Dr. Rosalyn | "Black Don't Crack" but sometimes it breaks

Welcome to what feels like the 1700 Saturday in 2020.  The year started off well enough but as we slid deeper into the spring term, things just went sideways.  A virus that was across the ocean mostly has devastated and divided an already fractured country.  Millions infected, many millions more unemployed and facing evictions, along with a dash of clear racial disparities in who is getting sick and dying.  Overlay all of that with continued police civilian interactions that are resulting in death and injury in what should be innocuous moments and I'm done.  I'm lucky to still be working and blessed that I can support my mother but I feel like I could sleep for a week and still wake up tired.  Someone a few weeks ago said I don't look my age.  Great but I feel my twice my age right now.  

There are a lot of melanated folks out there looking like they are aging in reverse (Angela Bassett, Pharrell to name two) but we are exhausted.  Daily we seem to be learning about yet another way being Black in this country is a hazard to our health and sanity.  And daily we seem to learn who among our "friends" keep telling us that we're being manipulated into feeling that way, the numbers don't bear out what we are saying, or who just really demonstrate they are stretching the word friend by what they say, share or are silent about.  On the rare occasion we are up front about our frustrations we will be labeled as aggressive, whiny or best yet be asked to do work to address it ourselves.  

There's always a weight sitting there what "we" need to fix but we are not the problem.  It's not that we haven't adapted to American culture.  American culture doesn't have room for us really.  Not the nuanced experiences of Black culture.  It's good with the athletes--until they protest, it's good with the doctors and lawyers--unless they speak about about discrimination in their fields, it's good with the teachers and therapists--until we push back on the supposed inferiority of our community.  But it's not good with working class Black folks and in general this country hates everyone poor.  It's why it keeps pushing the everyone can succeed narrative but ignores all the opportunities that afforded to you if you are financially stable.  That weight, that tension prevents most of us from just abandoning the rest of the community and enjoy our positions of relative safety.  Because wealth has never stopped the experience of racism or the pressure to be the magical Black person that has defied the odds.  If the country had truly embraced its Black citizens that phrase wouldn't even be in play.  But it hasn't which is why we're here right now.

It's against that backdrop that the news of Chadwick Boseman's death flooded my circle of friends.  He will always be T'Challa for large groups of people but in a very short time frame he was Jackie Robinson and Thurgood Marshall as well as a bunch of other roles that will live on well after him which is just a crap thing to even think.  He was 43 years old.  Older than my younger brother but not me.  He filmed most of these movies we are attached to right before or after his diagnosis.  He worked as his body worked against him and before he could become an elder statesman like Denzel or Samuel or Laurence he was gone.  And it hurts like my own brother died.  I'm not ok but I wasn't ok before this.  This just complicates the not okay.  Being Black in a country that doesn't love me, to paraphrase Doc Rivers, may make me a very young looking corpse one day.  Before that it will continue to break my concentration and make me angry and then make me figure out how to deal with it so I can keep breathing and doing good work as long as I can like Chadwick and John Lewis and Breonna.