness is at the bottom. Whiteness is, then, a paradox, for it holds that the only actual human beings on Earth are white, but that belief also diminishes—and, in some cases, forfeits—the humanity of the people who hold it. Therefore, whiteness is not merely destructive; it is self-destructive. It’s isn’t only vile; it is violent. It isn’t simply sadistic and built upon Black suffering; it is vampiric and requires Black blood to survive. As long as the very concept of whiteness exists, Black people are in danger—whether by assimilation or by murder. And let me be clear: whiteness has little to do with the color of one’s skin.
I don’t know, y’all. I’m trying to figure all of this out like everyone else. I’m trying to be as humane as it’s safe to be. I’m trying to afford other flawed and still-learning human beings their humanity as well. I’m not trying to weaponize my own trauma against others, ensuring the cycle never ends. (Speaking of which, if you’re into horror movies and you haven’t seen Smile, you should. It’s a great allegory for generational trauma.) Writer/community organizer Prince Shakur has a great meditation on these larger questions that he sent out in his newsletter. He says:
“I wanted to write a book about what it means for me as a queer black man to humanize these men, not romanticize them or wholly villainize them. To see something in them that they probably wouldn’t see in me. Humanizing someone or something that has the capacity to destroy us. That to me is a very queer logic.
But in light of the recent Colorado Springs shooting at Club Q, I ask - what are queer people to do when the world aims to destroy us? Do we simply humanize the whole world? Is this queerness or complicity?”
That final question is one of the worthiest questions ever asked.
Hope in the midst of hopelessness is either incredibly courageous or enormously foolish. Or maybe it’s both. I can’t even pretend that I have all the answers. Human beings sometimes surprise me. And sometimes, they shock me. Still, in any ways that I can, I try to resist the oppressive forces that are attempting to not just defeat me, but turn me into a facsimile of them. As the character Maggie, from The Prophets, believed:
“Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.”
One of the ways in which I resist succumbing to this species-wide cruelty and outrageous selfishness, this “death of the heart,” as Ancestor Baldwin called it, is remembering, consciously, to express gratitude.
Sometimes, it feels indulgent to think about gratitude in a world where so many suffer needlessly. It can feel as though being grateful for things in your own life erases others’ plight, which, in turn, fuels feelings of guilt. But I’ve come to understand that it isn’t an either/or proposition. You can be grateful and a witness at the same time.
So every Sunday, my sister-friend, actor/comedian/singer Stephanie Acevedo and I text each other to communicate one thing we’re grateful for. Whether it’s health or rest or laughter or a good film or loyal friends or the ability to clothe, feed, and shelter ourselves, or simply being alive, we express something we’re grateful to be able to do, experience, feel, have, or witness despite the pointed and unnecessary hostilities of the world’s governing bodies and those who subscribe to their empirical pathologies.
If you’ve seen the acknowledgments section of The Prophets, then you already know that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people and things I’m grateful for. I won’t re-list them all, but I do want to point out, here in this newsletter, some of where my gratitude rests.
I’m grateful for the Lenape and Canarsie peoples upon whose territory I live. You didn’t ask for European invasion and my Ancestors didn’t ask to be dragged here via enslavement, but here we are. May mutual respect and common ground always guide our interactions. May we forever honor the land.
I’m grateful for my Ancestors who have been guiding, keeping, chastising, and loving me longer than I’ve been aware. Their sacrifices and their survival is why I exist; and it’s why I can practice a craft that would have earned them torture, if not the death penalty. Thank you, Ancestors. I love you.
I’m grateful that I get to live my purpose, which is writing. It doesn’t matter that it took me 14 years to write my first book or that I was damn-near 50 years old when that jawn dropped. All that matters is that through all the fears, impatience, laziness, self-doubt, detractors, liars, sabotage, traps, and loneliness, I kept writing. And now, I am the thing I thought I could never be: a fulltime author. And I get to meet people from all over the world who find value in what I do.
I’m grateful that a change in diet (The MS Cookbook is awesome!), exercise, incorporating meditation practices into my daily routine, and receiving a new treatment, not to mention managing stressors (leaving social media was huge in that regard; Morgan Jerkins also has an analysis that resonates), are all helping me maintain my health as I deal with multiple sclerosis.
I’m grateful for the beauty of poetry, and for poets like John Keene, who writes in and out of a tradition, in the name of the marginalized, and always gives thanks to those who came before him.
I’m grateful for people who don’t only understand injustice if they—and their own, specific identity categories—are directly impacted by it; who don’t look at other people’s oppression with scorn and turned-up noses or who look away entirely or who intentionally exploit or participate in it. As Ancestor Baldwin put it in Giovanni’s Room:
“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
I’m grateful for the people who truly realize that all oppression is interconnected and, thus, our liberation is inextricably intermingled. And I’m grateful for the people who actually want to be liberated rather than trade places with oppressors.
I’m grateful for Dwayne Wade, who pushes back against his ex-wife’s casual and virulent anti-transness (masquerading as “concern”) and ensures that their daughter Zaya can be whole and full and loved and supported and safe and thriving and herself.
I’m grateful for good books and the good people who write them:
Author/thinker/speaker Frederick Joseph (he/him), who co-wrote, along with his spouse Porsche Joseph, a hopeful vision of the future for young people called Better Than We Found It: Conversations to Help Save the World.
Activist/author/style icon Da’Shaun L. Harrison (they/them), whose brilliant book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, is such a vulnerable, piercing, and incisive honesty.
Lawyer/essayist/memoirist Vanessa A. Bee (she/her), who had the vulnerability—which is to say, the courage—to tell her own story in Home Bound: An Uprooted Daughter’s Reflections on Belonging.
“Writer/speaker/Internet yeller” Ijeoma Oluo (she/her), author of Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, who wrote this observation on abolition:
“So many of our movements are patriarchal or extremely hierarchical and punitive. We build our own “justice” within our groups that are based on revenge instead of relationship.
And there is reason for this: it’s really all most of us know. It’s how we were raised, it’s saturated in our culture. It has infused itself into our way of thinking and doing in ways that we are often not fully aware of.”
Writer/metalhead/feminist Kelly Sue DeConnick (she/her) and her wonderful artistic collaborators Phil Jimenez (he/him), Gene Ha (he/him), and Nicola Scott (she/her), who have created what is, without a doubt, the best comic book series I’ve ever read: Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons.
I’m grateful for people who support the work of writers—like the amazing thinkers behind Books Are Pop Culture: Jerid P. Woods aka Akili Nazuri (he/him) and Reggie Bailey (he/him), who I call the Mobb Deep of Literary Analysis (because they’ll leave you shook).
I’m grateful for keen critics, who can see past the glitz and the glamour of escapist media and identify how they can reify hegemonic paradigms. Big-ups to Inigo Laguda and his insightful essay on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, “How to Sabotage a Black Utopia” (the essay contains spoilers):
“Namor proposes he and Shuri invade the ‘surface world’ together and she exclaims, ‘that’s madness!’ But… Why? Why wouldn’t she be more responsive–or at least, indifferent? The barbarity of white supremacy justified Wakanda’s borders being closed for more of Shuri’s life than it has been open.
Her indignation only makes sense if you infuse her psyche with an allegiance to whiteness that should barely exist inside of her.
Whiteness doesn’t need a white body to exercise its influence. Sometimes it just needs a mouthpiece, an inner voice that siren-sings a Black character away from their own self-interests.”
I’m grateful for people who actually love Black children. When I say actually, I mean that the love shows up, demonstrably, in their every day practice and isn’t—whatever the excuses, traumas, or traditions—harm disguised as love. Shout out to the genius Dr. David J. Johns.
I am grateful for organizations that point the world in a better direction:
Charitable organizations (the sites of the living heart):
Black Trans Men, Inc.
Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis
Marsha P. Johnson Institute
The National Black Justice Coalition
The Okra Project
Read 718
SisterLove
SnapCo.
Therapy for Black Men
Trans Women of Color Collective
Voix Noire
Independent bookstores (the keepers of sacred knowledge):
Adanne
Book Passage
Books with Pictures
Bronx Bound Books
Greenlight Bookstore
Hidden Gems Literary Emporium
Loyalty Bookstores
Penguin Bookshop
Resist Booksellers
Revolution Books
I’m grateful for the enormous wisdom of Ancestor Marlon Riggs. He leapt so we could fly.
I’m extraordinarily grateful for Ancestor Morrison’s words. She wrote so that we could have a chance to.
I’m grateful for the music of Samora Pinderhughes (he/him), which speaks to the mind, heart, and soul.
I’m grateful for my loved ones.
And I’m grateful for you.
Thank you for continuing to support my work and find value in it. Despite whatever else might be going on, may there always be things in your life that you are grateful for.
And may the Ancestors continue to love on you and keep you safe.
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert
P.S. A few of my friends have told me that accounts under the moniker “Son of Baldwin” have been popping up after my permanent retirement from social media. I just wanted to let you know that those accounts have no affiliation with me. If it’s not listed here, it isn’t Robert Jones, Jr. Thank you. :)
