Read More. Afterwards, as I continued to struggle with myself, I knew that I wanted to do something with my feelings that could be useful to others like myself.
So began my journey into the 1 ne Drop project. I asked them a variety of questions, like:. How do you identify? What makes a person Black? What makes you Black? Upon first meeting you, what do people usually assume about your identity? Do people question your Blackness? All questions I myself have never had to think about, much less articulate answers to. I can rest assured that when someone in the room is talking about Black people, they realize that they are talking about my people.
Wesley Lowery: Why Minneapolis was the breaking point. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.
I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it … No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. Some of her words, I must admit, are too hopeful, at least for me right now. In fact, I do weep at the world; I am, in a sense, part of the sobbing school; and I am skeptical that my lone oyster knife can cut any of the rot out of this nation.
But, like Hurston, I refuse to see the story of who I am as a tragedy. Joy is not found in the absence of pain and suffering. It exists through it.
The scourges of racism, poverty, incarceration, medical discrimination, and so much more shape black life. We live with the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow, and with the new creative tides of anti-blackness directed toward us and our children.
We know the wail of a dying man calling for his mama, and it echoes into the distant past and cuts into our deepest wounds. The injustice is inescapable. So yes, I want the world to recognize our suffering. But I do not want pity from a single soul. Sin and shame are found in neither my body nor my identity. Blackness is an immense and defiant joy.
As the poet Sonia Sanchez wrote in a haiku about her power—and her struggles:. People of all walks of life are protesting the violent deaths handed out by police officers. This is extraordinary both because the victims were black—and when does black death elicit such a response?
Think about how uncomfortable many Americans are with grief. You are supposed to meet it with a hidden shamefulness, tuck yourself away respectably for a season, and then return whole and recovered. But that is not at all how grief courses through life. It is emetic, peripatetic; it shakes you and stops you and sometimes disappears only to come barreling back to knock the wind out of you.
Rebecca Carroll: You should be feeling miserable. Black Americans right now are experiencing a collective grief, one that unfolds publicly. And we are unable to tuck it away. I do think Hurston would have to admit this too, were she around today. She wrote her essay before Brown v. Board of Education , the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham crusade, the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Acts, the rise of black mayors, the first black governor, the first black president.
She wrote her essay before we understood how tightly this nation would grasp onto its original sin even after legions of black people came with razor-sharp oyster knives and hands full of pearls. Black Americans continue to die prematurely—whether under the knee of a police officer, or struggling for breath on a respirator, or along the stretch of the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley , or in the shadow of Superfund sites, or in one of the countless other ways we are caught in the spokes.
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