But there never was a black male hysteria
Breaking & entering wearing glee & sadness
And the light grazing my teeth with my lighter
To the night with the flame like a blade cutting
Me slack along the corridors with doors of offices
Orifices vomiting tears & fire with my two tongues
Loose & shooing under a high-top of language
In a layer of mischief so traumatized trauma
Delighted me beneath the tremendous
Stupendous horrendous undiscovered stars
Burning where I didn’t know how to live
My friends were all the wounded people
The black girls who held their own hands
Even the white boys who grew into assassins
American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [But there never was a black male hysteria], Terrance Hayes
Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, 020925
This wasn’t a display of Black trauma for the white gaze—Lamar’s disassembled flag was a visual tailored toward the contemporary Black gaze. An aspect of déjà vu weighs down these expressions of Black resistance, trapped in the box of the camera frame. Consider the performance a kind of choose-your-own-adventure. One segment of the audience is appalled, another is amused, another is politically invigorated
Doreen St. Félix in New Yorker
