I saw a Black shackled person

on my way to the gym

Hi, I was out last week because I was moving so this week’s delight (usually for paid subscribers) is for everyone. On this week’s delight I share my feelings about seeing a shackled Black person. It’s not very delightful. Onto the feelings…

Thoughts on seeing a shackled Black person

As I walked in my new neighborhood today to sign up for a gym, I saw a young Black person shackled on the legs and wrists being guided by an older person. The shackled human couldn’t have been older than 20 years old. It doesn’t matter how old they were, it’s just something I noticed. I held back the tears. I’ve been crying a lot lately. Crying over moving to a new city, crying over losing my gym, crying over not getting sheets I wanted.

I’m not sure what happened the other day, but I yelled out. I can never get anything I want after I didn’t get something I wanted. I realize that is a very Hemingway sentence. To tell you the thing, then repeat the thing, but nonetheless I did.

I’ve been crying a lot because I feel like this world wasn’t built for any of us.

Yesterday I went to a coffee shop after returning the rental box truck we used to move some of our belongings to our new apartment. I will never call this place home. I don’t care how many times I open the front door. My home is in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and that is all. I haven’t had a home since my mother died and left me in this world filled with jerks like Elon Musk until I found Flatbush. It reminded me of Nairobi. For the first time in a while I was surrounded by Black people and chaotic streets. Sometimes Flatbush frustrates me because it feels like an extraction zone.

Ever since I read Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism where she mentions extraction as one of the American government’s ways of maintaining racial capitalism, I see extraction everywhere. I see it when there are pigs at the Church 2 train station and not one at the Bergen 2 train station. Extraction in this case looks like fining someone $100 for skipping the $2.90 fare and making sure that person is probably Black based on where the fare is enforced. If you didn’t already know, the Church station is predominantly Black and the Bergen station has a running shop outside it. If someone doesn’t have $2.90, you know they don’t have $100, but that’s how racial capitalism works. Black people are sites of extraction.

Back to the person with the shackles, my brain never left them, it just meandered to other thoughts. I don’t think my brain will ever leave them. I wonder if the older person who shackled this young Black person will ever read Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection and learn about how enslaved Black people were forced to sing and dance to “improve” their spirits and decrease the likelihood of revolt. They were only allowed to sing and dance when their enslavers sanctioned their singing and dancing. If they were caught partying without permission, they were severely punished. I wonder if he’ll ever read the pages where Saidiya describes the coffle forced to sing and dance after leaving the auction block.

I highlighted some of Saidiya’s words in a yellow highlighter that I carry with me everywhere. One day an orange highlighter popped out of my coat during brunch and everyone asked me do you carry a highlighter everywhere. I said, yes, but it’s usually a yellow one. I don’t know where the orange highlighter came from, but I’m assuming I grabbed it as an act of desperation because I couldn’t find one of my yellow ones.

On the coffle, Saidiya writes, “for those forced to ‘step it up lively,’ the festivity of the trade and the pageantry of the coffle were intended to shield the violence of the market and deny the sorrow of those sold and their families.”

On forced entertainment of the enslaved, Saidaya writes, “By encouraging entertainment, the master class sought to cultivate hegemony, harness pleasure as a product force and regulate the modes of permitted expression. Slave owners managed amusements as they did labor, with a keen eye toward discipline. Promoting fun and frolic could alleviate unrest…”

I think a lot about what it may have felt like to be forced to perform joy after a moment of complete subjugation. A moment when you were forced to sell yourself to a buyer who touched your body to assess your value.

I think a lot about pizza parties in workplaces ever since I read about forced joy in Scenes of Subjection. Of course wage slavery is nowhere close to the violence of chattel slavery, yet slavery is a spectrum and different parts of the spectrum are enforced differently depending on race.

I think a lot about Assata Shakur saying something about propaganda is for white people and the guns are for Black people.

I went looking for the quote online because I left her autobiography at home. I miss all my books. I looked online for the PDF version, but I couldn’t find one where I could search for it. So you’ll just have to believe my memory for now. I really miss all my books. Sometimes I go through them and highlight words that changed me. If you haven’t read Assata’s autobiography, I highly recommend you do. Her words declaring war on Amerikkka made me a different person.

The person who can’t go to the gym without crying about another person in shackles. Knowing that my inability to be free and find joy is directly linked to state-funded gangs parading our children down the street with chains. I can’t unsee that young person’s face. I stood on the corner watching them put him in a car. I wanted to run to tackle the large man and save him. I knew I’d lose so I went to sign up for the gym.

The salesperson asked me what my goals are for fitness. I said I do it for my mental health; I work out for endorphins. Deep inside I also really want to get super jacked, but I don’t care about getting jacked enough to go to the gym. I go to the gym because it really does help uplift my mood. Not as much as tackling some pigs probably would, but I’ve never done that. I’m too scared.

So I do jump squats with hopes of liberating my mind in “a minimum security prison” as Martin Sostre calls it. Martin said he doesn’t separate prisoner’s rights from other rights because, “this is a prison out here too. As long as you are oppressed by the state and the State is in control this is a minimum security prison, inside is maximum security.”

Like slavery, prison is also a spectrum. There’s a cage/concentration camp on one end and there is a world where the commons have been fenced off from us on the other. The young person was headed to the cage (inarguably much worse) and I headed to a gym.

To live in a world so devoid of empathy is to suffer. It’s to wake up in the morning and remember that the lives of only the most cruel in our society matter. They have a whole day dedicated to enslavers and murderers, they call it president’s day, I call it asshole day.

I hope one day we can live in a world where a person will not be walked down the street in shackles. I hope one day we can live in a world where we can all be free from the state.

We have to keep fighting for this world. We have to.

That’s it for the feelings!

❤️

Marcela

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