Black Lives Matter: It’s Not A Question, It’s An Aphorism
Today marks ten years since three Queer Black women created ‘Black Lives Matter:
BLM co-founders Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Ayo Tometi — the three activists are credited with using the phrase as an affirmation and an organizing strategy — initially pledged to build a decentralized organization governed by the consensus. The August 2014 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, helped the phrase “Black lives matter” become a potent rallying cry for progressives and a favorite target of derision for law enforcement unions and political conservatives.
While I don’t feel like anything has fundamentally changed as far as the dissolution of the existing status quo, I do feel like I’ve developed a heightened awareness to the correlation between the every day work the people do, whether it be gardening, food distribution, peer-to-peer mentoring — casual, involved conversations with people and how that work serves a purpose that is bigger than themselves.
I remember watching a YouTube video of revolutionary Kwame Ture speaking and he said,
If you’re thinking about world peace but do nothing to contribute to world peace, then you’re not thinking about world peace, you’re just thinking you’re thinking about world peace.
In that same hour long speech, he declared,
The purpose of life is to advance life.
Maybe I’ve never heard such an abstract and concrete thing put into few words that resonated with me before, but it felt more whole than how purpose has become propagandized as grandiosity in the form of off-the edge videos of people traveling — committed themselves to dangerous situations and stunts, pranks that have become ways to profit off humiliation of people who are systematically disenfranchised — from Black folk — homeless folk — surfacing across social media — selling to us that we’re missing out on that shit somehow.
And I gravitated toward this grandiosity, but I found myself more disillusioned by the Dream™ than I did of dreaming a dream. Needless to say, I’ve spent the last 10+ years mourning of a life that was conditioned to me. This is not to say or suggest that I or anyone else is incapable of dreaming and/achieving.
What it all means is that no matter how many degrees I get or how well I police myself to follow the arbitrary law of the European settler to achieve my goals, I am Black and Black Lives Matter is not a question. It is an aphorism and my explanation to this aphorism is to continue broaching the truth of what it means to matter without the hindrance that is antiBlackness.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
