You’re Dying, My Love.
Returning to ‘Who’s Killing Us? Black Cis-Het Men’
“One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.” — James Baldwin
Gender violence within antiblackness is so complex that it continuously moves us into a deeper spiral of contradictions and impossibilities. Every Black person dies in the death work of gender. Every Black person plays a role in maintaining the minstrelsy of gender. And when the dynamics of power, privilege, and access are constantly fluctuating — we can’t agree on who to protect first, or what to leave behind.
In my prose piece, ‘Who’s Killing Us? Black Cis-Het Men,’ some of the responses included that the writing was more violent than white supremacy because it framed Black cisgender straight men’s identity as terrorizing and nothing else. The poem was never written to educate or perpetuate the very antiblackness I seek to intervene, but rather explicate the visceral realities of gender violence that demands that Black cis-het men cannot divorce their identity performance from death sport. To be a Black cis-het man means that you are allegiant to executing brutality as your identity, as your allegiance, as your personality.
Black cis-het men’s identity and sustainability is directly rooted in Black death.
Black cisgender heterosexual men actively and…
