Today was supposed to be about our 3rd Annual Freedom Festival, June 16-19. But this week’s schedule has definitely been fc’d with.
And the thing is, I’m a slow processor. Show me something triggering and my brain socks it away, recalling it a whole lifetime after. As a kid, I thought this meant I could take anything. Turns out, all it really means is that my triggered shit is deep in there, it’s just been marinating over time.
Which is why, when I witness massacres like Buffalo, NY my brain goes into turtle mode, it’s still too close—I’m still processing. While simultaneously pulling up 39 years of stored up and staleAF related goods.
And so, a whole half week later—the very real and raw wound of what happened on Saturday afternoon at a grocery store in NY—is just hitting me now.
If that’s you too, Magogodi this note is for you.
First ⚡️: I want to remind you that there’s nothing you can do to understand such hate. Nothing.
Reading dude’s social media rant and calling it a manifesto is not going to help you understand. Connecting the dots back to “Replacement Theory” is important, but it won’t explain the baseless lie of white supremacy.
Because you can’t explain a lie.
You just end up chasing an endless rabbit hole of arguments as logical as Fox News and Corporate America refusing to deal with Tucker Carlson for the dangerous white supremacist mouthpiece that he is.
Second⚡️: Focusing on this one kid as the focal point of all of white supremacy’s ambition is white liberals’ fav distraction. Don’t do it.
White supremacy displaced this country into existence, period.
White liberals pointing fingers at the most extreme and violent manifestations of that displacement only perpetuates the problem. Why? Because blame is always over there. Blame refuses to grow the fuck up. To face the widespread reach of the lie.
💥📣 And here’s something strange—the most uncomfortable thing is refusing to deal with the uncomfortable truth.
Full accountability for hateful violence is non-negotiable. But nothing systemic will ever change until white leaders cut the quickness to blame and instead admit that white supremacy isn’t just happening over there. It’s here. It needs to be uprooted here first: Inside you.
What are you doing to unclog the toxic shit embedded in your DNA, that’s killing us?
And how do you do your part without choking on the hate that’s endemic to the lie itself?
Here’s 5 Emergency Life Kit Suggestions:
- 🫀Stay In Your Body: whatever you feel is offering you a chance to heal. Move through it, not past it
- 🎨 Connect With Black Art: this will bring things up in your body, especially things you’d rather not admit, things that belong over there, not here, in an antiracist body. Stay present to what comes up
- 👶🏾 Tell Your Children They Are Enough: and show them that fact. If you’re caring for black and brown and Jewish babies, remind them they matter. And have a right to be on this earth. If you’re caring for white babies, remind them, that they are and have to be enough—without, as Toni Morrison taught us—stepping on someone else’s neck to seem tall
- 🤲🏾 Heal Your Ancestral Line: Both backwards to stop the racialized trauma you inherited. And forward so you don’t pass on the bleeding.
- 🍵 Nourish: Invariably, you’re going to feel this shit. It’s real and rough and raw, no matter what shape and flavor of human you are.
Being kind to yourself in this process isn’t just a pithy tweetable, it’s how you heal from this shit.
It’s how you stay in your body and get strong enough to stop storing triggers and traumas and start facing the white supremacy that’s within; it’s how you begin storing up fresh possibilities to heal.
Heart,
Magogodi
🖤
p.s. Freedom Festival is coming June 16-19. Get tickets + scoop here.
