Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays

I don’t know if anyone is actually tracking the movement of the moral universe, but I’d wager that bend is a lot longer than any of us can bear. This is not to suggest that Dr. King’s famous quote is wrong. Rather, justice may be a lot farther than we think.

So, money is good, and money is necessary, and money is that thing that tells you that what you’re doing is not a fool’s errand. But the money is also an albatross, changing your relationship to the art.

I imagined what it might be like to stare down an abyss and shout self-affirmations into it.

When presented with the question, What do you think should happen to you? they responded, I should triumph.

But the thing about success is that it doesn’t seem like a natural result of unsuccessfulness. It feels like success comes despite a lack of success. Or, if you achieve some level of success, your lack of success in the past should be retrofitted as stepping-stones along the path of your rise.

Honestly, I see very little difference between Church and a Beyoncé concert. Maybe that’s the core of my theology: if it makes you feel something ineffable, if it’s bigger than you and yet deeply personal, if it sometimes involves a fog machine, it’s Church. Jesus is in there somewhere, swaying to the music, saving you a dance. What a pal.

And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

you have to tell your listener what you, the protagonist, want. This connects directly to the “why” of it all. The impetus for raising your voice to speak. There’s a power and a clarity in saying, “This is where it begins for me, and this is where it ends,” and knowing why. The why is the most crucial. It’s what elevates an anecdote to a story; it’

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.

These were the moments when I was reminded that no matter how passively I engaged with my Blackness, it was never not a force at work in my life. And, I found, the knowledge of my Blackness could be used as a weapon against me at any moment.