I wanna say something.
Chadwick Boseman is the only celebrity that I have truly grieved.
I have a very detached relationship to craftsmen, content creators and/or whatever personas they push.
Even the living greats I don't know if I'll grieve them so genuinely the way Chadwick's passing hurt my heart. Because shit I'd made a place for him in it. As a young black person.
As a black writer who wants to write black characters earnestly, wholeheartedly and for the culture, Chadwick was like the perfect muse.
I want to write action. No shame in saying I want to write my people into a genre that we're sidelined in or stripped of our politics to be a protagonist to.
So like Chadwick being a pro black actor, and a young person, and a beautiful soul really touched me. It touched me when my dad took me to see 42 when I first saw him on screen in theaters, his brilliance honestly shone through in Black Panther, a movie full of black talent and whose themes spoke to different schools of black revolutionary thought.
Knowing he took these roles and more struggling and running on borrowed time breaks my heart.
Him primarily choosing things that would mean something to black people over and over and again until the end inspires me tho. To know that this was purposeful. This was what he was going for and that I wasn't projecting onto him. That's important for any celebrity someone might call their hero.
The prioritization of political and influential blackness as his very career concept is. I don't know. It puts me at a loss of words. And I don't have a quote that really does the gravity of that for me justice.
But let's just say that as a black creative growing up seeing him as Jackie Robinson, to James Brown and to T'Challa really said to me at every stage of my development,
'There's room and time for you to say what you want to say. Without allegory and with your own voice and in your own skin.'
And I hope that where there's no room and when there's no time, I'll make them as he did.
Living and acting and moving and creating with purpose.
Someone asked him if he felt he was living with purpose at the NAACP Image Awards in 2019.
His answer?
“I feel that I’m living my purpose. But the thing about purpose is that it unfolds to you more and more everyday. You could be living in what was revealed to you at a particular time, and then you might get stagnated because there’s more that you’re supposed to do. It doesn’t just stop as you do one thing. I think it’s [about] being open to what you’re supposed to do at this moment and not getting stuck in the past. Purpose is not related to career or career. It’s related to what God put inside you that you’re supposed to give to the world.”
So yeah. I think I saw someone walk with purpose in real time. Coming on the map. Living beautifully and dying so soon.
Rest in power, Chadwick 💜💜💜
Forward, always.
You have touched so many people by being your amazing self i hope your proud of it 💜💜
