“The door out of which Black people were taken is the door of the world’s imagination.”
— Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
Author’s Note
Originally written in 2024, INHERITANCE, PT. 1 has been fully remastered. Not rewritten—reclaimed. The cadence is sharper now, the truth less forgiving. Consider this the version that finally breathes the way it was meant to.
Does My Blackness, My Queerness, My Status Offend You?
Sit with it. Let it sear into your skin like the heat of a Southern sun: the midday kind, the kind that blisters, that doesn’t forgive.
Like the sweat that dripped from backs that built this nation, backs that bent and broke under weight they never asked to bear, under hands that took and took and called it God’s will.
I know what you see when you look at me.
You see the broadness of my nose, the thickness of my lips, the weight of my thighs, and you want to consume me. Not love me. Not hold me.
Not claim me in daylight or introduce me to anyone who knows your name.
Just take me.
Under the cover of night, between the sheets of your shame, in a room where no one can witness the truth of your hunger.
Because isn’t that how you like us?
Hidden.
Indulged in secret, denied in public.
Turned into a craving that you pretend not to have when the sun comes up.
So I let you enter me, and for a moment, you are nothing but breath and heat and the rawness of need. For a moment, you call my name like it is the only one you have ever known.
Like it is prayer.
Like it is the answer to every question you’ve been too afraid to ask. And I almost believe you mean it. Until I feel you close your eyes, until I realize you need the dark to do this, until I understand that even now, even inside me, you are trying not to see me.
But in the morning, when reality settles like dust in the corners of the room, when you pull on your jeans and tuck away your shame, I am nothing more than an inconvenience, a memory you need to wash away.
You go home.
You wake up beside her. You pour your coffee, kiss your children, shake hands with the world, and tell yourself that last night was nothing.
That I was nothing.
That what happened in the dark does not exist in the light.
And yet, I linger.
I linger in every Black man you see.
You look at his lips and remember what mine felt like. You see his hands and remember where mine touched you.
You cannot unsee me.
I have ruined every body that looks like mine for you, and you hate me for it.
Not because I deceived you.
I’m exotic, remember?
I linger in the way you bite your tongue when someone calls me a slur, because to defend me would be to defend what you crave in the dark. I linger in the way you vote, in the way you pray, in the way you clutch your righteousness like a shield, hoping no one ever finds the cracks.
You took a risk, didn’t you?
That’s what you tell yourself.
You let your body betray your beliefs, and now, in the harsh light of morning, you must repent.
Because I am undetectable, still you see me as danger.
Because I cannot pass it to you, yet you still pass me off as your sin.
And I am not the one who is dirty—yet you are the one who scrubs your skin raw when you leave me.
The irony has lineage, just like your shame.
This shame has roots deep in American soil.
This shame is generational, passed down like heirlooms wrapped in guilt and denial.
It is older than you think.
Older than your grandfather’s silence.
They wanted us then, too.
In the dark. In the fields.
In the quarters where no one would see.
They wanted us and hated us for their greed.
And still, still, you wake up every morning pretending your world is righteous, pretending you have built something holy, something clean. Pretending that desire didn’t build this country as much as cotton did.
You ask why I make it about race, about queerness, about history.
But tell me: who wrote this script?
Who made Blackness a thing to be bought, sold, discarded? Who turned queerness into a whisper, into a crime, into something that exists only in the corners of your hypocrisy?
This is not my shame to carry.
This is your inheritance.
And it is heavy, isn’t it?
So tell me: does my Blackness, my Queerness, my Status offend you?
UNSPUN publishes longform essays, op-eds, and visual documents tracing the language of power in real time.
This essay is part of Inheritance: exploring art, attention, and the quiet violences of visibility—how power translates, performs, and disguises itself through media and memory.
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