They told me the best thing I could do in my own self-interest was defend the rights of others.
I believed it. I built a life on it. I studied Black liberation theory, gave my labor to a freedom that was never only mine, showed up in booths and streets and rooms for people who could not be bothered to spell my pronouns. I believed that if I threw my body across enough gaps, the gaps would close, and one day the closing would reach me too.
I want to tell you what it feels like to still be waiting. But I am not going to explain it to everyone. Some of you already know. This is for you.
Moral injury. I use the clinical term on purpose, because it is exact: the wound a person carries when they do right inside a system that does wrong, and have to keep living in the gap between. I have spent my life defending rights on the belief that rights are indivisible, that yours and mine rise and fall together. And I have watched the many treat the rights of others as optional. Negotiable. A thing they’ll get to when it’s convenient, when it’s safe, when there’s nothing better on, when it won’t cost them the man in their bed or the seat at their table.
The rights of others are so unguarded by the masses that I have had to accept a thing I did not want to know: most people will not defend what does not immediately threaten them, and by the time it threatens them, there is no one left to do the defending. That is not cynicism. That is the voting record. That is the history. That is the receipt.
So I’ll say it plainly, because pretending is one of the things I am here to quit. I am angry.
I am angry at the smallness of it. At the way people handed everything I had to claw out of the mud will spend that inheritance hating themselves, and then spend the self-hatred on me.
You cannot fathom the arithmetic from where I stand. You were given a floor I had to build. You were handed, at birth, the safety I manufactured out of nothing, by myself, in the dark, with no one throwing their body across any gap for me. And you use it to feel small. You take a life I would have wept to be given and you set it on fire to keep warm, and when the fire isn’t enough, you come looking for me to burn.
You want me to prove my femininity. Explain it. Justify it to a committee that never had to justify its own. Meanwhile mine is divinity — a self I authored, forged, chose, consecrated — and yours, in so many cases, is a costume you were issued and never once thought to question. You have been so thoroughly handled by men that you now let a man tell you who you are unsafe from, and the man he points you toward is me. The same men who have lied to and harmed every one of us have convinced you I am the danger — me, who has only ever shown up for you — while he stands behind you holding the matches.
I am angry at the stupidity of it. I will not call it anything gentler, because gentler would be a lie, and I am done lying to keep anyone comfortable. It is stupid to be aimed like a weapon at your own defender. It is stupid to guard the door for the arsonist. And I am tired — bone-tired, lineage-tired — of watching people too frightened to reach their own divinity spend their one wild life policing mine.
So let me be understood exactly, since understanding is on offer only on my terms now.
I am superior. Not because I was born higher — there is no born-higher; that is the entire lie I have spent my life dismantling. I am superior because I did the work of becoming divine and you have refused to. I reached my source. I mined my own soul for undiscovered strength, the way Nikki Giovanni told us we could, and I came back up holding it in both hands. You have a source too. It is right there. It has always been right there. And you would rather stand at its mouth throwing rocks at me than climb down into your own.
The hierarchy is real, and I will not flatten it to make anyone feel even. But hear what it ranks. It is not white over Black, not born over made, not the old sick order that raised us both and taught you to measure. It is risen over refusing. The one who did the terrifying work of becoming themselves, standing over the one who was given everything and made nothing of it. That ladder has a bottom rung you could touch from exactly where you stand. I am not above you for what I am. I am above you for what I was willing to survive to get here, and what you are still too comfortable to attempt.
Giovanni said she could not be comprehended except by her own permission. I have stopped granting mine. Until you reach your own divinity, I would rather you not perceive me at all, because to be misperceived by the unrisen is a tax I can no longer pay. I am interested only in other divines now. That is not cruelty. That is taste — the same faculty that lets me know the true thing from the counterfeit in any art. I have a palate. I will not call the forgery a masterwork to spare the feelings of people who refuse to enter the museum.
Am I a bitch, or am I just an exhausted lover girl. I have turned that over at three in the morning more times than I will admit here, because underneath all this heat is the least fashionable confession I have: I want the best for everyone. I have always wanted the best for everyone. And I cannot get anyone to want it back for me. There is always a reason, an excuse, a time, a place, a not-yet, a not-here. You couldn’t show up in the booth. You couldn’t show up on the dance floor at two in the morning in the queer club when it would have meant something. You couldn’t show up at the festival, the celebration, the small ordinary defense of my small ordinary joy. Even my rage is a love song. Even now, furious, I crave solidarity so badly it aches — I would take your hand this second if you climbed up here and reached it.
But I have been disappointed too many times to keep my palm open in the dark. White women marched my foremothers to the back of the suffrage parade and called it strategy. White women have voted, election after election, decade upon decade, for the men who would cage all of us, and then turned to me the next morning to ask why I sound so tired. I have studied the record. I have grieved the record. I have stopped being surprised by it. Maybe it is time to pass the torch, because I am tired of carrying it for people who keep blowing it out.
But here is what I need said before anyone decides I have abandoned them, because I have not, and that is the whole tragedy.
While you were busy proving I was the threat — explaining my body back to me, policing my divinity, voting for the matches, demanding I earn a humanity you were handed for free — they were taking your rights too.
Look up. The same court, the same men, the same machine that came for mine has your name a few pages back on the same list. The protections you assumed were permanent because they were yours are being unmade while you spend your one life fighting me. You were told I was the danger precisely so you would not feel the hand in your own pocket. That is the entire function of pointing you at me: it keeps your eyes down and your back turned while the real thief works, unbothered, in the light.
We are both about to be out here looking stupid. That is not a threat. It is a forecast. I cannot save the rights of others by myself. You cannot save yours alone. And the cruelest engineering of this whole arrangement is that the only door out is the one we would have to walk through together — the one you keep guarding against me.
I reached my divinity alone because I had no choice. You do not have to do yours alone. That was always the offer underneath the rage. Let me upgrade you as I upgrade myself. Climb down into your own source, come back up holding it, and I will know you the instant you surface, because divines recognize each other on sight.
But I am finished begging at the mouth of a well you will not enter. So I will leave you with the only thing that was ever truly in my interest to say — the thing they told me in the beginning, that turned out truer and more terrible than I understood:
The best thing you could do for yourself was defend the rights of others.
You didn’t. They are coming for yours now.
I will be here when you finally look up — not because I owe you my hand, but because I never learned how to stop offering it.
Prove you are worth it. I already did.
ebonyicons 
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