Noname doesn’t owe anyone.
The Chicago artist recently announced via Twitter that she will be taking a break from performing and making music indefinitely. This break will happen following the conclusion of her booked shows. She cited her frustration with the predominantly white audiences at her shows who consume her music (which often specifically speaks from and is aimed at the Black experience) while ignoring the realities of her existence as a Black woman.
Unshockingly, Twitter was set ablaze with accusations of reverse racism, perpetuating division, and ungratefulness. This pointed to the tried and true ideology stating prominent Black athletes and artists should be grateful and keep “politics” out of their fields. This is also a narrative used for Colin Kaepernick, James Brown, Beyonce, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Lebron James. It is also used for whoever else has the audacity to point out the obvious. It’s ye old “shut up and dribble” reanimated.
Artists and athletes do not OWE US their work. The only pursuit that is more important than honing their crafts is protecting the purity of it. Neither of which has anything to do with consumers.
Great Awakening
James Baldwin once said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” This decade will be marked by the awakening of Black people to the levels of racism as the through-line of American society. We have been forced, due to a lack of progress and an overall apathy, to become the freedom fighters of our own lives.
As we journey through that process, it is a trauma-inducing weight that recolors everything you know. All of a sudden, you see things in your favorite TV shows, noticing how the “cool white kids” with the Jordans and hip-hop knowledge don’t have any Black friends. If they do, they are just ornamental relationships. This weight is especially poignant when you learn the difference in statistics on every facet of society. From to , racism infiltrates, destroys, and runs rampant.
The weight of all this hurts.
Cost Be Damned
I learned from reading that the great Black television shows of the ’80s and ’90s that shaped my upbringing were only created because white audiences had switched to cable TV and Black audiences were the only thing left. To learn that much of my childhood joy was built around being a leftover was disheartening. Now every time I watch one of those old episodes, this thought pops in my head like an unwanted ad: “This was never meant to happen. This joy wasn’t for you. It was the backup plan to the backup plan.”
The same can be said for Black Christians. When you start looking around the room and realizing some of our heroes of the faith don’t even love you skin deep, it takes a recovery period (as with any victim of a traumatic experience) to be able to rejoin the general public.
While Noname said she can longer stomach the sight of “1,000 white faces saying the n-word,” Black Christians are declaring we can no longer stomach the tenants of racism tainting the churches, our faith, and society in general. We have collectively decided, cost be damned, if it comes down to us sacrificing our dignity, being enraged, or hurt; subjecting our kids to the world we were born into or continuing to let y’all be y’all for the sake of respectability…it ain’t gonna be us.