furious erasure
D’Angelo died, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy.
And as Saeed Jones wrote, “who gets to live a long life in America?”
as I read that the singer had died after a private battle with pancreatic cancer, it got me thinking about Andre Braugher dying at 61 and Chadwick Boseman dying at 41. And how, when black men—famous and everyday guys alike—die at any age, “he was so young” is actually an acknowledgement of theft. It’s the same reason Miss Major living to 78 was miracle because it was a miracle she endured as long as she did in a country built on theft of black and queer life. As D’Angelo himself said “As Black folk, we gotta always be three, four, five steps ahead of everybody else in order to just break even.” The question of who gets to live as long as they should isn’t moral but systemic.
Source: https://saeedjones.substack.com/p/diane-keaton-miss-major-dangelo
Attribution
The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. / And still a world begins its furious erasure— Who do you think you are, saying I to me? You nothing. You nobody. You. — from Citizen: “Some years there exists a wanting to escape...” by Claudia Rankine Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57799/citizen-some-years-there-exists-a-wanting-to-escape