on Chadwick, ableism & Black collective grief.

 

Everything sucks. We’re all constantly getting hit with bricks and left to ache, and many of us don’t know how to healthily heal ourselves from this hurt. Grieving is something I don’t seem to do well. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t experienced enough personal deaths as of yet in my life to recognize how, when, and where it surfaces. How it will affect my mundane routine. Where it starts to grow in areas that I’ve worked so hard to keep manicured and tucked away, to preserve my own calculated and organized sense of what is and what is not. Compartmentalization works until you eventually implode. 

But I do know how and what it looks and feels like to grieve many losses as part of a community. It’s something that we do and know real well as survivors in this cruel wake.

I give us credit as it’s been hard to compute that this passing has in fact happen. I struggle to pontificate with the limitations of this language to make it make sense almost too immediately; reading words of kindness and thanks, scouring any tweets with a message or a sentence that gives me a sense of comfort and wisdom on death and divine timing, to inform how to spew my guts by expressing this grief and confusion into the ether. We allocate space to mourn giants whom we’ve never even met personally. 

But how can you actually mourn for someone you have never really known? Are you in fact mourning for the person or the projection? And what does our sense of entitlement say about how we actively mistreat Black disabled lives? 

A few days have now past, and clarity has kicked in, not so much in now being forced to accept this loss as abruptly as it came. Rather, I now feel a greater sense of urgency to interrogate how we pity and actively dismiss when and where Black disability has been disclosed. Or not.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he chose not to tell us. Look at how we ugly we are to Black people living across the disability spectrum. Look at how far too many folks took this as an opportunity to aggrandize his battle as noble, a battle that is so familiar and terrifying for thousands of Black men living in our everyday.

Stardom aside, his death is one of the consequential thousands of being forced to rely on anti-Black healthcare systems established upon the desecration of Black bodies. 

It’s not only capitalist to conflate productivity with success. It sends an open invitation for ableism, in the automatic cues of hollow and rudimentary statements such as practicing kindness for all whose battles we know not, and simultaneously those same battles which we actively dismiss.

We don’t know yet the entirety of how impactful his legacy will be, but his life was fragile and exhausted. 

That too should be honored.

As we have seen, he is responsible for a generation of Black youth finding a sense of homeplace, on both the continent and the diaspora, through a genre of film—like all others—that systematically relegates Blackness as a superhuman spectacle or dwindled down to peripheral and violently white maneuverings. Yet this is what truly guts me; it feels like Black kids have been robbed of someone so special as immediately as they were given the time to have and love up on him: and, his energetic and focused trajectory is what is so inspiring and will remain in our atmosphere.

But I have to wonder what moments we witnessed his sense of grace as also moments of him practicing self-preservation. I wonder about the moments which we now rewatch and interpret to be him coasting to conserve energy as also being moments to witness the manifestation of that same grace.

He understood and practiced a reverence that is rare to witness. I wonder where room was made to balance the precarity of his life with gaining a sense of freedom being close to death.

This trying ass year has left us breathless, and has already reminded us of how fragile and precious our lives are made by this carceral globe. 

We talk about ancestral planes, are told to  communicate with spirit while working through this corporeal realm. I don’t think we fully understand what freedom is until we’ve gotten a taste of death for ourselves. We know that afterlife exists because we are living in one. We hold these truths near and well. The hard part is to then letting go to leap into the next phase.