The air conditioner hummed as I stacked copies of My Name Is Marcus on the table, then sat in one of the chairs reserved for the audience and waited for the first guests to arrive. As I fidgeted in my seat, a man approached me and asked what the event was about. I told him it was the launch of my new book. I handed him my card. He looked at it, turned it over twice, and said: “What do you know about Marcus Garvey?”
I rattled off a few dates from memory that silenced him. But I knew this would not be the last time. Nor was it the first.
The man’s question was not curiosity. It was a checkpoint.
Who gave you permission?
That is the lie in its internal form. The war on Black imagination does not only come from outside. We carry it in and turn it on each other. The empire does not need to be in the room. We run the program ourselves.
Every generation inherits the lie in the form that its time demands. In 1452 it came as papal authority. In Garvey’s time it came as laws, as prisons, as perpetual harassment. In that room in Miramar City Hall it came as a question from a man who did not know he was asking it on behalf of five hundred years of a program designed to make us doubt ourselves and each other.
In my own poems I ask the form the lie takes now. In a time of climate change, do Black and brown lives in the Global South matter? The empires have changed their instruments. The verdict remains the same.
The question is coming for you too. It may not sound like “What do you know about Marcus Garvey?” It will sound like whatever your generation’s checkpoint sounds like. But it is the same program.
How will you answer it?
Next week we talk about reorientation — the work of learning and unlearning.
Walk good.
This Substack funds The Garvey Classroom — curriculum, courses, and free daily teaching for students, parents. Free subscribers receive the writing. Paid subscribers fund the work.
