on deservedness

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, I think it is worth mentioning I have been in school for twenty straight years.

(Dated 2022)

When I say unfortunately, it is because I fundamentally disrespect the way knowledge is hoarded and translated into a status of wealth that rarely, actually demonstrates intelligence or capability, but access and consent to some level of abuse where most students and so called-scholars are collecting physical evidence proving their subservience and undeniable thirst for capital. I understand how hypocritical I must seem as a student who has not only fed into these abuses of power and also collected the very same physical evidence I am indicting in more ways than I care to admit from too many institutions who care more about the significance of simply my body (and I truly mean a body, that is: something devoid of spirit and humanity made shift into a symbol I did not fashion) than my personhood. I understand why my credibility, my politics, and my motives could be questioned because I willingly chose to enter these institutions, full well knowing their history, the ways I would be abused, the ways they continue to abuse others, and full well knowing there would be times where I would have my life literally threatened, in addition to my livelihood. And while I welcome skepticism, in fact I happily encourage a side eye, I use “unfortunately” because I don’t love that my entire life up until this point of writing has been formed by the dead beat patriarch that is the amerikan education system.  Evenso, I am a firm believer that context is everything and providing this context helps articulate and frame this notion of “deservedness”. 

 In the autumn of my final year at a place I will only call “clownlumbia pee-ew-niversity” because it deserves none of my respect and all of my shade, I had one of the most important phone calls of my academic career with a fellow disgruntled alum. Nick Hadikwa Mwluko is a singular person with singular vision and singular love. Our meeting was fated by being the two inaugural fellows of the New Vision Fellowship, made specifically for Black Queer and Trans playwrights and I can say firmly and proudly that Nick is an angel sent from heaven. They were the first person to ever really understand my grievances with an institution that was not only built by enslaved people, but one that actively funded the war that killed so many of my family members, and then left me and so many others out to dry during one of the worst global health crises of the century. And with all this so necessary context I am providing you for this conversation, Nick was the only person to tell me I deserved, in fact “deserved the most, even more” to be enrolled and have access to our so called ivy league alma mater. 

Compliments and I are not exactly on great terms. We are more like estranged childhood lovers where we respect one another from afar, might even lurk about each other and wish the other well, but were we to ever try to establish a relationship again it would be clunky, awkward, and neither of us know how to receive one another. I don’t have a terribly great interest in establishing a relationship with them and Compliments, though well meaning, don’t exactly want to stick around in a place they are not wholeheartedly wanted. That being said, unpacking what it means to “deserve” being in a place is of more interest to me than keeping this conversation to myself. 

Because, what does it mean to deserve? And not simply deserve in the context of access, wealth, and capital, but what is the concentrated state of “deservedness”? Is it useful? And moreso, is it dangerous? 

When we talk in terms of equity, deservedness and justice walk timidly together toward an undetermined destination because their walk is more desirable for the country/empire  than acknowledging we could reach something infinitely more tangible and sustainable if only we believed there is more to this show. This walk is the performance of justice, the story of righting wrongs, the artificial generosity of an all knowing authority and a seemingly unified “public” deciding who is worthy of liberty and who is not. Therefore, they are all byproducts of what happens when white supremacy hungers for endless consumption and expansion, whether that is through religion, imperialism, war, slavery, incarceration, education, healthcare, and/or resource hoarding. And so, if we continue to be entertained by these concepts of worth we are willfully engaging in only the performance of equity: a short lived, temporary relief for a chronic disease. I am disinterested in the basic treatment disguised as the sole management of our chronic disease as a country. What enthralls me is the cure altogether. We must end the performance of justice by creating systems that acknowledge an inherent and universal deservedness, regardless of how much labour or trauma we have fought for, regardless of how much capital or access we have, but a firm commitment that no human being deserves abuse, violence, or enslavement. 

Of course, the question, as always, is: How?