how can we grieve when everyday Black women*+ queer people’s bodies are subjected to so much terrific violence. it’s absolutely horrendous as we watched this murder happen in real time as Oluwatoyin Salau sought help & support. this is all too devastating for me to even accept.
we have spent weeks engaging with the ideation and contemplation of abolition & accountability politics within our community’s at large. we’ve been creating to spaces for restoration: we’ve been here connecting and caring for one another just to watch our own be
taken by the hands of yet another murderer. Our communities have been shaped by the whites supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
They have been build to relegate this power to individual men who are bestowed the necropolitical power to decide how to subject women torturous lives resulting in eventual death.
There is no way around the fact that we will never be safe before we recreate our own, before we can protect our own. before we can sustain our own. The homes we were born to were never designed to support our lives.
This is the result of centuries of bio warfare. This is yet another declaration of war & they fact that Toyin put her life on the line to dedicate her time, energy and resources to the movement of black liberation
just comes to show how much beyond the work we do, our lives are seen disposable: that our deaths are a spectacle. That this is all too normal in our communities. that we are expected to be both the carriers of life but also the spectacles of compounding and intersecting violence
This happens because it’s expected to happen. This is why this system must cease to exist. This system is then; killing us. It’s respectability politics, it’s rape apologism, it’s the silence, it’s the tolerance for violence, it’s the rejection, it’s the depravation
it’s the marginalization, it’s the over-working, it’s the sacrificing, it’s the expectations, it’s the gaslighting... it’s the denialism, it’s the colorism, it’s the fatphobia, it’s the transphobia, its the queerphobia, it’s the domestic abuse, it’s the family abuse..
My heart is hurting for Toyin. I feel deep remorse because I couldn’t do anything. I’ve been feeling remorse because I am both co-existing in midst of powerlessness and fatigue all while having to keep surviving and doing the work. This was Toyin a couple of days ago
This was her trying to make it out of all to unsafe world where she was seeking shelter with people she recognized as family. Who looked like her, who spoke her language, who could feel her... in all innocence; and that presumption was taken advantage of
and when she had the courage to speak out: she was exercising her power and her agency to protect herself, to find refuge, belonging and recognition. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve this.
I want more for us. I can no longer relegate our protection to institutions of oppression. I can no longer canalise my energy trying to convince people to integrate us into the houses that are burning us alive. We are not sacrificial lambs for your self-righteous delusions
Fuck this system. Fuck it all.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
