Tired.

Tired

by Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,

Aren’t you,

For the world to become good 

and beautiful and kind?

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two-

And see what worms are eating

At the rind.

…

I saw this tiny poem by Langston Hughes on Twitter and started to cry. I’ve been kind of emotional the last few days because Emory—this school that I’ve been highkey obsessed with, considering the work I’ve been able to do there and the people I’ve been able to meet and the classes I’ve been able to take, all of which orbit Blackness and art in really gorgeous and productive ways—that school, my school called the cops on a bunch of kids for peacefully protesting for Palestine. And they didn’t just call one set of cops but different branches, who together descended and tackled and tased, pepper sprayed and arrested, and I know maybe it’s naive to be surprised by this—I know maybe it makes me someone who doesn’t see the full picture—but I was surprised. I was surprised and very hurt seeing the footage, and then pretty soon after seeing in real life, all of these cops abusing kids in the very place I’ve been coming to for years now to learn and to teach and to write. 

It is entirely hypocritical for Emory to be this place of access to all kinds of knowledge about revolution and empowerment and then to assault and arrest people (teenagers) when they attempt to practice what you’ve preached. It is more than hypocritical for Emory to bring all of these people of color to their campus and then beat them, arrest them, charge them with criminal trespassing as soon as they say something the university doesn’t like. And I know it’s the administration—that so many of the professors and the students and the other people that make a university a community are as upset by this as I am, but I guess I feel very tired (to put it lightly) by the fact that even at my workplace a Black college kid can get tased over and over again while he’s handcuffed on the ground. I feel, like Hughes put it, “so tired of waiting…[f]or the world to become good / [a]nd beautiful and kind.” It is exhausting to wait for this when the same violence happens over and over again to people like you because other people are intimidated by difference. It feels actually a little impossible to believe that things will change when people are allowed to happily and greedily do the same things to harm you that they’ve been doing since America began. When they are shameless about it, will do it anywhere, will be called in by the very university you love so much to hurt your people right in front of you because your presence and the presence of those like you is, for the moment, inconvenient. The depth of trauma they inflicted on these kids is hard to forget about, as is the exposure of this violence—again, called in—to all the other people who go to and work at Emory. There are faculty and grad students who were assaulted and arrested, who had to spend the night in jail, and there are others, like me, who were not ourselves arrested but who feel restless now. We were reminded, once again, how swiftly feeling good can shift into lying on the ground with a cop on your neck if who you are isn’t something they want to see.

I love this poem “Tired” because it’s so precise and it is so how I feel—why don’t we just splice the world down, as crisply as an apple, and see what is going on down there—at the root of everything, what are the worms? How do we pluck them, one by one—start over?

…

Here’s to college kids all over the country (& all over Atlanta) speaking up for what they believe in: https://twitter.com/prem_thakker/status/1783603060616433871

Image: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Carl Van Vechten, 1939