The dirty secret of Black life is that, for all the existentialist angst that Mailer correctly identified in a generation of White hipsters who sought the coolness of “living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy” – because it produced great art and a consumable experience with the edge – most Black folk don’t live those lives, whether captured in the grimy photography of 1950s realism or Kayne and Kim’s Instagram accounts.
If we are being honest, exceptional Blackness never gets you killed; spectacular Blackness never gets you killed. Death is witnessed by Blackness in the singularly unremarkable and unexceptional: selling cigarettes, smoking a cigarette in your own car, reckless eyeballing in the 21st century mid-Atlantic city, playing in the park, your car breaking down on the side of the road.
8 years into a Black presidency, 16 years into the 21st century – a future that was depicted in many of our childhoods as a time of flying cars, and if we watched the first generation of The Jetsons, apparently no Black people – these deaths, the so many of them that have visited Blackness are not remarkable, spectacular, or exceptional, but rather mundane.
These deaths, the so many of them, are as mundane as driving your family around in a car, that you knew might breakdown on you one evening on the side of the road, that you neither possessed the time nor money to have repaired because that is what a mundane existence is. That something so mundane might get you killed – targeted by the State, no less – speaks to absurdity of Black life, and even that absurdity has become mundane.
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