This Will Be My Undoing: A Medicinal Vulnerability

Justice is a complicated request; particularly when you are deemed as “other” from the point of your inception. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, post Trayvon, post Mike, Sandra, Rekia, and all the countless others we are still standing at the footstools of request. We are still submitting and depositing tips and statements into the political suggestion box and still feeling like we’ve gotten nowhere. So many of us have experienced a devastatingly bounty of rage and paranoia for the stretch of a very long five years. I know for myself, there has been a complete psychological unraveling. During this long stretch of indignant indignation, it’s been the arms, heart, soul, words, and the vulnerability of Black women that has kept me afloat.  Insert: This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins. 

Truthfully, I’ve become totally disengaged with the writing of young Black folks. Everyone thinks they are good at it, the Blavity Blacks are hella annoying, and everybody and they mama on twitter thinks they are some longform philosophical deep introspective expert on the critique of Black life. Then there are those with popular podcast and the huge follower count that Black twitter has anointed as representatives of “the culture”. I’ve never been one to follow the crowd and usually those people come and go and fizzle. They typically end up getting angsty with their fan base and people find out that those folks usually aren’t as smart and though provoking as they originally came off.  We are in an era of Black culture where everyone and everything is expendable, people are the poor man’s version of a 90’s knock-off, and folks are pressed to be provocative when they add nothing new to the conversation. 

I like Morgan because I never get the sense that she is trying to catapult herself as the voice of a generation. I get the feeling that she writes about and for us because it genuinely helps her work through things the same way she’s hoping to help us. Her writing is medicinal and weaves a tale about Black girlhood morphing into Black womanhood that carries universal themes for most Black women in America. I particularly appreciate her sensitivity to the south, being that she was raised in the Northeast. Thank you, Morgan, for sharing your healing balm.

My favorite essay: How to Survive: A Manifesto on Paranoia and Peace

+Rukiya