BPR 52 | 2025
Afro-pessimism is not a euphemism for
a bad hair day. No joke, it’s rough out here.
You try to stay upbeat when a beat cop cracks
a skull and the court condemns the kid who
filmed him. The reggae soundtrack to the firstperson
shooter’s gallery of body cam footage
asks, whatcha gonna do
when they come for you, like it was ordained,
which, some say, it was. See, when Noah’s son
Ham stumbled upon the old man buck-ass
naked, passed-out drunk as a judge, rather than
process the shame that his kid had witnessed,
the Old Testament Bad Dad cursed all of Ham’s
descendants. Some say that’s why we’re in
the fix we’re in. For if you believe it, Ham begat
Black folks. His reckless, let us call it “eyeballing,”
begat the curse of everlasting servitude. Back before
colonial laws forbade Black women from naming
in court the white men who’d knocked them up;
long before calipers sized a skull in the long
con of racial science, pious slave merchants
brandished Bibles and claimed “Ham’s Curse” gave
them divine license to ply their trade. Don’t try
to make it make sense. “Things are better now,”
some deduce from theories of human progress
in which fish with feet grow to join the angelic
train and in time learn to walk upright as Godfearing
white men. Also them: “Stop living
in the past.” Meanwhile Jim Crow’s cheap cologne
still haunts the halls of state capitol buildings. Must we
pretend nobody knows why we sing the Blues?
Why we whistle through the blessing in our two
front teeth? Why we might turn to the black girl
From Spectral Evidence (2024), Alfred A. Knopf