Is an interesting concept to me, it’s elusive and sparsely used in conversation. Even by those who have every reason to grieve or are clearly grieving(clock it). The primary use of it is usually by a second party trying to explain someone else’s actions or current behavioral state.

Seriously, how often has someone told you that they’re grieving right now and can’t pop out? OK, now how often have you heard it not in response to someone dying? Exactly.

As I continue my journey of obtaining my psychology degree and being as pro-black as possible, it’s painstakingly obvious that Black people should be grieving. Wait, my fault, it’s PAINSTAKINGLY OBVIOUS that Black people are in a constant state of grief but don’t recognize it. I can explain it but I can’t understand it for you, feel me?

It isn’t simply that Black people can’t or don’t feel grief. Black folks have developed overwhelming cultural technologies exactly for grieving: I’m talking music, funeral traditions, roasting, stories, prayer, memorial shirts(cut that out), car wash fundraisers, Shit, pouring one out for the dead homies - oh I’m sorry - “pouring libations.”

And this is what makes the Black dimension much more interesting. There are losses within Black life that do not start and end with funerals. Neighborhoods are either war zones or deteriorating. Every friend incarcerated. A parent is physically present but psychologically unavailable. A child realizes poverty has already narrowed their imagination and stunted their idea on what they can be. Someone grows up without ever feeling protected. A love life that keeps starting over. A Black woman realizing she spent twenty years being “strong” because nobody ever created a place where weakness was survivable or even an option. None of these occasions necessarily produces a ritual saying: you have suffered a loss; now grieve.

Yet when I speak to the homies about some of their hardships, it’s met with an unemphatic “you know how it be,” and word.. I do. I understand you because this happened to me too… OR maybe this happens so often that we have stopped treating it as something deserving mourning. No, not unemphatic, I meant ‘Matter-of-fact’ because the homies aren’t necessarily lacking empathy. They may understand too well. That’s the tragedy.

So today is dedicated to grief.

But this is bad… I don’t jack it. Within psychology (or at least my interpretation of the material), grief is an infinite amount of feelings and actions that such a basic definition doesn’t truly encompass it. Take for example the wound of being abandoned by a parent you’ve never met. If your father was never physically present, what exactly did you “lose”? Maybe you grieve the father you were entitled to have. A person can grieve an unrealized childhood, an imagined future, safety they never experienced, innocence taken too early, a relationship that existed physically but not emotionally, or a version of themselves that circumstances never allowed to develop.

Perhaps it should be defined as..

“the feeling of reaching out for someone who has never been there for you, only to discover when you need them one more time, they still aren’t there for you.”

But wait, what if it’s

“the feeling of reaching out for someone who’s always been there, only to discover when I need them one more time, they’re no longer there.”

Someone or something.. Who knows.

Think about the relationship example. Discovering someone never loved you doesn’t merely mean losing them. You may also lose:

• the history you thought you shared,

• your interpretation of their previous actions,

• the future you constructed around them,

• the version of yourself who believed the relationship was safe.

That’s why certain breakups can feel almost existential.

It’s a terrifying thought, but: What happens to a people when loss becomes so ordinary that mourning begins to look unnecessary?

What would Black life look like if we permitted ourselves to grieve not only our dead, but everything racism, poverty, abandonment, violence, and broken relationships convinced us we were never supposed to miss?

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Death gives us instructions. Somebody dies and we know what to do. We gather. We cry. We cook. We pray. We tell stories. We take off work. Nobody looks at you crazy for breaking down at a funeral.

But what is the funeral for the childhood you never got?

Where is the repast for realizing your mother could never love you the way you needed?

Who sends flowers when your best friend gets twenty years?

What black outfit do you wear when the future you planned with somebody dies but they’re a train ride away?

Maybe some of us remain stuck in grief because nobody ever taught us that these things were allowed to be mourned in the first place.

So, this one time only, the big homie Afro Sparks is going to teach you a few ways to grieve healthily, free of charge, no medicaid needed.

How to grieve.

To begin, there is no singular way to grieve. But there are healthy ways to do it.

The first is to identify exactly what was lost. Not just “my father wasn’t there.” What did his absence cost you? Protection? Guidance? Validation? A model of manhood? The ability to feel chosen? Your nervous system cannot process a vague wound nearly as well as a named one. Sometimes we stay angry because anger is easier to tolerate than saying, “I wanted my daddy.”

Secondarily, you have to allow the emotional response instead of immediately regulating it away. Cry. Be angry. Sit in the disappointment. Write about it. Write about it, and then write about. Talk about it(x3). Your emotions are not the pathology; sometimes the compulsive need to escape them is. Alcohol, sex, isolation, aggression, sex, endless work, humor, weed, SEX, scrolling, “Trust me I’m fine” and even intellectualizing the shit out of your trauma(guilty) can all become ways of never actually feeling it.

Third, learning to move in and out of the pain. You visit the loss, then return to living. You cry about your childhood and still go eat breakfast. You mourn somebody and still laugh later that night. Your brain does not need you staring directly into the wound everyday all day. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some trauma that we need to spend 24 or ever 72 hours straight just grieving but the “Dual Process Model of grief” proposes movement between loss-oriented coping and restoration-oriented coping: confronting the loss, then engaging life, then returning to the loss as needed. Integration happens partly through this movement between confronting the loss and rebuilding life around it. There’s no such thing as moving on if by moving on you mean becoming the person you were before the loss. The goal is learning how to move forward with it!

Then the hardest part - Acceptance.

Stop negotiating with a reality that cannot be changed.

My Mother should have been there.

She wasn’t.

That’s it.

Finally, we have scar care, accountability for the wounds you suffered. In other words, how can I carry this pain without reproducing it? Grief can explain behavior without excusing it. If abandonment made you terrified of intimacy, grieve that but don’t abandon everybody before they can abandon you. If you were never allowed weakness, grieve that but don’t punish the people who love you because vulnerability still scares you. You can grieve the abandoned Black boy who became emotionally hardened without excusing him when he hurts somebody else. You can grieve the Black woman forced into hyper-independence without pretending every harmful coping mechanism is healthy.

The goal is not forgetting.

The goal is to allow the pain to become apart of your story without defining it. You do not “get over” every loss. You teach your nervous system that the loss happened, you survived it, and it no longer has to keep happening inside you.

You’re welcome gang, that’s all I got for you frfr.

One thing for sure, defining it won’t help you recover whatever you’re supposed to be grieving… BUT naming it can definitely influence what happens next. There is psychological power in realizing:

I am not merely angry at my father. I am grieving the father I deserved, and I’m going to cry for that little girl inside me that grew up alone as many times as it takes until I have the strength to healthily accept it and integrate that grief with my new life because sometimes there is no moving on, and rightfully so.

Easier said than done, I know. It’s such a daunting question to ask yourself: “What do I do with the life/love/opportunity I never got?”

Because, and I’m going to hold your hand when I say this… Sometimes there is nothing to recover.

Maybe healing starts with admitting that surviving something does not mean it did not hurt you. Maybe you were strong because you had to be. Maybe everybody around you went through the same thing. Maybe there was food on the table. Maybe your father had his own trauma. Maybe your mother did the best she could.

And maybe you still lost something or never had it in the first place.

You are allowed to grieve that.

There is no childhood refund.
No replacement mother.
No alternate adolescence.
No machine returning murdered people.
No lover capable of retroactively loving you.

Some losses cannot be repaired.

You know how it be.

Works Cited

American Psychological Association. “Grief.” APA Dictionary of Psychology, American Psychological Association. Accessed 16 Aug. 2026.

Moore, Sharon E., et al. “Cultural Responses to Loss and Grief among Black Americans: Theory and Practice Implications for Clinicians.” Death Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2022, pp. 189–199. doi:10.1080/07481187.2020.1725930.

Stroebe, Margaret, and Henk Schut. “The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description.” Death Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 1999, pp. 197–224. doi:10.1080/074811899201046.

Wilson, Da’Mere T., and Mary-Frances O’Connor. “From Grief to Grievance: Combined Axes of Personal and Collective Grief among Black Americans.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 13, 28 Apr. 2022, article 850994. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.850994.

Author’s notes: The Wilson & O’Connor source is something you guys should absolutely look into. Modern psychology is overwhelming built around the White mind. In their article they explicitly argue that conventional definitions of grief are too narrow to capture Black American grief; discuss personal and collective grief; connect Black grief to enslavement, family separation, incarceration, racism, premature death, racial violence, and loss of safety; and criticize grief research for historically relying heavily on White samples.

Also you can pick up my book here: Theproblackstandard.org

Black people are constantly asked what it means to be pro-Black. We deserve an answer strong enough to govern conduct.

Black people are surrounded by declarations of pride.

We celebrate our culture. We defend our identity. We speak about liberation, unity, community, and power. Yet when someone asks what being pro-Black actually requires, the answer often becomes vague.

Does pro-Blackness mean loving Black culture? Supporting every Black person? Buying Black? Studying history? Dating Black? Building institutions? Opposing racism?

Which actions materially strengthen Black people, and which ones merely look or sound pro-Black?

I created The Pro-Black Standard because a people cannot build collective power around an undefined commitment.

Black pride is sentiment. Black power is capacity. Pro-Blackness is discipline.

From identity to obligation

The Pro-Black Standard defines pro-Blackness as disciplined loyalty to Black collective survival, self-definition, power, cultural continuity, intraracial nation-building, and institutional independence, proven by what we build, control, protect, and transfer.

This definition asks us to move beyond performance.

A pro-Black action should leave Black people with greater knowledge, safety, ownership, organization, cultural confidence, institutional strength, or intergenerational capacity. It should produce something that can be preserved, measured, criticized, improved, and transferred.

That does not mean every Black person must share the same politics. It means that anyone claiming the pro-Black tradition should be willing to answer a material question:

What does this belief help Black people build, control, protect, or pass forward?

I explain this distinction more fully in What Does Pro-Black Mean?.

Why forty rules?

Broad principles are necessary, but principles must eventually become standards.

The doctrine organizes pro-Black conduct across six connected fields:

• Peoplehood

• Power

• Culture

• Family

• Survival

• Institutions

From those fields come 40 Rules of Pro-Black Conduct.

Each rule includes an operational standard, an explanation, a practical example, a failure test, an evidence classification, and a primary-source foundation.

The purpose is not to replace thought with commandments. The purpose is to give Black people a serious framework that can be studied, tested, debated, corrected, and applied.

A doctrine should not be protected from criticism. It should be strong enough to survive examination and honest enough to change when the evidence requires it.

This tradition did not begin with me

The Pro-Black Standard is an editorial synthesis grounded in Black nationalist, Black Power, Pan-African, and African liberation traditions.

I did not invent Black self-determination, economic cooperation, cultural protection, political education, institution-building, or collective responsibility. Generations of Black thinkers, organizers, workers, teachers, families, and freedom movements developed these principles under conditions far more demanding than my own.

My responsibility is to organize the record carefully, distinguish direct historical support from my editorial synthesis, and state clearly where important Black political traditions disagreed.

The doctrine does not manufacture unity where the archive records debate.

Version 1.0 has completed an internal adversarial review. It has not yet completed independent external scholarly review, and I will not falsely represent it as having received an endorsement that has not occurred.

The review process, evidence classifications, correction procedure, and amendment architecture are public.

Why I felt responsible for creating it

My life has placed me in different regions, institutions, classrooms, public-health spaces, community programs, and political conversations.

I traveled through most of the United States before I was ten. I later earned degrees in African American Studies and psychology, along with an African American Studies Skills Certificate.

I have worked at AHF’s flagship location on Sunset Boulevard, taught children through the Theodore Young community program, helped distribute free phones to Black people experiencing homelessness through California’s Affordable Connectivity Program, worked alongside the Salvation Army, and helped raise more than $40,000 for Black women refugees in Ethiopia and Sudan.

I have also participated in public debate through platforms including Jubilee.

These experiences taught me that Black people do not suffer from a shortage of intelligence, creativity, courage, or cultural pride. We suffer from the difficulty of converting those resources into durable collective structure.

I created The Pro-Black Standard to contribute to that conversion.

You can read more about my background and editorial responsibility on the About Tyler Burns page.

What I want this work to become

I do not want The Pro-Black Standard to become another text people praise, quote, and forget.

I want it used in homes, classrooms, churches, youth programs, Black Studies departments, community organizations, political-education groups, bookstores, fraternities, sororities, and conversations between Black people who are serious about our future.

I want readers to challenge weak claims, identify missing sources, test the rules against material conditions, and propose better language when better language is needed.

Most importantly, I want the doctrine to help Black people move from asking whether we love ourselves to examining what our love has prepared us to build.

The complete forty-rule standard is available to read online for free.

For readers who want the full visual doctrine as a physical cultural and scholarly publication, the full-color physical edition is printed on demand through Lulu.

Read it. Question it. Apply what survives examination.

Then help build what Black life requires.

Offered in service, spirit, and love.

Peace Be To Black.

As I lean back into my chair, my hand saunters slowly through the thicket of my tangled Afro, your words breathing a new life into me. A simple poem - was the canvas in which you avowed your passionate strokes of devotion and love. I cling to every affirmation you so carefully crafted to bless my weary soul. Enamoration swells - a soft awakening - in my very being, as your words flow through, unraveling old wounds and mending them with a tenderness only you, a Black woman, could carry.

As you finish, a delicate smile breaks free from your once-enthralled demeanor. Your eyes lift from the page introducing themselves to mine.

My heart loosens, undone.

“Did you like that?” you ask, your voice light, touched with a quiet giggle - bright with hope, trembling anticipation.

I do not answer immediately for only a fool would rush this moment.

This sacred aura, shared in the quiet between us.

I study you, the gentle rise of your chest, the softness resting behind your strength, the glow in your eyes alive with a light that many chase yet will never achieve. A light that feels as though I have known it long before this moment, long before this life. I reminisce the songs, the gifts, the poems, everyday showering me with the quiet reassurance that your love is infinite, and you’ll be mine forever.

Then I understand.

Because to love you…
is to see myself without armor.

Not the self shaped by survival.
Not the self hardened by the world.
But the self that existed before fear

whole, unbroken, alive.

Your poem was never only poetry.
Your songs were never only melody.
Your gifts were never only gestures.

They were return.

Moments of recompense, not repayment, but obligation formed from the natural rhythm of love and giving where you have received.

The weight I carry without announcement.
The discipline required to remain steady when everything invites doubt and destruction.
The quiet wars fought in silence to protect, to provide, to endure, to remain whole in a world that often meets me with resistance.

You saw…and you stayed.

So your words became refuge, as your voice became softness, culminating into a presence of restoration.

Your goal was not only to reciprocate the love I give to you, It was not to erase the world
but to remind me that I am more than what I must fight within it.

This sacred exchange:

I build the ground beneath us, as you bring life onto it.

Two forces restoring one another.

Because love, when true, can never drain, it only renews.

And in your restoration of me,
I find the strength to return to the world again, protecting you, providing a safety and love that can rebuild your walls into a throne.

“Yes,” I whisper, my voice softer than breath.

Your radiant smile deepens.

“Black Love” is not fragile.

It is not accidental.

It is not struggle.

It is not new.

It is old as memory itself.

It is liberation.

It is intention.

It is as tough as Grandpa’s hands.

Soft as Grandma’s fro.

Stubborn as life enduring.

Before we had security, we had each other.

Before the world labeled us as broken, we were all that was needed to be whole.

Love, for us, has been breath.

Black Love begins when two people stop surviving alone, and start witnessing each other into being, aiding as the ancestors willed.

Thanks for reading, Happy Valentines ~

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Author’s Notes:

I’ve been thinking about agency and where it comes from, how it’s avoided, and what love demands of it.

This is a philosophical short story. Not a confession, not an indictment, not a diary.

It’s about two creatures governed by different survival logics, and the quiet moment when clarity finally outweighs warmth.

Read slowly.

I often ask people where the sky begins when I want to know who defines their world.

Some point upward, tracing an invisible ceiling as if meaning lives somewhere beyond their reach. Some recite science-layers of atmosphere, pressure, and distance- representing the safety gained from university and professors. Others invoke the heavens, the sky is a boundary set by God, right where Earth loosens its grip. None of these answers satiate me, they are never fulfilling, bursting at the seams with hesitation and an appeal to authority.

I search for answers, through books, through nature, through conversation and connection. I come breathtakingly close. Perhaps whether someone experiences the world as something defined for them, or something they are responsible for defining themselves. “Where does the sky begin?" I search for answers endlessly, this time silently, I observe the world around me, paying meticulous attention to the inhabitants within it.

Perhaps the Turtle understood this instinctively.

He moved through the world slowly out of discipline, carrying his home with him that some may mistake for armor but upon closer review it was authorship. A Turtle settles where he stands not unlike a tree or a bridge. He believed systems could be rebuilt if one was willing to sit with them long enough to understand their failures. He believed consciousness was practiced, lived, not inherited.

The Penguin did not see the sky this way.

She plainly enjoyed the weather.

She was never alone.
Not really.

There was always another body.
Another conversation.
Another current to follow

She arrived in the Turtle’s life warm, expressive, deeply alive in the way people are when they feel everything but understand very little of why they feel it. She spoke in confessions and apologies, in laughter that came easily and sorrow that lingered too long. She loved loudly, often, urgently. She loved the way someone loves when love feels like oxygen: necessary, panicked, and constantly in danger of running out.

I watched her move through rooms the way penguins move through water. Graceful, communal, never still. Always surrounded. Always in motion. The warmth was plentiful. Direction was not.

She mistook this for freedom.

The Turtle mistook it for something he could understand or perhaps solve.

From a distance, I, an observer, could already see the pattern forming. He listened. He organized. He regulated. Offering language where there was confusion, structure where there was impulse. The Turtle thought love meant helping someone locate themselves inside the world. He thought if he held the map long enough, she might look up and realize she could read it too.

But maps are useless to those who confuse the ocean for a well, and depth for direction.

She spoke often of cycles, how she didn’t want to repeat them, how she feared being the reason things fell apart like in her past. The words sounded like accountability, but they floated. Observation without agency. Weather reports mistaken for choice.

Regardless, they loved, and were in love.

As the snow fell and fell again, until even its memory dissolved into slush, the Turtle and The Penguin were inseparable. Winter bound them together with the quiet urgency of survival. The cold made intimacy efficient. There was no excess movement, no wandering far from what was warm and known.

He showed her revolution, a deep-seated acceptance of self, It was the kind that reorganizes the inner world. He taught her that intention could be practiced, that discipline could be shaped not as punishment but clarity. He spoke of systems and roots, of how change begins slowly, underground, where no one is watching. With him, the world felt legible.

She showed him something else.

She showed him how to be light. How to laugh without reason. How to let hours dissolve into play. She brought him back to childlike wonder, to the pleasure of being unburdened by consequence, if only briefly. In her presence, seriousness softened. The future loosened its grip.

Their love lasted the entire winter season.

What neither of them noticed because love rarely announces its costs, was that the warmth they shared had become asymmetrical. The heat that kept The Penguin alive through the cold months was drawn directly from the Turtle. Slowly. Quietly. Without malice.

Penguins are birds that cannot fly, though they were shaped as if they might have once remembered how. They survive winter by huddling. By pressing close enough that individual heat becomes collective salvation. But the Turtle was not built to disperse himself endlessly. His shell, his home, was meant to be sufficient…Not sacrificial.

For the first time, the weight of that shell became too much.

What had once been protection had now become burden. The constant regulating. The constant soothing. The constant caretaking. Each act small on its own, reasonable even, but together they formed a fog around him. A dullness. A fatigue he could not immediately name.

She was never a project. He told himself that often. Never an investment. Never something to fix.

And yet her foundation was broken.

She spoke of it plainly, sometimes even tenderly. She told him she did not know how to stand alone. She told him the ground beneath her shifted constantly as she ran from the cold. And in moments of vulnerability, moments she mistook for honesty, she told The Turtle that he had the tools to fix it.

She did not say this as a demand.
That was the danger.

She said it as belief.

Winter ended.

By late spring, the Turtle understood something he had avoided all season: love could be sincere and still be extractive. That care could slide, imperceptibly, into depletion. That being needed was not the same as being met.

Unbeknownst to her the only thing she wanted, she needed, was warmth, a body.

The Turtle departed, not in anger, not dramatically but because staying any longer would have required him to abandon the very authorship that had made him who he was.

Where does the sky begin?

The Turtle, much like myself, thought he knew. The Penguin never too far in the back of his mind. The interaction with her didn’t bruise him, perhaps he had left quickly enough to not suffer a spiritual wound. His purpose remained adamant, throughout the summer and fall, he continued his journey. It wasn’t a coming of age story, he was much more developed than that. He organized, connected to the people, and helped others all in the name of answering that one question. It was Winter once again, and penguin sightings were none too rare; perhaps he was looking for her.

A Sunday approached quietly.

A conversation had been promised, not the drifting kind, but one with weight. The penguin spoke of it often. She said she had prepared something. That she had changed. That she was ready to prioritize him.

Before that she needed help.

The Turtle high from the satisfaction and reward from helping others on his journey saw no harm in obliging.

She was frantic about liberation, The Penguin had cultivated a deep sense of justice from her interactions with The Turtle and in his absence refined it into her own. She yearned for freedom for her and her people.

The Turtle spent hours with her editing her theory, chartering her ideology carefully, deliberately. This was how he loved: with time, with attention, with action. The irony did not escape me.

Objects gathered around them:

a glowing phone
a marked-up document
a waiting bed
a promise suspended in air.

When The Turtle completed his work on her project, The Penguin said she wasn’t ready to look at it yet. She wanted to “just talk and enjoy his presence she had waited on for so long, she was cold. Too cold to do anything.” He told her he was going to bed early, that they needed to have their conversation soon. She said she would be ready. The Turtle left, he carried his home and decided to wait elsewhere, for the moment The Penguin would reveal all she promised, to hear how she’s changed. He retracted into his shell, he stood in silence, intention and vulnerability.

Thirty minutes later, a message arrived explaining that the room had been filled with friends and the like. A small huddle had been formed in her home. Nothing serious. Just warmth.

This was the fracture.

Not because she lied, but because even inside the promise of revelation and change, The Penguin moved as she always had: toward noise, toward proximity, towards the nearest available at the time.

It was after this that I noticed the other body, the presence of another before the Turtle did.

There was another man moving at the edges of her life, one she spoke of casually, almost academically. She described him the way people describe furniture in a room they don’t plan to stay in, useful, present, easily replaced. There was no reverence in her voice, no awe, no gravity. Only function.

She did not love him.

A distinction that would matter even if only to her.

He was not chosen by her, he was available and warm.

When The Turtle had previously stepped back and left her in the spring, when his stillness created space instead of shelter, she filled the gap the only way she knew how. Penguins are birds that cannot fly, though they were shaped as if they might have once remembered how. They survive winter by huddling. By pressing close enough that individual heat becomes collective salvation. They do not endure cold through solitude. They survive by gathering bodies… any bodies close enough that the temperature holds.

This was not infidelity in the traditional sense.
It was thermodynamics.

For her,
it was survival.

She could never understand and did not understand why being alone felt painstakingly unbearable. She would ruminate and manifest it as fear, as confusion, as shame. She was paralyzed by the idea of being judged for something she could not name. But I could see it clearly, solitude felt like death to her nervous system. Silence felt like exposure to her inner reflection, for isolation would not cast her into loneliness, no, it would confront her with herself.

Thus, she gathered warmth.

She told herself it was necessary, she told herself it was harmless. Temporary, fantasy, survival. She told herself she would explain it later- when the Turtle was calmer, for he had just returned and she didn’t want to lose the specific warmth the Turtle gave. She promised herself when the timing was better, when the stakes were safer. She titled her reluctance to tell the truth as shame, shame of her actions, the possible shame of being judged, the shame of being seen for who she was. She needed warmth and bodies for survival, that’s it!, she proclaimed. In truth, it was avoidance, not of judgement but of the cold.

To her, the warmth of the Turtle was different.

With him, she felt seen rather than surrounded. Held rather than huddled. Their intimate moments did not flood her senses; perhaps it anchored them. That was why she loved him. That was why she secretly feared him. The Turtle and by proxy, his love asked her to stand somewhere. Warmth asked only that she float boundlessly.

She hid the other man - the other body, not because it mattered but because she foresaw it would illuminate her inner-self she did not yet have language for. That her nature still outweighed her agency. That even when seen and held, she reached for proximity before principle.

When the Turtle learned of it, there was no explosion. Only quiet recognition. To him she had not chosen another man over him. She had chosen not to be alone without him.

This distinction did not matter.
It changed nothing.

Because love does not survive on warmth alone.

It requires intention, ownership, and the ability to endure cold long enough to decide where you stand.

The Turtle did not argue.

He left.

Days passed and The Penguin surfaced publicly, declaring herself divine, desirable, powerful and immediately confessing confusion. She wondered why she doesn’t swim the ocean with the confidence that she is cloaked in the most divine of mystical waters. A worthy being anyone would wish to huddle with for warmth.

She began to search for bodies in a static way.
Never pursuing,
Only waiting -
for who is available,
and
who would approach.

I noticed something subtle then:
Without The Turtle absorbing her uncertainty, The Penguin’s movements grew erratic.

Louder. Faster. Less convincing.
And The Turtle?

Within The Penguin he saw a deep sadness, not due to the pain she caused him or herself. But due to the overwhelmingly painful reality her own nature confines her to. penguins require the warmth of others to survive but not in the way a lover does, no.

She was burdened not by her deep need for bodies to keep her warm one after the other, not by cycles, not by fear. She was burdened by her inability to generate agency for her own survival.

For you see -

Penguins are birds that cannot fly- and yet this is not why she cannot answer the question.
Penguins survive winter by huddling- and yet this is not why she cannot be alone.
It is simply because she does not know where she begins.
It is simply because she does not know how to take control.
She cannot answer where the sky begins, not because it is too grand or out of reach,
But because she has never stood anywhere long enough to place it.

So the Turtle stood.

He did not take her warmth with him.

He did not strip her of comfort or condemn her nature. He continued alone.

And in the quiet that followed—without applause, without witnesses—the answer revealed itself:

There was no villain in the end.
Only two creatures governed by different skies.

He finally understood.

The sky does not begin at the horizon, with God, or from scientific conjecture.
The sky is not a place, but a concept.
It is the line that separates us from the cosmos and the divine we imagine above us.

The sky begins wherever you decide it does.
At your feet.
At your breath.

At the moment you stop outsourcing meaning
and begin authoring it.

And that is something… No amount of warmth can teach.

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Author’s Note

This story is not about blame, morality, or resolution in the traditional sense.

The figures here are symbolic. Their choices are not meant to be judged, only understood.
If you recognized yourself in either creature, that recognition is the work.

Read it as a parable.
Sit with it.
Stand where you stand.

If this story resonated with you, feel free to share it.

Share

How do you teach a generation how to love yours?

How do you give your beloved a world you can’t afford?

And you dream your self-esteem could accomplish more,

As you scream you can redeem but they walk out the door.

Maybe a Beamer helps your femur

Pick you off the floor.

Cartoon tattoos, I swear it’s deeper than the surface.

Ignore the screaming of your soul when you know you heard it.

We get caught up in some things that we think are worth it,

And it stained my surface ’cause I didn’t know my purpose.

If you don’t know your talent, then you end up in somebodies circus.

A wrong decision, no revision and somebody’s hurting.

So go to service, spite your curses, and make you a purchase.

Into heaven, Evil reverends, they can see you nervous.

If you don’t believe in God, then they say you’re worthless.

Well I like serpents.

And sometimes I’m more than wordless.

But I try my best to never do no one Disservice.

Let’s focus on the 1% that try to hurt us.

For my community.

I swear I’m nothing but a servant.

Love, hope, hugs baby,

let me be your merchant,

‘Cause you deserve it.

With care,

Signed, your Black insurgent.

Reflection: Saltwater is a symbol of survival, from sweat, tears and the vast sea.

It symbolizes sorrow, purification, and the migration of the diaspora.

Psalms are holy writings or prayers.

Hastily and apathetically put together “Saltwater Psalms” could represent prayers made of tears, worship from the wounded or even songs sung through pain.

I wouldn’t call this a poem, it’s more so chaotic ramblings about the Black dilemma, Capitalism teaching us that we can heal by making purchases, transactional faith/religion, shame and purpose.

I hope you enjoyed, and if it spoke to you, leave your thoughts below.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
— Frederick Douglass

The course of history is never changed by those content with comfort. History doesn’t shift when the oppressed asks politely. It moves when the marginalized dare to know, dare to question, and dare to act. True transformation comes from those who refuse to bend under the weight of systems designed to crush them.

No man has ever died for the ontological argument or philosophical syllogism but plenty have died for freedom, justice, and dignity.

Galileo, when cornered by the church, recanted.
But Harriet Tubman never did.
Nat Turner never did.
Fred Hampton never did.

Revolutionaries don’t die for abstract beliefs…they die for people.

So why do some individuals stand in the fire and fight, while others shrink when consequences come knocking? Why does our history hold countless martyrs for social freedom, but today, in the face of mass incarceration, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. Why does the current era — drenched in Black pain, surveillance, disposability, and digital rebellion — feel so void of the intellectual fire that once made abolitionism and civil rights unstoppable?

Where is the radical mind?
Where is the philosopher-activist?
Where is the Revolutionary Negro?

The revolutionary Negro seems to have vanished…

This essay explores that disappearance.
And more importantly, what fueled the fire in the first place.

The phrase "epistemology of the revolutionary negro" suggests an exploration of how individuals engaged in revolutionary movements perceive, acquire, and validate knowledge. Let's break it down:

1. Epistemology: Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, scope, and limits of knowledge. It delves into questions about what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. In this context, "epistemology" implies an examination of the ways revolutionaries understand and interpret the world around them.

2. Revolutionary: A revolutionary is someone who advocates or participates in a significant, often radical, change in society, politics, or other aspects of life. Revolutionaries challenge established systems, institutions, or ideologies, aiming to bring about transformative change.

🔍 The Core Argument

Modern Black activism lacks what once made abolitionist and civil rights movements unstoppable: a foundation of revolutionary thought.

Intellectual resistance: the kind rooted in self-knowledge, moral clarity, and sharp critique of power has been stripped from the DNA of our current movements.

To understand why, we must study the epistemology, the knowledge systems, that shaped the original revolutionaries: enslaved Africans, fugitives like Frederick Douglass, insurrectionists like Nat Turner, and agitators like David Walker.

Their knowledge wasn’t academic… it was existential.
It wasn’t theory. It was survival.

What Is Revolutionary Epistemology?

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks:
How do we know what we know?
What’s real? What’s illusion? Who gets to decide?

But for the Revolutionary Negro, epistemology becomes something deeper:
a weapon of survival. A compass. A firestarter.

Enslaved people didn’t just fight for freedom.
They fought for clarity.
Because clarity is what makes freedom real.

To clarify this framework, I’ve broken revolutionary epistemology into four essential tenets, the kind practiced by Douglass, Walker, Turner, Truth, and so many unnamed others:

Revolutionaries understand the world by drawing on personal experiences, history, ideology, and social theories, critically evaluating the knowledge they gather. This knowledge directly shapes their actions, strategies, and goals, as they use ideology, education, and critical thinking to guide their movements. They challenge and reject dominant ways of knowing which are often biased, oppressive and uphold systemic injustice. Instead, they construct alternative knowledge systems rooted in liberation, such as indigenous wisdom, womanist epistemologies, and Marxist dialectics, to empower themselves and drive transformative social change.

Literacy as Liberation: The Case of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass understood something essential:

Knowledge is the key to breaking chains.

In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he describes the moment he realized that literacy was both a threat to white power and a tool of Black resistance.
The more he read, the more he questioned.
The more he questioned, the more determined he became to be free.

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
— Frederick Douglass

Douglass’s radicalism wasn’t born on a battlefield, it was born in a book.
Reading was not escape. It was insurgency.

He didn’t just absorb Enlightenment philosophy — he flipped it inside out.
He didn’t just read the Bible — he turned it into a weapon of contradiction against slave-holding Christians.
He didn’t just write a narrative — he declared war on the American myth.

He didn’t just resist physically, he tore down the intellectual foundation of slavery.

Anti-Literacy Laws as Epistemic Violence

Why did the state fear a literate Negro?
Because ideas are harder to kill than people.

Charles Terry writes in A Rebellious Education that anti-literacy laws were often passed directly after uprisings, like Nat Turner's. The slave codes were designed not only to restrict movement but to police minds. To outlaw questions. To stop the enslaved from asking:

Why not me? Why not free?

These weren’t just attempts to prevent rebellion, they were epistemic warfare.

White America didn’t respond to Black knowledge with dialogue — it responded with war.

They weren’t just trying to prevent escape.
They were trying to assassinate thought.

This is what I call epistemic warfare:
Controlling what people can know in order to control what they can imagine.

The goal was to make the enslaved too wretched to even imagine freedom.

But Douglass, Turner, and Walker refused to be unknowing.

Modern Movements, Missing Minds

Fast forward to now.

The Black Lives Matter movement, despite its visibility and global support, has largely failed to produce intellectual revolutionaries.

Where are the modern Douglasses?
The David Walkers?
The Anna Julia Coopers?
The Malcolm Xs?

In 2021, The Guardian reported major financial mismanagement within BLM’s leadership.
Millions raised but little transparency.
Little ideological direction.
Little revolutionary substance.

The issue isn’t just transparency.

What’s missing isn’t just ethics, it’s epistemology.

Too many organizers have passion without pedagogy.
Anger without analysis.
Volume without vision.

It is safe, and accurate, to say that after the peak of the BLM movement and George Floyd’s murder in 2020, more visible policy benefits and legal protections often went to non-Black minority groups, particularly Asian Americans and LGBTQ+ communities, while Black Americans, once again, carried the moral weight and public labor of revolution without receiving proportionate systemic change

What Actually Happened After 2020 & BLM Protests?

1. Asian American Hate Crime Bills

• The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act (2021), passed swiftly, was designed to combat anti-Asian violence after a spike in attacks.

• It received bipartisan support, something Black-centered legislation almost never does, despite centuries of anti-Black state-sanctioned violence.

• Meanwhile, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act? Still not passed federally.

2. Queer and Trans Inclusion Efforts

• Major diversity pushes post-2020 leaned into LGBTQ+ inclusion—especially among non-Black queer identities.

• Corporate DEI often used queer visibility or Latino/a/x representation as a stand-in for racial justice, dodging Black specificity altogether.

• You’ll find companies say “diversity” and hire a light-skinned Latina or South Asian woman, while still having zero Black men or dark-skinned Black women in leadership.

3. Blackness as Symbol, Not Substance

• Black trauma became a branding opportunity.

• Streets got renamed, murals got painted, “Black Lives Matter” got stenciled outside Apple stores, but no reparations, no major wealth redistribution, no federal police reform.

• We got performative justice, not material justice

Black pain moved the world. But Black people didn’t move with it.

The post-George Floyd era was proof that symbolic victories are not systemic ones, and that the very people who die for change are often the last to see its fruits.

If you're not framing policy through the specificity of Black liberation, then you're just dressing up white supremacy in different colors.

The Cost of Losing the Revolutionary Mind

Without revolutionary epistemology, activism becomes:

• Hashtag deep

• Aesthetic but not structural

• Symbolic but not strategic

The American education system has failed Black youth.
Movements have become leaderless — not just by design, but by neglect.

The average Black teen can name more rappers than freedom fighters.
Not because they’re apathetic but because no one gave them the map.

The result?
Fragmentation. Confusion. Drift.

What Must Be Recovered

Revolutionaries must once again become philosophers.
Organizers must become educators.
Influencers must become ideologues.

The revival of Black radicalism begins in the mind.
And not just the mind shaped by the university but by the street, the sermon, the cipher, and the story passed down from our grandmother’s tongue.

To reawaken the Revolutionary Negro, we must:

• Teach our people to question everything, including us.

• Critique power with surgical precision.

• Read, write, speak, and organize like our lives depend on it.

Because they do.

Final Thought

We are not suffering from a lack of energy, we are suffering from a lack of intellectual infrastructure.

The abolitionists taught us that every revolution begins with a question:

“Am I not a man and a brother?”

That question, once whispered in chains, changed the course of human history.

It’s time we start asking again.

Let’s Build Together

This essay is Part One of an ongoing series I’m writing on Black revolutionary thought, epistemology, and activism.

📌 Part Two is coming soon: How to Be a Revolutionary Negro and Fight Modern, Dominant Epistemologies.

If this moved you, subscribe.
Share it.
Talk to your people.
Let’s bring the mind back to the movement.

Works Cited

• Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Dover Publications, 1995.

• Terry, Charles. A Rebellious Education: Enslaved African Americans and the Fight for Literacy. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2022.

• Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal. African Heritage Studies, 1965.

• Turner, Nat. The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1831.

• Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Publications, 1994.

• Springer, Kimberly. Living for the Revolution. Duke University Press, 2005.

• Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. Vintage Books, 1981.

• Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Harper & Row, 1988.

• McCarthy, Michael. “Black Lives Matter Faces Scrutiny Over Financial Practices.” The Guardian, April 8, 2021.

“A resource in abundance is never one heralded.”
But Black men like me — we’ve always been expected to love in abundance, bleed in silence, and still smile through it.

Please Enjoy This Record While You Read…

I’m not just mad.
I’m tired.

Tired of being the one who gives.
The one who affirms.
The one who shows up for everybody and gets treated like a default setting.
Like an app running in the background: useful, reliable, but never once celebrated.

Let me be real: Black men who lead with softness and care don’t get treated like kings.
We get treated like couches. Comfortable. Familiar. Sat on, leaned on, but rarely cleaned or maintained.

The Moment That Cut Different

The other day, I texted my girl I was proud of her.
She gave me a soft "thank you." And that was that.

Then I mentioned my mom said she was proud of her too.
That’s when her whole energy shifted.
She said, “Wait… she said that? I could cry.”

So I asked, “How come you didn’t cry when I said it?”

She replied, “You tell me all the time.”

She wasn’t being cruel. She wasn’t trying to diminish me. I love her dearly, and this is not about that singular act.
But the message rang loud and clear: my love had become background noise — heard often, felt rarely.

Familiar. Predictable. Taken for granted.

Since I’ve reformed my way of thinking as I entered the throes of true adulthood, I’ve pedestalized emotional intelligence and kindness. It’s been a stark contrast from my emotionally walled off black youth. Ever since that change, moments like these have become a ritual amongst people I love. It confirmed something I had felt for years but never had the words to name:
Even those closest to me can forget the value of my voice, the weight of my love, the sacredness of my care.

I Was Raised to Be Dismissed

See, I’m the youngest of five.
My mother and I traveled cross-country from New York to California, where I was raised alone. The strong black woman stereotype could’ve been inspired by my Mother. Always working, emotionally unavailable, never asked for help. In other words she was never home. I was the little black boy with the keys, the little black boy who knew how to cook, and take care of the house. The kid who answered the door for no one.

From a young age I understood why my Mother had to work so hard. I understood that we were soldiers in the trenches of poverty. Poverty that brough enough misfortune on it’s own, so I wasn’t the child who caused chaos. I was emotionally aware. Got good grades. Didn't throw tantrums. I paid attention, stayed out the way, and made sense of things most kids couldn’t.

That kind of kid…

The so-called “resilient one”

Gets the reward of adultification bias early.
They don’t get protected.
They get praised for how well they survive without support.

“He’s strong.”
“He knows how to take care of himself.”
Translation: We don’t need to check on him.

But being “easy to raise” doesn’t mean I didn’t need raising.
Being emotionally well-rounded didn’t mean I wasn’t hurting.
It just meant I learned how to shrink my needs so nobody else had to make room for them.

I became emotionally fluent not because I was nurtured, but because I had to learn how to comfort myself when no one else saw me.

So when people now ignore the love I offer, or act like it’s less meaningful because it’s consistent — it doesn’t just hurt.
It echoes.

It confirmed an old, buried lie I’ve spent my life unlearning:
That what I feel doesn’t matter unless someone else validates it.

But I’m not a child anymore.
And my silence is not consent.

Black Men Have Always Been the Emotional Backbone

This thing I’m carrying…it ain’t new.

Black men have always held the emotional weight of our families, even when the world pretended we didn’t.
We weren’t just providers or protectors, we were the soft heart behind closed doors.
The ones who hugged without words.
Who taught discipline, not just by force, but by presence. This is not to say our sisters didn’t do the same.

From slavery to Jim Crow, from civil rights to now, Black men have been the unseen emotional architects of Black survival.
We’ve led households with quiet wisdom, carried grief silently, and loved loudly in ways that history books don’t record…but our grandmothers remember.

Even when systemic violence ripped us from our homes, we showed up as uncles, brothers, grandfathers and even loving kids that weren’t ours like they were.
Holding families together through barbershop talks, long drives, lessons in the garage, jokes over spades, head nods that meant “I see you,” and long stares that said “Don’t let this world eat you alive.”

And when we did love out loud?
It was revolutionary.

Baldwin.
Hampton.
Our daddies.
Our boys.

All emotional warriors.

So when I say I’m tired of being overlooked, it’s not just my own story I’m telling.
I’m naming a pattern.
A legacy.
And I’m done letting our emotional labor be treated like it’s disposable.

Being the “Good Black Man” Is a Trap

There’s this myth that if we as Black men, just love hard enough, give enough, show up soft enough, we’ll be seen.
We’ll be protected.
We’ll be respected.

But here’s the truth:

This world, and sometimes even our own people, are conditioned to devalue the Black man who doesn’t lead with dominance.
We’re told we’re safe, but we’re treated like we’re disposable.
We’re told we’re “different,” but we’re used the same.

Our emotional labor becomes invisible.
Our affirmations become expected.
Our vulnerability becomes unremarkable.

You Don’t Get Extra Credit for Bleeding Quietly

I’ve been everybody’s safe space.
Everybody’s therapist.
Everybody’s “he got me no matter what” Black man.

But who’s checking on me?
Who’s making sure my soul is fed?

I’m learning now what I should’ve been taught young:

Love without boundaries becomes a prison.

What I’m Reclaiming Now

My value is not in how easily I love.
It’s in how intentionally I protect that love.

Being easy to love should not mean being easy to overlook.

I’m no longer comfortable being comfortable for others while uncomfortable within myself.

To My Brothers Who Feel This

To the youngest kids who had to grow up emotionally older than everyone else —
You were never supposed to be invisible.

To the Black men who affirm others, but get silence in return —
Your voice should not need to come from someone else’s mouth to be received as truth.

To the “good ones” who are emotionally available but still feel alone —
Being good isn’t the goal.
Being valued is.

The New Standard

Let them earn your love.
Not because you're bitter, but because your love is sacred.

Speak your silence.
Say when you feel unseen, even if your voice shakes.

Be loud about your boundaries.
Because Black men don’t need to be palatable to be powerful.

Choose yourself first.
Not as an act of selfishness, but as a revolution.

Even the sun sets.
It doesn’t make it any less necessary.
Your warmth, your words, your love…they don’t lose value because they’re consistent.
But they do deserve respect.

So let them miss your light when you withhold it.
Let them sit in the shadow of your silence and remember what it cost to be bathed in your love.

Because you’re not just easy to love.
You’re rare.
You’re Black.
And you’re beautifully protected now.

“A resource in abundance is never one heralded.”
So be rare. Be intentional. Be boundaried.
And let those who failed to honor your love feel its absence.

🖤
If this piece resonated with you, share it with a brother who gives without asking for much. Or with a sister who might need the reminder that loving a Black man well requires intention. Drop a comment. Build community. Let’s heal out loud.

There’s something I’ve been wrestling with. Not quietly. Not politely. But in the marrow of my bones, in the heat that rises in my chest every time I hear our pain chopped into tidy categories.

We say Black men are disproportionately affected by police brutality. That they lead in incarceration, homelessness, violent death. All true.

We say Black women lead in maternal mortality, sexual violence, and economic marginalization. Also true.

And yet—look closer:

Even when one gender leads in a category of systemic injustice, the other is never far behind. We may not always tie in numbers, but we tie in pain.

That’s not just intersectionality. That’s something deeper. More guttural. More bloody. That’s anti-Blackness operating like a scalpel, slicing differently depending on the body in front of it, but cutting just as deep.

The Trouble with Intersectionality

Intersectionality, as Kimberlé Crenshaw envisioned it, was brilliant. Necessary. It gave Black women language for being erased in both feminist and civil rights spaces. It exposed the lie that race and gender could be understood separately.

But somewhere along the way, intersectionality became sanitized.

It became a tool of division.

It got absorbed into liberal identity politics and turned into a kind of oppression Olympics, where we count up identities to determine who gets to speak. It went from being a lens for liberation to a sorting hat for suffering.

White feminists use it to center themselves again. Corporations use it to check boxes. And worst of all, it has been used to pit Black men and Black women against each other, under the illusion that our pain is mutually exclusive or in competition.

Intersectionality, in its modern form, is often more invested in hierarchies of harm than collective healing.

And in this distortion, we lose the truth:

We are not each other’s enemy…we are each other’s reflection.

The Symmetry of Our Suffering

Let’s lay it bare:

• Black men lead in police executions, incarceration, school suspensions, violent death.

• Black women lead in maternal mortality, sexual assault, poverty, and institutional neglect.

But in every one of those systems, both genders are right behind each other.

• When Black men are the face of the prison-industrial complex, Black women are the fastest growing prison population.

• When Black women lead in domestic violence and sexual trauma, Black men follow with unspoken, undocumented wounds—as they lead the same in the statistic but for men.

Black men and women are both drowning—just in different corners of the same ocean.

And yet, modern frameworks act like we live in different ecosystems. That’s the lie we’re taught to believe. Everything one goes through, so too does the other.

What We Need is a Black Theory of Pain

We don’t need more frameworks that divide our suffering like it’s some oppression equation. While made with good intentions, Intersectionality is a thin veil.

We need a theory that understands this:

Blackness is the target. Gender is the strategy.

For Black men, the weapon is criminalization. Erasure. Emasculation. For Black women, it’s neglect. Exploitation. Misogynoir.

But we’re both being hunted. We’re both bleeding. We’re both enduring violence that is deliberate, sophisticated, and intergenerational.

Instead of playing trauma tug-of-war, trying to determine who has it worse, we must start holding each other. Naming the patterns. Burning down the systems.

We Are Not Opposites. We Are the Same Circle.

What I’m calling for isn’t just a critique of intersectionality. It’s a dismantling of how it’s been weaponized and a call to evolve it into something that doesn’t divide us by identity, but unites us through shared struggle.

Let’s stop letting white institutions define the terms of our liberation. Let’s stop pretending our pain exists in a hierarchy. Let’s stop talking past each other, and start building language that holds the fullness of what we’ve survived.

This isn’t about who suffers more. It’s about understanding that we suffer together, even if the world slices us up differently.

We don’t need to compare wounds.

We need to heal as a people.

Together.

If this moved you, share it. But more importantly, talk about it. In your group chats. At your dinner table. In your own writing.

Let’s start building a new Black theory of pain…One that loves us enough to hold it all.

• AfroSparks

Jubilee, a prominent platform on YouTube boasting millions of subscribers, is renowned for its engaging Socratic discussions and culturally nuanced debates. These conversations serve as prolific forums highlighting the breadth of ideologies within our society, particularly across race, religion, gender, and identity. It was within this arena that I found myself, representing my truth and my people. As a passionate advocate and self-appointed steward of the Black community, I’ve long prided myself on being both a voice and a vessel. I actively engage in debates about the state of Black America, mentor Black youth, and even launched a neighborhood program that helped children learn to express themselves through songwriting. That sense of responsibility was sown into my spirit by my mother, Tonianne.

“...That sense of responsibility was sown into my spirit by my mother, Tonianne.”

“We inherit not only trauma, but purpose”

My mother was born in 1959 to a lineage marked by struggle and survival. Her mother—my grandmother—fled Alabama with her parents and siblings to escape persecution by the Ku Klux Klan and eventually resettled in New York. I was born in Peekskill, New York, in 1996, the youngest of five. My father served in the military. My mother was a correctional officer. Though their relationship dissolved before I could form meaningful memories of it, I recall glimpses of my father in a homeless shelter—an image that still stirs something inside me.

Those close to me often describe me as noble, independent, and deeply moral. I’ve never chased trends or craved conformity. In second grade, my teacher set up a microphone in the cafeteria for an impromptu talent show. No one approached the mic, except for me. I’ve always been that way. As I got older, my music took me across the country and gave me the opportunity to meet thousands of people. Even on campus, I seek out strangers—especially Black students—and ask them about their experiences, excavating their stories for insight and answers.

“…excavating their stories for insight and answers.”

This same deep investment in community and identity brought me to Jubilee. The episode centered around Black Christians and non-religious Black people, a layered and emotional topic. During production, while soundchecks buzzed and cameras focused, each cast member was pulled aside for solo portraits. When it was my turn, the photographer kept stopping, visibly frustrated.

“Bro, you hold your head way too high. You’re out of frame.”

I tried to adjust, but no matter how hard I tried to lower my posture, he had to keep redirecting me. At the time, I saw it as a minor annoyance. In hindsight, it was symbolic. My pride, literally and figuratively, was pushing me out of frame.

Pride has helped me ascend, but it has also caused me harm.

In American society, shaped by a Christian moral framework, we’re taught that certain behaviors are not just flaws but sins. Pride is one of the so-called seven deadly sins. I understand that now, not in the religious sense, but through the psychological and emotional toll it has taken on my life. I am deeply introspective and constantly in conversation with myself. One of my favorite hobbies is gaming. I even stream it sometimes. But gaming has never just been entertainment for me—it’s therapy, a space for challenge and self-discovery.

A few weeks ago, I was playing Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. A mini-game appeared that had no impact on the main storyline, meant simply to provide a break from combat. But I couldn’t let it go. I kept restarting it for over an hour, furiously chasing a perfect score. I was yelling, frustrated, stuck in a loop. Even when I finally hit 100%, the game’s announcer still sounded disappointed. That’s when I turned it off. My pride had stolen the joy out of something I loved, again.

This isn’t an isolated experience. Pride shows up everywhere in my life. I often have self-deprecating thoughts about my body. I’m overweight, and although others may not judge me harshly for it, I do. I ask myself how I can preach self-discipline to my community if I haven’t mastered my own body. I hold myself to impossible standards. In the gym, I push until exhaustion. In the studio, I obsess over every breath. Even video games have to be played on the hardest difficulty.

Not for the praise of others, but because I demand it of myself.

My mother always said, “If you’re going to do something, give it your all.” Somewhere along the way, that turned into something darker. If the results aren’t flawless, I tell myself, then I didn’t try hard enough.

To others, this might look like drive or commitment. To me, it often feels like drowning.

So I’ve started to build a new framework. The first step is interrogating the why. Why do I need to be exceptional at everything? What memory or moment conditioned me to believe that anything less than perfection is failure? Once I identify the root, I can start setting healthier boundaries. Excellence is fine, but when it begins to strip joy from life, it becomes a form of self-harm.

The second step is finding accountability. Carrying burden on your own makes it easy to spiral. I’ve decided to check in regularly with someone I trust. That person is usually my mother, who still serves as my moral compass. She reminds me that being human means embracing imperfection. I need that reminder more often than I care to admit.

And finally, I believe in therapy. Always have. As someone passionate about psychology, I know how transformative it can be when paired with a real desire to grow. And I do want to grow. I don’t want to be at war with myself in pursuit of being useful to others.

Pride is not my enemy, but it is a shadow.

It follows me everywhere. It has helped me rise. It has made me tired. What I seek now is not to eliminate it, but to reshape it and to let it motivate me without consuming me. To allow it to protect me without isolating me. To find a version of pride that coexists with joy, with rest, and with humanity.

Because Black excellence should never mean perfection at the cost of peace.