Sam Jackson

“No baby, you didn't hurt me. You wrecked me. Know the difference.”
― J.A. ANUM

“Days after the elections of 2016, asha sent me a link to a talk by
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We have to have hope, she says
to me across 3,000 miles, she in Brooklyn, me in Los Angeles. We
listen together as Dr. deGrasse Tyson explains that the very atoms and
molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of
stars that once upon a time exploded into gas clouds. And those gas
clouds formed other stars and those stars possessed the divine-right
mix of properties needed to create not only planets, including our
own, but also people, including us, me and her. He is saying that not
only are we in the universe, but that the universe is in us. He is saying
that we, human beings, are literally made out of stardust.

And I know when I hear Dr. deGrasse Tyson say this that he is
telling the truth because I have seen it since I was a child, the magic,
the stardust we are, in the lives of the people I come from.
I watched it in the labor of my mother, a Jehovah's Witness and a
woman who worked two and sometimes three jobs at a time, keeping
other people's children, working the reception desks at gyms,
telemarketing, doing anything and everything for 16 hours a day the
whole of my childhood in the Van Nuys barrio where we lived. My
mother, cocoa brown and smooth, disowned by her family for the
children she had as a very young and unmarried woman. My mother,
never giving up despite never making a living wage.

I saw it in the thin, brown face of my father, a boy out of Cajun
country, a wounded healer, whose addictions were borne of a world
that did not love him and told him so not once but constantly. My
father, who always came back, who never stopped trying to be a
version of himself there were no mirrors for.

And I knew it because I am the thirteenth-generation progeny of a
people who survived the hulls of slave ships, survived the chains, the
whips, the months laying in their own shit and piss. The human
beings legislated as not human beings who watched their names, their
languages, their Goddesses and Gods, the arc of their dances and
beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families
snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this
built language and honored God and created movement and upheld
love. What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to
die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that
their children's lives did not matter?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“He tells me how he cannot remember ever feeling good about himself. He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself. We sit with that for a time; what it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“When I speak at universities, in colleges, I share these statistics. I tell them that even as we are labeled criminal, we are actually the victims of crime. And I tell them there are no stats to track collateral deaths, the ones that unfold over months and years spent in mourning and grief: the depression that becomes addiction to alcohol that becomes cirrhosis; or else addiction to food that becomes diabetes that becomes a stroke . Slow deaths . Undocumented deaths. Deaths with a common root: the hatred that tells a person daily that their life and the life of those they love ain't worth shit, a truth made ever more real when the people who harm you are never held accountable.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir