Unhived

Seen on LinkedIn this morning: "If you ask a Black person today (or any decent human) on your Zoom/conference call how they're doing, just know they're not doing well."

Blow that. I'm a Black person, and I'm doing just as well today as I was this time last week. Perhaps that makes me an indecent human being. Fine, I'll cop to that. But I'm not into performative Blackness, especially when that seems to entail not understanding how the world I live in works.

What happened to Breonna Taylor shouldn't have happened to anyone. Many people find the lack of charges against any of the officers in her shooting to be another in a long series of miscarriages of justice. And maybe they're right. But to not be doing well because of that is to have one's sense of well-being tied to actions and decisions that one has no control over. That's a recipe for misery and stress, because the fact that one has come to depend on another for one's well-being does not, in and of itself, give that other person a felt obligation to nurture that well-being. In other words, when the grand jury was deliberating whether to indict Officers Cosgrove, Hankinson and Mattingly, and on what specific charges, the well-being of the Black community in the United States was not on their list of considerations. And yes, I understand that granting the grand jury the benefit of the doubt, but not investigating further (trust without verification, if you will), allows them to act with deliberate malice. And so while I find it unwise to be upset about this, it is neither unethical nor impermissible.

I am doing well, because that's my priority, and I take exclusive responsibility for it. People should be allowed to do that without having their ethnic, ethical or species bona fides questioned.