People either care that you’re dying, or they don’t. It’s not rocket surgery.

We keep finding new language to describe some pretty simple shit. It’s not necessary. And it’s deliberately obtuse. The goal is to have us constantly running around like headless, terrorised chickens. And it’s working as planning.

One of my biggest gripes with contemporary Black Studies is its offer of a lexicon without a coherent strategy or a plan. So now we know how to describe the minutiae of Black pain, Black suffering, Black trauma. And now you’ve got tenure. Now what?

It’s not just the academy. We’re all accountable to varying degrees. But I’m not a fan of careerism which wastes the precious time we could be using to figure out how we survive this as well as what comes next.

Every time something like this happens, there’s an abundance of evidence of people relying on Black Death as a way to future-proof careers. It’s chillingly common and elegantly disguised.