I saw I Am Not Your Negro the other day.
It starts with James talking about how living in Paris, he didn’t miss anything about the US but one thing: black people.
I know what he felt now more than ever: I’ve never had as many black folks in my life as of now and damn.
Damn. You have no idea.
That sweet love and beautiful connections I experience interlace with this harshly divided world. Black people after the past years of watching ourselves die in real life in HD, after NOT voting for that motherfucker are so fed up. My white France is missing me. My France doesn’t care about its black population, never did.
Division has intensified. People don’t understand the weight and test of time, especially when they don’t have to care about it because they’re on the easy side. Being in the middle is more isolating, more strenuous than ever.
That intersectional shit is cutting deep and fast man, I’m trying to navigate it like Spike in his Swordfish II in the middle of an asteroid field. I’m going to the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, this micro world where less than 2% of people are black. And I’m probably going to stay in Oakland where as Dave Chappelle jokes “you put all of them niggers on the other side of the bridge huh?”.
It’s this weird bag of very high adversity, straight up hostility on one hand and complete comprehension and cultural acceptation on the other hand. Every minute of my life, I witness and experience things you only read or hear about.
It’s so corrosive. I wish it would stop. I know it won’t. I guess it also makes me feel alive like nothing else.