The Tragedy Paradox
This should be a time to grieve. It should be a moment to mourn the lives lost and cherish the ones that remain, to ask what brought us here and how we can never return again. It should be a moment where there is rest and reprieve and quiet contemplation before there is righteous anger and bold, definitive action.
Instead, as a Black American, I must make this moment an opportunity.
The hours and days after another act of white supremacist violence are the rare times that Black voices on politics are sought out and uplifted. I may be noticed in quieter stretches, or given temporary space for those all too few 28 days in February, but it is when our blood stains the soil that the mainstream is eager to hear me out. When Black bodies fill the morgues, it is incumbent upon me, a Black political essayist, to find the words to roil the agitation of “good” white people, to describe the spotlighted systems of oppression and supremacy and brutality that enabled the tragedy, to contort my trauma into something consumable.
If I don’t, I lose the chance to be heard at all; if I do, I am participating in the comfortable cycle of white complicity.
Because I have lived through this enough to know that the eager white appetite for Black trauma isn’t a sign that we will change, or that white people are learning and addressing their own biases, or that our society is taking active steps towards an integrated equality. I know that I’m not clarifying the structures of white supremacy, or converting the skeptical, or even inspiring anti-racist action. I am merely providing emotional absolution to white people — even non-Black people — who don’t like the costs of white supremacy but are unwilling to abandon the benefits.
As long as I can paint a portrait that incriminates the “other” white people, as long as I can condemn and assail the “bad” ones, they can continue to believe that white supremacy is a problem of agency rather than permission. Their sympathy for my misery is their internal sign that they are “good” people, and so my writing — and the rage, despair, and desperation within — is merely to provide white self-satisfaction.
I can warn in a thousand ways a thousand times before we cycle back here again, and it will change nothing, because Blackness in this society cannot forestall tragedies, it can only bear witness to them.
Yet choosing silence and self-protection is to give up a chance to raise my voice at all. These are the moments Black writers get space to speak, to make our names, to build our platforms. Trauma is a spotlight, and you have to put on a damn good show if you want to continue performing. The audience wants what it came here to see. Black opportunity must be paid for with Black life. Some of us can only be valuable if others are discarded. It is the law of supply and demand: We cannot thrive while our misery is wanted.
Nearly four years into my writing career, almost two years after George Floyd’s murder, I don’t find myself seeking the words to castigate the system or the perpetrators who feed from it, nor am I hoping to incite the virtuous with righteous anger. Instead, I think I am searching for something like peace: enough time to mourn, reset, and prepare for the next time.
After all, we will be here again, and I will need something to say.
