It's much more complicated than just pain, although there is pain beyond measure. Please try to consider Black America and our institutions and traditions beyond just pain. Especially if you're not Black.

Don't reduce us to pain narratives only. We are complex, flawed, human.

To my own generation, and the two generations after mine: Please try to watch that you're not reducing our elders & ancestors to only their pain. To do so is to participate in their dehumanization in retrospect *and* to not deal with our own internalized racism & antiblackness.

For what, I ask, will the generations after ours say about us, despite our intent?

(What are they already saying about us? Thinking about us?)

Why are so many of them telling us that "they don't have a culture?" *Think.*

Through our actions, many of us are saying that other cultures have it right, or at least, more right than us, while we're almost always wrong. And embarrassing.

What does that do to our psyche? Our spirit & souls?

What does that do for young people? Does it benefit them?

Why is it that every other human culture on this planet can have as much, if not more harm, embedded therein, but we're the only ones expected to transcend and become cultureless?

(Supernatural?)

Why do we hate our past so much? Those who came before us?

(Ourselves?)

How can we talk about Afrofutures until we wrestle with the Black past and present within ourselves?

"Let's put aside all that old stuff." But that's not how humans, or our human cultures, worked, ever. Why would it work that way for us?

Cultures evolve, but there's no tangible evidence any "We Are Not Our Ancestors" wave has benefitted us in the slightest. We are losing our minds in part because we're trying to engage in mass reinvention under continued white supremacist siege.

I know because I tried that path.

Cultures evolve anyway. Each generation of Black folks has been different, has developed new things. But the mindset that our elders and ancestors were solely ignorant and harmful and only caused trauma and pain that we have to deal with now is... whew.

See their full humanity.

If we don't, no one else will. And then when we're elders, then ancestors, the generations after us will also see us from the same deficit lenses.

They won't thank us for the rupture. They will thank us for reconciliation, for evolution, and for at least attempting some healing.

Some of this is just basic inner healing work. Not violent rupture. Looking back, seeing them for who they were.

Thanking them for what they handed us that was good. Forgiving them for causing us pain, as we can, when we can.

(We forgive not for the other person, but for us.)

In doing that work, we cannot implicate entire generations, or all of our ancestors. There were ancestors who valued women & queer folk. There were ancestors who were atheists. There were ancestors who worked hard for our liberation.

Our ancestors were just. like. you. and. me.

Just like no one will defend us except for us, no one will honor our elders and ancestors except for us. And we're arguing for our humanity, all while some of us denigrate Black ancestors for non-Black consumption & clout.

Maybe you find it cathartic. But who is that really for?

We Gen-Xers weren't given mics when we were younger. Now that we're in the middle, I'm hoping for maturity & evolution on the part of certain Black mic holders in the months, years, and decades to come.

I don't speak up about every odd take on Black folks I read. But... yeah.