We’ve been using the expression “I don’t gotta do nothing but stay Black and die” forever. The line comes from the Langston Hughes poem, “Necessity,” where he writes about work, high rental prices, and capitalism.
How we embraced this expression says a lot about our resistance and the undying spirit of self-determination we’ve always had. When we consider Hughes’ ultimate truths, our Blackness and the inevitability of death, it’s a liberating refusal of the ways of being and doing that systems – from capitalism to patriarchy – have convinced us are necessary to be worthy.
Tricia Hersey, author and founder of The Nap Ministry, teaches about rest as a form of radical resistance. It’s a response to mainstream ‘grind culture,’ which socializes us to believe that we’re nothing more than our productivity and accomplishments, but that’s not true.
According to Hersey, Harriet Tubman was known for sleeping and even stopping to pray despite a bounty on her head along the Underground Railroad. Our people infamously resisted enslavement with legendary rebellions like the Haitian Revolution.
Both writers and the ancestors encourage us to slow down and reclaim our autonomy by remembering that we’ve always belonged only to ourselves and not the systems coloniality created.
We’re divine beings despite what anyone says. We don’t have to earn our worthiness; just like our Blackness and our lives, it’s God-given.