This is The Black Urbanist Weekly, an email newsletter that highlights Kristen Jeffers’s Black Queer Feminist Urbanist commentary on one key issue every week. This week Kristen is admitting that she needs to take a breather on the journey because collective healing must happen, but she has to heal within first.
I will heal from government failure because I will do as Audre Lorde said and practice self-care as a politic. However, as people in a democracy, that supposedly self-govern, we need to ask ourselves is who we are and are we satisfied with failing our communities, collective, and even colleagues.
It’s not that we will bad things to happen to us, but sometimes they do. I don’t want Covid-19, but if it happens, I’ll do my best to cope with it and yes, thrive with it.
This is government failure. But, for a person like me who has already been marginalized, my life has been enveloped in government failure. But, that doesn’t mean I have to like it or shrug it off or worse, lean into it in an ablest manner.
If you’ve been around here long enough, you know that this newsletter and the platform it sits on prides themselves at promoting good governance. A good governance that doesn’t discriminate, incriminate, pontificate, marginalize and/or enslave.
Actually, the more I think about it, I think that it’s time to retire the idea of good governance and think about ways we replace that with grassroots mutual aid and care, that then create abundance-centered places.
But I’d planned on writing about that next week. This week is about my individual path to healing from institutional and governmental failure and trauma.
This newsletter this week (or any week) is nowhere near enough to sustainably heal anyone or anybody from government failure.
I used to beat myself up physically and literally at that realization that I couldn’t get more followers or be more “reliable” or fit into a box, especially when that box required some level of dehumanization.
But, what I can do is call it like I see it, in a slither of time. I can’t call out everything, but when I can, I will. If I inadvertently cause harm, I will be accountable.
That being said, I have decided to take a breather from trying to write to this audience. I will be taking a sabbatical from writing this weekly newsletter (and a few other things) for Black History Month.
Black History Month celebrates the labors of my ancestors, and I think the best thing I can do to honor their dreams for me, especially the one we celebrate today, is to not labor for those who still don’t see me as 100% human and instead do things that bring me joy and create things that will, when I resume my work in March, start that process of helping me be part of the collective care our planet needs, but with my oxygen mask fully on and tight.
I’ll see you in these spaces for the next couple of weeks to tie up a few loose ends, then I’ll see you again formally, in March, with a new focus for this newsletter and my work.
Before You Go
— Check out Mia Mingus’s call to solidarity around disability, both our own and that of those we care about, is right in sync with my thoughts on how we need to be careful that abelism (and its resultant classism), don’t become a cornerstone of society.
— You can go ahead and check out this Jamilah Lemieux article on the need for Black cishet solidarity that I’m going to revisit when I talk about centering (and funding) an intersectional and accessible Black press, but despite where this conversation is hosted, in this world of the internet, at least we are having it so we can stop the real-life harms not having this conversation continues to create.
— I had a lot more thoughts in this email on the TRB situation, but honestly, sharing them is labor that I don’t believe will be reciprocated and I’m reclaiming my time. You can watch my video that I did last week on the situation, which really just reinforces that I can’t keep fitting my square peg into the round holes this industry creates.
— And finally, I saw the article about Patrisse Cullors reclaiming her time and undertaking healing from movement trauma two hours after I made the video last week.
Until next time,