"I was not meant to be alone and without you who understand."

when i work with white folks who are marxist and deemphasize race i feel so...erased. pun unintended. and bland. and when i feel like it's just the growing pains of anti racist work -but i have to put up with it- my future feels dismal and uninteresting. i don't want to my future to be a bunch of african dashiki wearing white people singing we shall overcome and imagine. and with a few token blacks over to the side decorating the scene and dancing in a drum circle. don't get me wrong i love my individual white people to death and i like to be able to learn about how folks different from me in such ways live, and from time to time being in a drum circle is kinda fun, and imagine is a beautiful song, but i swear i feel like i need beautiful, intelligent, spiritual, open, conscious, elevated black people in heavy doses just around me for sustenance and air. i literally feel most alive when i am in predominately poc space. i feel most beautiful amongst amazing people who are black and conscious and working to get rid of the effects of european colonization on their beings. even the white people i tend to gravitate towards most usually were socialized in black/poc affirming spaces. or they have some kind of jungle fever, like they seriously love themselves some black people. (not in the exploitative, tokenizing way. i hope.) i realize i'm just writing here, not really censoring much, not really editing my shit but shit. this is really where i'm located right now. life would truly suck without black people. and this is someone who feels that she would partner with the right person socially constructed as white. i don't look at white folks as less than human. i just see poc, black folks as essential to my fucking health. i noticed that when i'm in "white" space (space that is predominately/culturally white) the laughter isn't as deep. shit isn't funny, isn't jubilant and joyful...it's contained. white people jokes are cute, but they tend to be to stuffy to be funnnnnnny. when i'm in black space we laugh til we're almost fucking shitting ourselves, we go all out. i've learned that the funniest people are those who have gone through the most painful growing life experiences, the people who have had to deal with the most shit. if we weren't laughing we'd be crying. or we'd be dead. if we weren't creating music and art for white people to steal and market and sell back to us, we'd be dead. we'd be dead yo. and these are the things-these black cultural things-that i can't see myself living without.

*The above quote in the title appeared in Audre Lorde's essay "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger." It was taken from "Letters from Black Feminists, 1972-1978" by Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith in Conditions:Four (1979).