My friend and colleague Pilot Viruet published a wonderful essay on Medium called “Black Exhaustion”.
An excerpt is below and the full piece is available here.
“It’s exhausting to try and convey this to well-meaning, endlessly patient non-black friends who can’t possibly understand, as much as they try to, and then to feel guilty for bringing it up, as if I am crashing their carefree party with reality—and to know this isn’t the case, but how do you not feel like a broken record when the world is a broken record of broken bodies? To unfairly put my white partner through this: to emotionally shut down, to be loved and comforted but to aggressively reject that love and comfort because the larger world tells me my darker skin means I don’t deserve these things. To love the non-black people in my life but always harbor some small resentment knowing that they will always have it better, and to be inherently suspicious of allies because I worry they care more about looking good on social media than they do about my actual life. It’s exhausting to be sought out to write essays about race in popular culture, and to try to explain that there are some days when I absolutely cannot muster a single shit about taking a celebrity to task for saying something boringly bigoted when I am watching videos of my black brothers and sisters being murdered in the street as revenge for having the audacity to breathe.”
