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YEP, WE ARE MAD

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 I recently read a positively brilliant essay by one Max S Gordon called Be Glad You Are Free. The essay is well-thought out commentary on black culture, Nina Simone and Beyoncés Lemonade.


Gordon, who I’ll admit is a high-key Nina Simone stan and views her as this flawless heroine for black culture, raised some valid points, that I’d always thought of but could never articulate as clearly as he did. 

What the essay highlighted, which is the point of this article, is ‘Black Madness’.
Black madness, he says, is ‘a response to living a life constantly subjected to violence – psychic, physical, social and political.’
This definition captures our madness perfectly. And yes, since we are stereotypically labelled as mad, well; there you have it, we are mad. I own this madness.


My own black madness flairs up when George Zimmerman tells the world, without an inkling of shame or chastising, that he will auction the gun that he used to kill 17-year-old Trayvon Martin since it’s a piece of ‘American history’ (his words not mine).


It flairs up when a white waitress in Cape Town receives over R100 000 because a black customer told her that ‘you will get a tip when you bring back our land.’ But people in Cape Town can barely raise a matching amount when floods or fires ravage poor black and coloured communities in the same city.


 Every day, the black reality is perpetually undermined and treated as an experience that should just be hurdled over as if years of systematic exclusion is that simple to just ‘get over it’.
As a black person, it’s difficult to tear through the veil that racisms casts and achieve a place for yourself in the world that views you as a citizen worthy of the same opportunities and contribution.


Success


With the world underestimating you solely based on the colour of your skin, black people work twenty times harder to achieve the same level of success as their white peers. Yet, even when we achieve said success, we are barraged with insults, which only serve to stain black excellence with suspicion and hate.


For example, Serena Williams wins her 21st Grand Slam title, instead of celebrating her, the world saw it best to attack her on her looks by calling her ‘horse’.


My friend was right when she said, “They love black girl magic but don’t unpack black hurt.”
I’d like to add my own madness, and that’s the ‘20-something madness’. The 20s are such a turbulent time for us. We are basically ‘pubescent adults’: we are told to be adults yet our elders still insistent on treating us like children.


The 20s are a time of exploration, they’re the definitive era of said exploration. We are at war with ourselves, constantly thinking if we chose the right careers, trying to make our families proud and wondering if our lovers love us as much as we think. We are mad because our parents offer us everything in the world except they won’t let us be who we really are or want to be.


 It’s a trying time, where you see your peers presumably succeeding and you find yourself thinking, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” We are at our most vulnerable when it comes to societal pressures and their limited definitions of success.


When we don’t fit that mould of success, we feel like failures. We are mad because our governments continue to forgo creating opportunities for young people, the youth unemployment is at its highest, yet we spend tumultuous years studying in order to contribute to the economies of our countries.


We are mad because our education system fails at roundly preparing us for the realities we face daily, we have all the knowledge about history, biotransformation of steroids and Plato but we feel inept at actually living.
We are mad about many things.


If you aren’t mad, then you are yet to wake up to the world in which you occupy (I have an episode of black madness almost every week).
Ironically, we all on some intrinsic level, want the same things: love, equality and success.


Those things can be achieved but we all have to collectively aim for these goals and strip away any prejudices that plague our functioning.

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