Survivors' Guilt

It's Entertainment To Most But Reality To Me

Survivors Guilt

As of late that’s all I’ve been feeling. Why? Cuz I made it out but yet I’m still in it. I’m forced to sit with this feeling and reality. Many niggas I grew up with are behind that wall or under a tombstone. More are behind the wall than under a grave , crazy right cuz I just turned 20 a week and a half ago as of the time that I’m writing this. I suffer from many restless nights and days fearing that a friend of mine’s lifeless body will be posted on VOTP or a Random subreddit. So I can potentially see ones that I know, in which their body is reposted post mortem to supply the endless appetite that society has towards the dinner table in which the meal is Black death and trauma. It feels as if no matter how far I stay away from the bullshit at a moments notice I can always be rolled right in. I dread the potential phone calls or notifications that I may be privy to. I often times feel like Tre from boyz in the hood with a rougher edge of course. Yea I go to school now yea I’m getting my degree. But I fear where my mind will go if I lose one of mine. Have u ever had ya patna ask you if you think he’ll be killed ? No matter how much advice I could give on how to move and how to stay lowkey the threat of not only the opposition but the state remains. I say I’m still in it because I could go all the way to Rome and still have childhood friends who are outside running the streets trying to make nothing outta something. The problem and main issue is that I know the situation that they’re in is structural. It’s not chosen for many, a life of gang banging and beating down blocks isn’t one in which they can choose. It was determined for them 40 years ago. The lines of war were drawn in the sand by their uncles , fathers , and other people that they were raised under. Most live in situations of inherited beef.

I hear many on the left discuss the “lumpen” in which many of you don’t know a damn thing about the lumpen especially if you were introduced to the concept and stories of the lumpen through the walls of academia or behind the safety of a screen. If you divorce the stories that are behind the people who comprise the lumpen how can you ever see to organize the lumpen? If you participate in socially isolating the lumpen from wider society and viewing the soldiers on the streets as castaways who are of no importance all you’re doing is reaffirming existing anti Black logics of generalization.

I won’t mull over the problematic natures that come with street life. What I am saying is that these people don’t exist in a bubble. I see the destruction , and the actions of violence that are committed against Black flesh by the guys who bang to the hardest extent. It is at the same time that one must come to the conclusion that the baddest banger on the block has a story and usually in that story you will see how one becomes a stone cold killer. In these stories you will often hear about how the neighborhood in which they come from was created through structural violence , how the structures of racial capitalism made it so they lived in poverty. In where poverty is a form of financial violence , the violence that is expressed through the barrel of the gun is just the maddened subject reverberating the violence that collapsed onto them.

In future pieces I will go into the anti Black scripting being the concept of the “YN” and why it flattens the existence of many Black boys into just destructive urban terrorists. I guess I will be left with this feeling of guilt for the rest of my life the most tragic thing about it is when I realize that no one or nothing is coming to save us from our environments and the environments that we were born into will continue to deteriorate overtime and that this deterioration is manufactured intentionally by the state and society at large. At the end of it all it seems as if this is a feeling that I will have to get used to. Is it the easiest pill to swallow ? Well, no of course not, but I realize that the spark has to be lit somewhere I don’t do too much hoping nowadays. I look at it as we live day by day and we gotta get some shit done and corrected before I leave earth. As I look back on my past I realize all of the lessons that older homies taught me. I realized what type of homies I hung around and slowly marked my interests towards what they were into, which was crafting a life bigger than the box that we were given. I wouldn’t say I was born with an inherent difference than most boys who were raised in my side of St Louis. I will say my interests were tailored towards different things , one of the things that was told to me was that “The Most Gangsta Thing You Can Be Is Yourself “. What that means to me is authenticity beats chasing “it” and “it” being an image , a bravado , and a lane that isn’t meant for me to drive in. I often think about concepts such as destiny and what mine is. I guess my story isn’t over. One can say it’s still being drafted.