High School Resources

a plea (text only)

by Danez Smith

Format: Essay

Excerpt: “To be black and joyous means to understand something about survival, to know what has daily missed you, grazed your flesh, chosen instead the blood of the one next to you. It means to know how quickly the party can turn into a wake, the thin difference between a traffic stop and an execution. It means celebrating even in the midst of mourning (see: the second line, the repast, the rap song at my friends home-going ceremony, the calling a funeral a “home-going). It means living with the constant fear of how easy your joy can turn into your struggle to remember joy. I imagine that people of many marginalized backgrounds, particularly those oppressed through the many methods of violence, already know something of this, but I only know it in a black way, in the peace and horror of my grandma’s hum. I want to un-tinge black joy, to remove what haunts the corners of our happiness. I want to build a world where black people are not prospering “in spite of” something. Who has formula to end the hungry, greed-fueled reign of this world while simultaneously imagining and building one not dependent on the suffering of brown men and women around the world?”