learning my bullies were swastikas dressed in catholic school uniforms 

The machette eyes of my peers would carve smiles out of my face like a jackolantern

The always needed a darkskinned overweight target to dart through

A pinata  to hang in the nucleus of the playground while each kid took a swing 

I learned how to hate myself at such an early age.”

-

Carvens Lissaint “Beauty Part 3”

I got an ask a while back asking, “Do you ever get tired of fighting the racism?”

I get tired all the time. There’s so much that I want to say, every day, here on my blog. But you know, writing about racism means thinking about it. And it’s on my mind every day, but there are some days where I get lucky. Some days, I’ll stay in my room, just me myself and I, and immerse myself in everything I possibly can just to keep myself from thinking about it. It only works for a few minutes. There’s not much in this world for PoC that won’t remind us in some way, especially once your awareness grows. I’m tired. I’m constantly tired.

That’s why sometimes, I’ll make posts, and sometimes, I’ll vanish for days at a time. Sometimes, I just don’t feel like dealing with the bullshit anymore than I have to already. Sometimes, being on Tumblr is the straw that breaks my heart. I’ll always come on, but I don’t always have the enrgy to write. Chances are that those days when I’m not posting? I’m still here online, reading and refreshing my dash, and just seething, mind full of things that I want to say, but fingers and body lacking the energy to put my thoughts into words for everyone to see.

It’s tiring. Sometimes I can’t do it. This past week, I’ve been particularly tired. Tired of the nonsense, tired of the bullshit, tired of people who refuse to get it, or just refuse to acknowledge it. Overwhelmed by school, since the year is coming to a close and the professors are bombarding us with research papers and exams and shit. Overwhelmed by the lack of awareness on this campus, and the racism of my peers, and overwhelmed by the even more blatant racism I see whenever I open this site, whenever I so much as click on my inbox.

Get tired of saying the same things over and over, and tired of being asked—or no. The right word is demanded—to educate people who have no interest in learning in the first place. Tired of hearing more and more news about how the government, the police, the American citizens, the citizens of the whole world, could give less of a fuck about me and my own, and how we’re treated, so long as it makes them happy. Some days I don’t have the energy, and I don’t have the willpower, and that’s what it comes down to.

There’s only so much I can take before I need to take a step back and just rest for a second.

If you ever send me an ask and it takes me weeks to answer, it’s not that I forgot. It’s that I just don’t feel like responding yet. It’s that I’m aware of the fact that I don’t have the energy or motivation to give your question the attention it deserves. It’s that I’m tired. So please bear with me.

It doesn’t take a lot for me to run out of steam. Racism is something I’ll never stop fighting against, so long as I may live, but sometimes, I just need to sit down.

And it sucks, because—and I can’t speak for all PoC, only myself, so forgive me for being presumptuous—we don’t want to deal with racism all the time. WE don’t want to always encounter it. But even when we don’t want to think about it, be it because we’re tired, depressed, furious, or just need a break because we’re at our breaking point, there will always be somebody, or something, to remind us of our position in this world. Always. You can take that to the bank.

It makes being tired, that much more difficult.

Idk, I’m just think speaking. I don’t even know what the point of this is.

Anyway, posts of actual substance will be back as soon as I find my energy.

i-killed-the-kkk-with-malcolm:

Alright, I’ve been reading the posts by a lot of the black women bloggers about how we, as black men, continue to perpetuate the negative stereotypes of our women, how we won’t fight for our women, stand up for them, love them as they love us. You know? Whenever anything goes down in the community, whenever we need to close ranks, when a black man is gunned down for no reason, when one of us black men is killed, black women are oftentimes some of the first ones sounding the alarm. We rally around our women.

I’m just…I’m wondering if the disconnect we have as black men (and I’m speaking broadly across the spectrum, because I don’t have kids), or a percentage of black men have from their kids, could have something to do with this inability to close ranks when one of our black women is attacked and assaulted in the same way as when a black man suffers the same fate. 

Somewhere there’s a disconnect. As a black man, the closest I can get, when reading about the 21st century lynching of another black man, is to think, “wow, that could have been me,” “that could have been my brother,” (and perhaps later in life, “that could have been my son”, but black men don’t see the feminine within themselves. As a culture we are strongly entrenched in patriarchy, and we just don’t see it.

Women, though. Women give us our future generations, they birth us, they bring us here, and so their pain, their anger, their anguish upon reading about another senseless murder, another racially charged murder might be felt differently. They look at it, and suddenly it’s, “that could have been me,” “that could have been my son,” “that could have been my daughter,” “that could have been my baby.” Women are uniquely positioned in that they understand the pains of childbirth, and they understand the bond between mother and child that we, as black men, can’t experience. We will never experience that, and so, we don’t understand that they see their child in all black children slain, they see their face in all the faces of murdered blacks, and we? We only see the face of the men.

I don’t know…just thoughts.