What Would I Defend?

• Prayer, ginger mint tea, YouTube Afro-DJ playlist.

• I work with youth nonprofits where young people interview folks in public all the time. They walk up with microphones, cameras, little clipboards, sometimes barely enough preparation, and somehow ask the kind of question that will have an adult standing on a sidewalk reconsidering life. Watching them always makes me wonder: What if I didn’t know them? What if I was just walking down the street, minding my business, probably carrying too much shit, and someone stepped in front of me with a microphone and said: “What’s something you believe strongly?” Well… 

• Young people are not “the future.” They are presently alive and deserve present-tense power.

• Black boys deserve tenderness before something terrible happens to them.

• Black girls deserve protection that does not require them to become symbols first.

• Black folks should be allowed to be mediocre.

• Trauma is not automatically more literary than joy.

• A Black writer does not owe you a glossary. Catch up.

• Every writer should read poetry.

• Autocorrect is actively trying to destroy relationships.

• Every poet should occasionally read about somebody getting chased through a parking garage.

• Rest is part of the work.

• Not everybody needs a podcast.

• And podcasts are radio.

• People watching reality television exclusively through TikTok clips may have solved television.

• Black Twitter should have been protected as a historic district.

• Algorithms have convinced us that popular and good mean the same thing.

• Kanye is probably one of the clearest examples of our inability to hold two truths at once.

• Patriotism that cannot survive honest history is not patriotism. It’s branding.

• Sometimes “protecting my peace” means “I’m afraid to have a difficult conversation.”

• Not everybody who disagrees with your memory is gaslighting you.

• Chemistry is not compatibility.

• You cannot heal your way out of needing other people.

• Black men need friendships where somebody can say “I love you” without a funeral nearby.

• We need more stories where Black men survive the whole thing.

• We need more pictures of Black fathers doing ordinary father shit.

• Children should be bored more. Boredom has produced half the art humans love.

• Church mothers invented mindfulness.

• Adults should have recess.

• Mosquitoes feel personal.

• What could somebody stop you on the street and get you talking about immediately?.

  With all my heart

  — Té