06/10/2026
James Baldwin said:
“To be Black and conscious in this country is to be in a constant state of rage.”
There has never been a more true statement.
The rage I carry knowing Black mothers die giving birth at three times the rate of white women.
The anger knowing more than half of Black babies in this country grow up in poverty.
The malice I feel pondering the robbery of our community — by either police brutality or the quieter, everyday anti-black brutality American culture normalizes.
All of that fills me with a rage that still surprises me to this day.
But none of it compares to the righteous rage built up in me knowing how manufactured all of it is.
White supremacy is — and has always been — a decision. Not a necessity.
With that truth in my chest, I could murk every klan member in the Bible Belt.
The only problem is that wouldn’t change a damn thing.
Not for my people around me. Not for my people in the wider world.
Rage alone can’t build power. The truth is power building is persistent. Strategic. Slow.
This country’s sickness runs so deep that every single day it goes unacknowledged in power is another day this decrepit s**thole — the one we call “land of the free” — decays further.
I encourage everyone who shares this rage to direct it toward our common struggle.
This is a relentless war that has been waged against Black people for centuries. It did not start with us, and it will not end with us. But that does not mean we fight without leverage.
We can—and we will—serve real losses to an opposition that would like to see us gone.
To the African diaspora: fight the fight of our lineage.
To everyone outside of it: support the Black struggle for liberation. Not as saviors. As allies who show up consistently, without needing a medal.
The rage is BEYOND justified. But the work is the point.
