A preface—
I put my last missive to you on hold because in the face of the enormous movement for Black lives and against institutionalized racism that has crossed borders and continents, it felt right to listen and let Black voices lead. It’s important to me to share some of the resources I have found helpful in both action and education during this time, including: this list of bail funds across the country, this reading on frameworks of racial identity, this roundup of contemporary books by Black writers, and this constantly-updated hub for petitions, places to donate, protest resources, and more. Seeking out tangible actions and learning spaces is what has resonated most with me, and perhaps it will with you. The movement is not over, it’s ongoing — and so is my intent to learn, to act, to move forward.
Similarly, it’s easy for me to think of Small Histories as something ineffable, smoke signals evaporating into the ether. Some of that is just natural shyness on my part, and some of it is feeling as though I’m writing for myself. But if there is anything I’ve learnt so far from this phoenix of a month, it’s that now is not the time for shyness, and that change only happens when we cross the usual delineations of our small universes. Small Histories is a series fundamentally based in my own experience: the loose threads, the ropes and pulleys of my life. It will continue to be; it will, I hope, if I do this right, also step outside it when needed. And in this, I would like you and I to make a covenant: not to be afraid to speak to each other. If something I wrote stirs something in you, please say it. If something doesn’t sit right with you, please say that too. I will do my best to listen, learn, and reply.
Black lives matter, in their every iteration. Black women, Black trans people, Black disabled people matter. Black art, Black joy, Black life, being lived, matters. I am saying it because it bears repeating. I am saying it because it is always, always true.
There is a story my family likes to tell about my great-uncle: how he sat in the field sprawling below the farmhouse with a box of matches, dropped one lit, and set the tall grasses blazing. They laugh at this story. I don’t. I have only ever imagined the wall of flame, the buckets being passed from hand to hand.
June feels like that. A match dropped to parched, crackling ground, and the world sprung into flame. When I say I’m watching the world burn, I don’t mean in terms of destruction (though that too, and that’s for another time). I mean the urgency. The fever. The rage. It suffuses me, smolders in me. Isolated as I am with two people at high risk for COVID — making protests a non-option — I have set about signing, donating, sharing, emailing, calling. Verbs that feel real and solid and anything but idle.
On the ninth day of the George Floyd protests in New York, I moved out of my apartment, a moment I’d come to figuratively kicking and screaming after being forced to try finding a new roommate mid-pandemic. By the next night, I was back in my mother’s house — without my lover who’d stayed back in the city, without a permanent residence, still without a job. Without the usual relief of oncoming summer and its gatherings and small joys, without any visible end to a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands. It struck me suddenly and forcibly how many holes I had. A moth-eaten curtain in the wind.
Since then it has been a descent into something unnameable, but that I know well. Instead of on fire, I feel pulled underwater. Voices muffled, every emotion through a veil, except one: This will never end. I will never get out. I am still trying to be anything but idle, still choosing verb over noun, but I have slowed.
I’ve been thinking about something I learnt in college on the German philosopher Heidegger. Earlier philosophers like Descartes preached absolute objectivity, lifting oneself out of daily banality to achieve perfect reason. Heidegger pushed back with his concept of Dasein, of “being-in-the-world”: that human beings are not just beings, noun, but are instead in a constant and active state of being, verb, in the world. Each of us, as a human being, is born into a very specific existence — one that we cannot shake or ever step outside of.
This past week saw the murder of Oluwatoyin Salau, a young Black activist who came to the forefront of the George Floyd protests. There is a video of Toyin at a recent protest that I can’t stop thinking about. In it she says, “At the end of the day, I cannot take my f-cking skin color off. I cannot mask this sh-t, okay? Everywhere I f-cking go, I’m profiled whether I like it or not. I’m looked at whether I like it or not.” It’s bubbling, viscous, her warranted fury that this thing she cannot change about herself is held against her, is weaponized against her. “Look at my hair, look at my f-cking skin,” she rasps into a microphone. “This sh-t —— I can’t take this sh-t off. So guess what? I’mma die about it.”
That last, so defiant, haunts me now. Toyin was too horribly right. She died simply for her Dasein, for the fact of her being in the world: a young dark-skinned Black woman who was vocal about the rights of those who, like her, get ignored and brutalized and killed simply for who they are. Not their choices, but their being.
Part of what pushed me to the bottom of where I am right now is the thought that I cannot deny my own Dasein, either. I can never not be white, Bostonian, American, French, middle-class, born in the 1990s, public school, college-educated, raised in a major city, ad nauseam. I can never deny that I was born, geographically and historically, into a landscape of systems that were designed to benefit people who look like me and to harm those who don’t.
But being-in-the-world, as Heidegger conceives of it, is an idea that moves and breathes. Individual Dasein changes as the world around a human being changes, and as that human being decides to change how they move through the world. New tools, ideas, language, landscapes —— all this can shift the way just one or a thousand people move through their world.
The fire of this moment is more than needed, is urgent. Non-Black people have to acknowledge that our being-in-the-world results, directly or not, in Black people dying just for being. But the long-term work of changing the world around me, and the ways I interact with it, is something else: candle-flame that has to keep the light, through flickering, through breath of wind.
Right now, to me, being in the world feels immensely hard. It feels heavy and seasick, dragged over the lip of the ocean shelf. But being is also constantly becoming, and the kind of becoming I have to do is crushing, agonizing work. It is work specifically meant to pull apart systems that structure every part of my life. There is a strange saltbitter comfort in feeling the weight of it, in knowing nothing is sacred — because it means everything must change.
Parting words—
Donate to the Oluwatoyin Salau Freedom Fighters Fund (if you are a Black girl activist in need, the next round of applications opens in July).
Read this piece by Clarkisha Kent honoring Toyin and grieving her, as a fellow Black woman.
If you’re interested, here’s a brief visual overview of Heidegger’s work and more on his concept of being-in-the-world.
collage honoring Oluwatoyin Salau by Broobs Marquez