The Black Experience
Black pain is not abstract.
It is a body taught to brace for the impact of brute force, before it is taught to dream.
It is a child learning silence as a form of survival.
A mirror learning flinch.
A spine memorizing fear.
A heart heavy before ever being free.
A childhood torn from the trembling hands of an eight-year-old black boy,
society’s stereotypes stripping him of his innocence, stealing his adolescence
so that instead of fearing monsters and dragons, he fears sirens and bad men with badges.
The Black experience shows that the moment those flames were extinguished,
And a wish was made, his childhood came to a close, a moment most would celebrate.
Most would think it was the big one- eight,
But for black children, childhood ends at 8.
The Black experience.
The Black Experience means
One second, you are playing pretend,
shooting nerf guns and roaming free,
the next second…
It is hands up,
face down.
Your heart is in your throat, your eyes are closed.
You want to shrink, you finally feel as small as society has shaped you to feel for your entire life.
They won…
The Black experience.
The Black Experience means
One second, nursery rhymes are sung, synchronized to the swings of a jump rope,
And suddenly you see your life summed up in seconds as it flashes before your eyes,
as a barrel is bare and braced against the back of your skull, scratching your cranium raw,
Your hands raise to your head, and your body falls forward as your knees cower to the mighty
badge, and your breath is being counted by someone else.
The Black experience.
In this world, being born black means being born guilty
and spending a lifetime auditioning for innocence.
“Innocent until proven guilty” means nothing to the jury of our peers,
as they are swayed by their prejudice and preconceived notions to think that
The more melanin we possess, the guiltier we are.
Intertwining itself into everyday life, the microaggressions are invasive,
They take over, they rule and ruin,
It’s the effects of racism.
Sometimes societal views creep up on you; they sneak into your subconscious and cause
you to hate what stares back at you when you look in the mirror,
You hear “Your hair is too big” while you poke at your curls with predatory hands,
You see too many curves when staring at yourself in the mirror
But like breathing in secondhand smoke,
Your body comes to its senses.
Your body
realizes,
repents,
rejects those thoughts
and starts coughing up the ideas that were shoved down your throat before you could even form
coherent thoughts,
cleansing itself of the toxins it just let in.
The body attempts to restore itself to the way it was prior to inhaling that poison, except
you're
too late, and the results of racism have already set in, leaving permanent scars.
The Black experience.
Being Black in America means laughter swallowed in public.
Anger criminalized.
Trauma minimized.
Grief turned into a spectacle.
It is ancestors screaming through our blood, clawing at the cage they were kept in for decades,
begging for freedom, for representation,
to never hear the word n*gger again,
Except we can’t grant those wishes, can we?
Because while the world calls it history,
The word used to degrade my ancestors is thrown around, no longer weighed down
by the fetters placed on the limbs of those, a few generations back in my family line.
The Black experience.
Black pain is blood on concrete and on the barrels of service weapons,
Shell casings fished out of chest cavities and placed into evidence lockers only for the claim
against the cop to be “inconclusive.”
Names etched on stone before they could ever be seen on a diploma.
Names on cardboard and protest signs, on broadcast channels and news headlines,
Police brutality and black-on-black crime,
The “I can’t breathe” and the mothers identifying their sons by shoes.
The Black experience.
Black pain is being told to move on
while the knee is still there pressing on the necks of all those affected, jarred, scarred, and scared
for their futures, hoping to find solace.
THAT is
The Black experience.
If this hurts to read, imagine living it.
