INTRODUCTION

To be black is to be a dissident. At some unspecific point over the past quarter century, and likely long before, America convinced me of this. The seismic wreckage of Ferguson, the daily, microscopic humiliations produced first by the pollsters who reveal that high percentages of whites believe black people have it better than whites and then later by the ones who think we deserve our wretched conditions, certainly confirmed it. Democrat or Republican, protestor or appeaser, lover or fighter, black life in America is one of navigation, for the moment black people issue a grievance of any size, the white mainstream backlash is loud and swift, the strategies and tactics we have employed to find acceptance as Americans collapse—and we are told we can go back to Africa.

The thought stuck, as important thoughts do, and as a result the traditional framings of and solutions to racial questions in this country felt increasingly insufficient, limiting, patronizing. There has been so much shrapnel. The historical arc of black triumph followed by harsh white response was not only instructive in understanding the big issues, such as Reconstruction or the half century of mobilized white response to Brown v. Board of Education, but it also felt very much a part of a menacing present marked by the throaty and effusive rejection of history itself. Even at this late date, despite decades of taxpayer-funded data to the contrary, countless funerals and billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded civil lawsuits, Americans still argue whether police interact with black citizens with more hostility and violence. Americans, twenty years into the fifth century of European inhabitance, still debate whether its white founders intended a nation by white people, for white people—even though the foundations of this country can be routinely found in any eighth-grade history textbook. This country is proud to accept nothing of its own past. It cannot even get the basics right, and it is exhausting.

Dissidence can never be a place of origin but is rather a destination, a conclusion after the long journey that faith—in the ballot, the corporate partnerships, the diversity and inclusion initiatives, the Rooney Rules, or just America’s belief in its own exceptionalism—is no longer an option, and was probably never a particularly good one in the first place. It is the realization that our conventional strategies and solutions have been, if not illegitimate, then failures of mission. It is a break with the mainstream, and a finding of comfort living outside of it.

This book addresses that beginning following the end of exhaustion, a collection of essays that examine varied spaces of the front lines: blackness, where advocating for black people is treated as a punishable offense and, in a time of increasing hostility from the locker room to the White House, one of insurrection; of an authoritarian state, where no amount of evidence or video or debt will shake Americans from their fidelity to police at home and a runaway war machine abroad; to surrender relinquishing the concept of public wealth and to the acceptance of corruption as a value, all enveloped in a vapid but influential celebrity culture.

This collection of essays is not a how-to survival guide for a darkening time but an individual response to the malignant behaviors that have enveloped us. They are, at the end of the journey, a declaration of rejection.