Collective Grief
With the sad news of Take-Off’s death, I am forced to reflect again on what it means to be a black woman in the United States. It often goes unnoticed that Black Women carry more than their share of collective emotion in this country. That is not to take away from the struggle of Indigenous people in this country, in any way, but today I write as a Black woman.
As a Black woman and mother, I am tired of seeing our young men killed over petty ego trips. I am aware that this written lament will fall into the void of similar laments that has stacked as high as the day is long for as many years as we have existed in the United States. But it needs to be said until it is heard by everyone who is listening. I’m tired of reading about and hearing about dead Black males. No ego trip is worth a life. Who cares what someone says? Who cares if you are losing at a dice game, or a card game? We lose sometimes. We all lose. Better to lose at cards than lose a family member/close friend. Better to lose and walk away alive to play better next time than to have to live with the emptiness that comes with grief or to not walk away.
My Black mama heart aches for the woman who raised the Migos. It’s November. I’m sure she was planning Thanksgiving dinner with her boys. Or at least hoping they’d drop by. Now she’s planning a funeral. She was probably thinking ahead to Christmas. They all loved her so maybe they were planning to take her somewhere. Maybe a trip someplace different. But now, she’s thinking of how to even do a holiday without one of them. Every morning she is waking up hoping that she’s in the multiverse where this news never came to her. One of the many options where he is still alive.
See, it’s easy to sit on the outside of the Black community as a whole and speculate, comment and judge. But from the outside, you are just watching another train wreck, there is very little true compassion or investment. From the inside, you are grieving with someone else’s mama while holding your own boys close. You are telling them to let stuff go. You are reminding them to not hang out in certain settings after dark with certain crowds of people. You are having to remind them again that everyone is “packing” so if it feels some kinda way leave. If people start arguing, leave. If there is alcohol and guns, leave. If there is gambling and guns, leave. It’s all the stupid stuff and the wretched stuff and the usual stuff. It’s the constant reminder that brown skin lengthens the odds against you. But the worse part is as a collective griever, you understand that you can’t stay there long because you need time to feel better before the next one. Just like with police brutality, I needed a break before the next one. Though, these days, I avoid the news like the plague. It’s not any good for my mental health.
This country doesn’t care about you young Black man/woman/nonbinary. This country doesn’t care about you young White man/woman/nonbinary. This country doesn’t care about you young Native man/woman/nonbinary. This country doesn’t care about you young Latino/a/man/woman/nonbinary. This country doesn’t care about you young Asian man/woman/nonbinary. If it did, it would start to deal with the gun problems, the health problems, the chemicals in everything, the safety of our drinking water and soil, education, secondary education costs, etc. If it cared, it wouldn’t keep going around the same track on the same old sorry shit that the same old sorry people eat up every election year. While everyone is hung up on whether killing babies is ok or not okay, guns have us so paralyzed that living beyond infancy is its own challenge. If someone is being assaulted, I am having to choose between helping and getting shot or letting it happen. Everyone has a gun. I’ve seen women yelling at men, sounding truly fearful and I’ve gone inside because my kids need a mom. I don’t need someone seeing me call the cops so they can come back or send their boys back to deal with me. We say that guns give us power but the power is wielded against those who have no guns. I also don’t want a gun because the odds that one of my children kills themself with it goes up. No thank you. But our government will watch a school full of kids get attacked and shrug their shoulders.
And my mama heart grieved them too because 1) The Uvalde shooting was on my birthday so I’ll NEVER forget it and 2) their parents would be considering Christmas gifts this time of year and instead have begun the spiral into the deep despair that comes to greet them around this time. They should have been dressing up and walking their neighborhoods on Monday, collecting more candy than any child should ever have access to. But my mama heart can’t go back to that because there will be more to grieve and I have to find the light before I dive into more collective grieving. And more grieving will come because this is the United States of America.
