The Purge

(This blog post was inspired by a meeting with students for The James Baldwin Society on 3.26.25. I’ve been reflecting on their expressions of exhaustion all day. I HOPE this offers some consolation … some strategy for survival).

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work… not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.”—Toni Morrison

These are turbulent times, there is no doubt about that. These times try us and work us over; they exhaust our resources for resistance. And that is a strategic design that capitalizes on the centuries of pscyhological labor false power has demanded of every single body that bears difference from white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Whether you are black, queer, female, non-binary, poor, uneducated, disabled, or an embodiment of any other condition of being deprived of access to the priveleges associated with that infamous enemy of your state, you must know that its most important objective is to induce weariness. So logically speaking, in the face of such a formidably inevitable outcome, your first duty is to practice self-care. For it is only through through a sustained practice of self-care that the revolutionary disturber and the enlightened thinker are able to continue to practice liberatory action. Self-care is the source of revolutionary energy. Whenever and wherever I encounter weariness, I have learned to first question the disruption of the lifeline that fuels its alternative.

Media—whether social, political, or popular—is akin to a hypodermic apparatus used to overdose us with dark information and hopelessness. It is an old strategem really, but only a means by which power directs our thinking away from the things we should really be doing and paying attention to. For precisely this reason we must monitor and curate our consumption, and filter it through what we know to be the truth of the world’s social motivations. The world we live in is sustained by a social order, and that order is upheld by our acceptance of its information. Knowing this, it is the responsibility of the artist and the enlightened thinker, the revolutionary interloper and the dissatisfied citizen, to always be able and prepared to inject counter-narrative and indisputable truth into the blood stream of the world’s social consciousness. If we don’t, we run the risk of sitting idly by feeling sorry for ourselves, while we watch the world overdose on the poisonous darkness it has learned to accept into its system. But you cannot do that if, first and foremost, you do not manage your own consumption of toxicity. This does not mean that we stick our heads in the sand and refuse to see. It does not mean that we turn a blind eye to everything and decided that what does not directly affect us is not worthy of our time. It does not mean that we become insular and selfish in our navigation of the times. It does mean, however, that we cannot afford to be lazy participants who go with the flow of things, questioning nothing. In fact, you must question everything continuously because questions are the fruit of a healthy mind.

I question many things. Each time I smell cannabis, I question vape shops and liquor stores in such close proximity to a black college campus—an institutional center of black intellectual thought. I question the strategic design of implanted distractions. I question whether or not the over-sexualization of black women (the Hot Girl and the “Boss Bitch”), and the glorification of toxic black masculinity (the YN/”Young Nigga” and the Hood Genius), are just tools to ensure cultural complaceny. I wonder whether or not many of the things we call culture now are just repackaged manifestations of historical trauma—attempts to employ blues aesthetics, turning the ugly into something we can call beautiful, even though we know Death dressed up in a three-piece Sunday suit is still just Death looking good on the Lord’s day. I question whether or not the underlying implications are that, if you can just keep them high … if you keep them drinking … if you keep them dancing … if you can just keep them pleasurably distracted from feeling the grief and the threat, the danger of their real predicament in times of political warfare, you can guarantee that real power will always elude them. I question whether or not in pursuit of a reprieve from the unbearable weight of dark information we sometimes disenfranchise our own selves by not recognizing distractions for what they truly are. And are we doing ourselves a disservice by not raising our voices in opposition to the ongoing practice of migrating distractions into the womb-spaces of black potential? I question why we are not alarmed by the preponderance of black intellectual breach birth—a feet-first phenomenon in which more of us learn to run (from power, from ourselves, from truth, from self-awareness, from information) before we learn to think critically. I question our weariness and whether or not it is sometimes a sign we are simply distracted because I know questions are the seeds of change, and they are an indispensible aspect of self-care.

When you stop asking questions you have eulogized your revolution—the internal/personal one, and the one that wants to take shape around you.

How are you taking care of your internal revolution?

I am asking this because the world around you can never be better than the world inside of you. And I am remembering Anaís Nin’s assertion that we see the world not as it is, but as we are. Once upon a time, when I came to understand that the darkness I felt within was only a reflection of the darkness without, I closed my windows and locked my doors. I installed security systems within myself—alarms, to shock me back into clear consciousness in the presence of threat. I fortified myself by deciding how and what I wanted to feel, and refused to allow the world to breach those boundaries. I made a determination to become so swollen and expansive in my own impenetrable joy, which is founded on the truths I know … about everything … that the world around me would have no choice but to hear my steadfastness in it. I decided not to be concerned with who hears and who changes, but only with the practice of injecting my vibration, my politics, my understanding of the truth, into every atsmospheric opportunity I inhabit.

How are you takeing care of your revolution?

Are you being soft with yourself? Are you tenderly administering truth to the places within where the lies have induced bloodletting? Are you giving yourself permission to question? Are you seasoning everything you consume with love and a refusal to allow yourself to taste anything else? Are you simply filling up or are you relieving yourself of the uncomfortable bloat of the world’s poisonous offerings by using the tools you have—your art, your voice, your mind—to ensure that you are never weighted down by its excremental ideologies?

I am simply saying to you … it is time to purge …

and heal,

because healed people heal people.

Is the balance of information you’re consuming revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?

I’m asking because there can be no revolution without until there is a revolution within.

How are you taking care of your revolution?