#the journey continues

I went to a high school where I was one of three black kids in my whole graduating class. On a regular basis, I experienced antiblack (+ antiqueer) violence in the hallways, in the bathroom, in the lunchroom, and sometimes even in my “safe space” that was theater.

I still hear the matronizing misogynoir of the white teachers who instructed me to cover myself up with jackets because my budding hips and breasts made my clothes “too tight” which “violated the dress code.”

I still feel the hands that grabbed at my hair, poked, touched, and reduced my black body to a spectacle of curiosity and cruelty.

I still catch a certain tightness in my throat when I remember the upperclassmen who asked if I had a “thug side” or why I didn’t talk ghetto “like other black girls.”

Though I did not know who Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, or bell hooks were at the time, my parents, aunties, godmothers, and elders taught me the resistance work of Sidney Poitier, the ancestral healing of Maya Angelou, the self-determination of Malcolm X, and the love language of Martin Luther King Jr.

In this time of heightened segregationist violence, antiqueer legislation, and imperialist politics and proxy wars, we are all in search of moving castles that bring us peace and a sense of belonging. While the waterways of decolonization are filled with growing pains, sorrow, healing, and wrath there are also rivers that overflow with a love that celebrates our existence.

There is no perfect solution to combating violence in any form, but in an ecosystem of white supremacy, we would be fools to reduce Protect Black Women to a battle cry and not recognize it as a declaration of love.