Every four years we are told ‘change is coming’ and then made to wait for it, again and again.

I almost wish someone would ask us: how does it feel to be a pit stop? To be a refuelling station where sputtering-out political campaigns pull up to receive a laying on of hands; where a Black baritone reverend holds the president’s shoulder and between benedictions issues forth some version of the declaration that “We know Joe”? And that president passes the torch to a Black candidate who can siphon Black popular culture and sponge down a government busy giving standing ovations to the Butcher of Gaza.

I almost wish someone would ask before the politicians slip off their oxfords: how does it feel to know that they are only here for the night? To know (what is by now an open secret) that although they promise that we are in this together they have only stopped by to use us. To make us promises and then dart off to fundraising dinners before we can whisper, “Hush now, don’t explain.”

Is it not time, now, to refuse to be ping-ponged between those who stand with genocidaires and those who dream of a day of retribution for our surviving them? Can we not saddle up and build a world away from those who dance to our music in the clubs but turn us away at the entrance? Who shoot us when we call for help and circulate minstrel memes of our killed as if they were digital lynching postcards?

Why resign ourselves to wait for the enlightenment of evil? To be mules beaten from four years to four years, promised this time really “change is gonna come” as the Earth shrivels, Nazis are inspired, and presidential candidates openly challenge one another to golf.

• Read More