What I’m Learning About Gratitude While Black

Songs of Survival Blog, pt. 3: Gratitude

So, boom. I’m walking home in a huff, muttering to myself:
“Nothing’s changed,” I repeat under my breath.

It’s the summer of 2020. George Floyd’s last words — “I can’t breathe” — remind me of the killing of Eric Garner. Breonna Taylor, killed in her bed, recalls the killing of Fred Hampton.

I’m fighting the dreadful epiphany that the scholar Frank B. Wilderson III might be right. If he is, the world is more fucked than I thought. Wilderson argues that Black people endure “historical stillness,” a term he borrowed from literary critic Hortense Spillers. An example would be that slavery lives on today as “a relational dynamic,” thus, we still live in the age of slavery.

In the moment, “historical stillness” doesn’t feel like an arcane philosophical concept, but like heavy lungs. It feels true: that for all the blood spilled for racial progress in America, we hadn’t moved very far. “Nothing’s changed.” That feeling wrings the water from my heart.

Woke and Miserable

When I look back now, I think, “No wonder I’ve been so depressed.” I’d been focusing, almost exclusively, on the negative. Social justice folks do that a lot.