![[ESSAY] "Gather Me, Man"](https://external-preview.redd.it/7atZmU7sPNuadyOrL84hMR04WmUgfL0zfJylNQiz0LU.jpeg?width=140&height=78&auto=webp&s=36057e4c47aa34c47c82bd4820900ba0f0912fad)
[ESSAY] "Gather Me, Man"
Excerpt:
>Anyone who has ever thought, theorized, spoken, written or acted upon Black men ain’t shit, or some facsimile thereof, is as culpable in the deaths of Black men and boys as any lynch mob, all-white jury, Hollywood studio, or sheriff’s department because they have shared in creating the optimal conditions for that peculiar kind of dying. I am implicating myself in this too because years of indoctrination, under severe and common duress, had me rooting against myself and anyone who remotely looked like me (they do not call it blackmail for nothing). The applause, popularity, and profit that comes with just such a positionality can also be addicting.
But I am older now and perhaps wiser. And the greatest lesson I have learned in five decades and then some is this: I do not have to diminish the humanity of others in order to assert my own. I know what comes after a lynch mob’s ovation. I realize that if I am to survive, if we are, my gaze, my attitude, must be of better use than simply viciousness. My trauma must be resolved not shared. And given current conditions—the endemic refusals to hear or heed; the feet entrenched in righteousness; and not a real witness to be found nowhere—I realize this too: Because I am a Black man, unapologetically so, it means that though I may love you, I cannot trust you. Not out of bitterness, but out of an overabundance of caution: I have seen what happens when Black men allow people to get too close; and I have seen the disgrace that follows. I do not know if I will live to see the day when reconciliation replaces rancor (Black men don’t stay here long, is what the studies say). But I pray for it nonetheless.
We have selected the para over the social, relinquished dialogue in favor of offense/defense because we have decided that everything must be a competition, including pain. We have declared war upon each other, made hatred inescapably mutual at the coaxing of agents, at the behest of plantation owners, for the arousal of trillionaires. I do not see any signs of a ceasefire, but extinction, through lovelessness, has made itself inevitable. We have been fooled, I guess, because the plantations, and the rape factories, do not, for the most part, look the way we have grown used to seeing them. With HGTV-worthy makeovers, they now look like the elite institutions, all-white parties, and latest technology that they have always been.
Today, we celebrate 250 years of only rich people being free and poor people confusing living vicariously with the real thing.