Before I start, this was an entry I started back in December 2024, and when I found it again, I had to finish it with what I was first ready to make into a fresh entry.

This is also going to be heavily themed towards the black community. Especially the blerds (“black nerd”), to which if a previous entry wasn’t a clue, I am one.

It takes a lot for many of us to stop believing in the voices that tell us to keep your head low, and not be so different from others in our community.

Memories of being told that I “speak so well,” being called an Oreo or “the whitest black person” someone has ever known, or even being told by someone that they couldn’t tell that I never saw jail time, come to mind about that.

So much of it can be blamed on someone’s upbringing to think that it is the way we should be seen and talked to. Not just by others, but to ourselves even after the people planting mental seeds like that are gone.

And it’s even worse when it comes from older black folk that may have or had an equally unhealed community to lean on. This includes their family experiences that could have them do the same discarding behavior to the younger generation without any care.

Because of this, the goal post about “being Black” keeps being altered depending on who you sit with, and who wants to sit with you, whether you choose to defy the social order, or do your best to hide who you are to fit with people that may not even like themselves, and they keep you around to be an insecurity dump.

If you don’t do things like play spades, can’t recite a cipher, don’t care much if at all about sports, or you have reservations about even saying the “N-word,” you’re cut off from a division of the collective.

You’re not “Black enough” to matter to them.

This isn’t the time for divisions based on the ones mentioned.

Because no matter where we go, someone’s bound to see our lives as a stain to their own existence, and choose to “cleanse” the stain, if they can’t control how it presents itself.

And this is a case where, while I have reasons to know this activity isn’t entirely exclusive to Black people, it’s a way to state that we’ve been in pain, no matter how we mask it, and it deserves to be shared in every way we can.

It is also a chance to say that even the similarities of pain with other races can be the bridge to relate and react in the name of unity for ourselves, and run offense and defense to our opponents.

That includes our own who’d rather tap dance for massa’, thinking they have a chance to come up next to them that doesn’t involve rope and a tree.

I can speak to that because I’ve been there. On the clock, in art collaborations, hangout sessions where I’ve been the spot in a cup of milk.

That experience is rich with patterns that had to be broken in myself before saying anything about it publicly.

For every few it repels, it’s attracted those in and outside of my race who have also given fingers to the person behind the curtain, the monster behind the mask, and especially the ones in the “high castle.”

There are many solutions to this that I can speak on, but right now it’s about releasing frustrations, and this isn’t even all of them.

It is enough, though, to let anyone that even read this far know that anything I say about things on a universal or exclusive case like this post is, will be based on lived experience while absorbing other perspectives.

I can’t say that I started sharing my thoughts as long as I have just to cement myself into echo chambers. But how I am received in what I share has also given me education and proof that the world can be better with my review of it.

And if not the physical world, then the one inside of me has benefited greatly from it, most of all.

Kingston Priest