Because all I can think about is this:

As a person with breasts, society would absolutely lose its collective shit if I walked around bare-chested in public.

And before somebody starts hollering about biology, decency, or “appropriateness,” save it.

Men’s chests are not inherently more neutral. Society just decided one version of a torso is harmless and the other is sexual, political, disruptive, tempting, dangerous, or “asking for attention.”

That’s the part that fascinates me.

A stadium full of shirtless men becomes:

community

tradition

team spirit

good clean American fun

A woman existing topless in public?

Suddenly we’re clutching pearls, citing morality, talking about “the children,” and acting like civilization itself is moments from collapse.

And the wild thing is, I don’t even necessarily want to walk around topless.

I just notice freedom when I see it.

I notice who gets to occupy public space casually.

Who gets to be loud.

Who gets to be comfortable in heat.

Who gets to be ridiculous without becoming dangerous.

Who gets to have bodies instead of “statements.”

Because that’s what this really is: casual bodily freedom.

Men get to remove their shirts without their bodies becoming a debate.

Without their morality becoming a referendum.

Without their chest becoming public discourse.

That’s power, whether people recognize it or not.

Gravity Did What Gravity Does

And let’s tell the truth all the way through while we’re here.

I’m not twenty-two.

I’m post-menopausal.

My breasts look like breasts that have lived a life, not breasts trying to win a popularity contest.

They have sustained life.

They have brought pleasure.

They have survived gravity.

They are not defective because they changed.

They are not shameful because they are no longer performing youth.

They are mine.

Men are allowed to age into comfort.

Women are expected to age into invisibility.

And that’s when you really start noticing the rules.

A shirtless older man at a baseball game is “living his best life.”

A shirtless older woman becomes a public discussion.

A warning.

A spectacle.

A joke.

A morality issue.

A meme before she is a person.

Stay in Your Lane

It reminds me of that moment in Dance with Me when the older dancer sees what the younger dancers are doing and says, “I wanna do that too.”

And you can feel the room dismiss her before she even moves.

Not because she lacks desire.

Not because she lacks ability.

But because everyone around her has already decided what kind of body is allowed to want, to move, to try, to be seen.

That is the quieter rule underneath all of this:

stay in your lane.

Age gracefully.

Dress appropriately.

Be respectable.

Do not ask to feel free in public.

Do not remind anyone that your body still belongs to you.

Even now.

Even after motherhood.

Even after menopause.

Even after survival.

Even after the body has carried work, grief, heat, joy, stress, years, and history.

We are still expected to negotiate whether our existence is visually acceptable before we’re allowed comfort.

The Old Brutal Logic

There is an old, brutal logic underneath all of this:

the idea that a woman’s body has an assigned purpose.

Be desirable, but not too available.

Be fertile, but not too loud about the cost.

Be modest, but still pleasing.

Be youthful, but not childish.

Age, but do not become visible in your aging.

And when you are no longer useful within that framework, disappear.

That is the part I keep thinking about.

Not because a shirtless baseball chant is the same thing as historical practices that treated widows as disposable. It is not.

But because the same old question keeps echoing underneath different rules:

What is a woman allowed to be once she is no longer being arranged for someone else’s comfort?

The Children Are Watching

What fascinates me is how early this starts.

When I was little, my chest looked just like my male cousins’ chests.

Flat.

Childish.

No real visible difference.

And yet somehow they were allowed to exist freely in the heat while I was already being taught regulation.

My wife remembers something different.

She grew up in the country, running around outside barefoot and bare-chested as a little kid in the heat, the same way boys did.

Free.

Unselfconscious.

Human.

Meanwhile, I grew up in the city already learning surveillance.

Already learning:

Cover yourself.

Close your legs.

Put a shirt on.

That’s not ladylike.

People are looking.

Don’t give people a reason.

That conditioning starts long before sexuality ever enters the picture.

Which means this was never really about “protecting children.”

The children are learning the rule from us now, in real time.

Boys learn:

Your body is natural.

Your body belongs in the world.

Girls learn:

Your body is public property that must be managed for other people’s comfort.

Your body must be negotiated.

And apparently we’re still teaching that lesson at baseball games now.

That contrast has stayed with me because it proves the rules are not natural.

They are taught.

The Stories We Tell About Bodies

And this is where I keep coming back to the stories we are told about bodies.

Because the story matters.

For generations, even biology was narrated like conquest.

The sperm races.

The sperm wins.

The sperm penetrates.

The egg waits.

Even there, the body coded as female was made passive in the telling.

But what happens when the story changes?

What happens when we admit that bodies are not neutral in the way we describe them, study them, regulate them, or shame them?

That is what I keep seeing in this baseball trend.

Not just shirtless men having fun.

A story.

A story about whose body is allowed to be casual.

Whose body is allowed to be funny.

Whose body is allowed to be hot, sweaty, aging, loud, ridiculous, and free without becoming a public problem.

And whose body has to be justified before it is allowed to exist.

Modesty Is Not the Same as Control

And to be clear, this is not me arguing that everybody should walk around naked.

I’m actually a fairly modest person.

I like structure.

Layers.

Clothing with shape and intention.

I feel more like myself in draped fabric than bodycon anything.

Sometimes I cover my hair because it’s comfortable, grounding, practical, or simply beautiful to me.

But there is a difference between choosing modesty and being taught that your body is inherently disruptive.

There’s a difference between self-respect and surveillance.

Because real self-control has never been about forcing other people to disappear themselves.

It is about how you conduct yourself.

How you behave around other human beings.

How you practice restraint, dignity, and respect without requiring someone else’s body to carry the burden of your discipline.

Closing the Loop

So no, this is not really about whether a bunch of men take their shirts off at a baseball game.

It is about what gets celebrated as freedom when men do it and what gets punished as indecency when women even imagine the same thing.

It is about children watching from the stands and learning, again, who gets to be comfortable in public.

It is about a country that calls baseball America’s pastime while still passing down America’s oldest lessons:

boys get space

girls get rules

And apparently, even in a stadium full of bare chests, some of us are still expected to keep our shirts on.

After I published Part I, I found the picture.

The lime green top. The pageboy haircut. The pose I remembered. The version of myself I thought might have been lost.

There she was.

Me at eighteen, trying to capture something I had once seen in my mother.

Finding that picture made me go back and look at hers again.

There’s a part of me that wants to blame her. And there’s a part of me that doesn’t.

Because the truth is, I don’t know what she was given either. I don’t know what softness looked like for her. I don’t know if anyone ever slowed down long enough to see her the way I wanted to be seen. I don’t know if she had the space to question how she loved, or the language to name what was missing.

It was a different time. And not in the way people say that to excuse things, but in the way that shapes what people even believe is possible.

Looking at that picture now, I remember that she was eighteen. Or almost eighteen. Seventeen, turning eighteen that November.

It was 1962. Medgar Evers would be assassinated the following year. Malcolm X in 1965. Dr. King in 1968. The Civil Rights Act had not yet passed. The Voting Rights Act had not yet passed.

She was coming of age in a country that had not yet been forced, even legally, to stop pretending Black people were disposable. And I wonder what that does to a girl.

Not in theory. Not in a history-book way. I mean that girl. The one in the picture. The one looking directly into the camera like she already knew how to hold herself still.

What happens when survival becomes the first language you learn? When you are taught, directly or indirectly, that softness is dangerous, that fear must be swallowed, that tenderness is something to protect by hiding it?

What kind of woman does that girl become?

And what kind of mother?

I wonder if it silenced her in a way. If she learned to swallow fear before it could show. If softness felt like something she could not afford. If being seen too clearly felt dangerous.

I don’t know what was going on in her mind then. I don’t know what she feared. I don’t know what she hoped for. I don’t know if anyone ever gave her room to be afraid.

By the time she had me, the story I heard most often was the emergency: I was premature. My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. Something almost went wrong before I even had language. But I don’t know if anyone held her through that. I don’t know if her mother showed up. I don’t know if anyone said, You must have been terrified.

She never told me.

She never showed it.

And maybe that was part of what she learned too.

I can hold the context of her life without erasing the harm in mine. There were things she did that I can understand now, but understanding does not make them harmless. Some of it was neglect. Some of it was abuse. And naming that does not mean I am blaming her for everything. It means I am finally telling the truth without flinching.

So I can’t sit here and pretend she had tools she may have never been given. But I also can’t pretend that I don’t have them now.

Because I do.

I’ve had time. I’ve had distance. I’ve had experiences that made me stop and ask myself why I respond the way I do. And once you start asking that question—once you really sit with it—you don’t get to unknow the answer.

That’s the part that belongs to me. Not what I was given, but what I do with it.

I can understand where something comes from and still decide it’s not how I want to move forward. I can recognize a pattern and choose not to repeat it. That doesn’t erase anything, but it does change what comes next.

There’s also a part of me that learned a long time ago that I will have to answer for the things and decisions I’ve made to my children, if not anybody else.

Respectfully.

Not because I believe mothers should disappear inside their children. Not because I believe martyrdom is the price of love. I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that. There were times I had to choose myself because no one else was going to choose me, and because disappearing would not have made me a better mother. It only would have made me more resentful, more exhausted, more absent in ways nobody would have named until much later.

But I also know that choosing myself did not happen in a vacuum.

My children experienced those choices in real time. Not as intention or survival strategy. Not as a woman trying to claw her way back to herself. They experienced me as I was. And whatever that was—whatever I gave, whatever I missed, whatever I didn’t yet understand—that is what they lived.

I don’t get to rewrite that. I don’t get to soften it after the fact just because I know more now. I don’t get to say, But I was doing my best, and expect that to answer every ache.

I think about a conversation I had with my mother once as an adult. I remember us passing by a train station, though I don’t remember where we were going. I tried to talk to her about some of the choices she made. Not to put her on trial. Not to make her answer for everything. Just to name that some things stayed with me.

Like the times she put me out.

Once, when I was six or seven, she locked me out of the house. I remember going across the street to the little park near our apartment complex. I sat on the swing and cried because I was terrified and didn’t know what to do.

Things like that linger.

When I tried to talk to her about it, she said, “I did the best I could with what I had.”

And I didn’t counter it. I didn’t ask her to defend it. I let that be her truth.

But now I understand something I didn’t understand then: her truth does not cancel out mine.

She may have done the best she could with what she had. And I was still a child locked outside, afraid, trying to figure out where to go.

Both things can be true.

That is what I have to remember when my own children come to me with their version of the story. I may want to explain. I may want to defend myself. I may want to tell them what I was carrying, what I was surviving, what I was trying to do.

But before I defend myself, I want to learn how to open the door.

Because sometimes my best may have still hurt them.

Sometimes my choices may have confused them. Sometimes my distance may have felt like rejection. Sometimes my silence may have sounded like indifference.

Sometimes the ways I was trying to survive may have looked, to them, like I was choosing something or someone else.

And maybe sometimes I was.

That is a hard sentence to write. But it is probably the truest one.

I have made choices I am proud of. I have made choices I would make again. I have made choices that gave me room to breathe, to become, to stop living like my own life was an afterthought.

And I have made choices that I may have to answer for.

Both things can be true.

I can love my children and still admit I did not always know how to mother from softness. I can know that I was carrying my own wounds and still recognize that my wounds did not make me harmless. I can understand myself without excusing myself.

That is the difference I am trying to learn now.

Not perfection. Not performance. Not pretending I finally know how to love correctly.

Just the willingness to notice. To listen. To stay present when the answer is uncomfortable. To not make my children responsible for reassuring me that I did okay.

If they ever come to me with their version of the story, I want to be able to hear it without reaching immediately for my defense. I want to be able to say, I understand why that hurt you, even if I remember the moment differently. I want to be able to hold the truth that love was there and still recognize that something else may have been missing.

That is a hard place to stand.

Because it means holding two truths at once: that I did the best I could with what I had, and that my best may not have always felt like enough to them.

Both things can be true.

And neither one cancels the other out.

Maybe that is where soft love begins. Not pretending we were given everything we needed, or that we gave everything perfectly. But in what we are willing to notice now.

And what we choose to do next.

I don’t mean love in the general sense. There was food. There was shelter. There were decisions made in the name of care. But there wasn’t softness. Not the kind that lingers. Not the kind that checks in. Not the kind that says, I see you, and I’m here with you.

I’m talking about soft love.

The kind that notices when your energy shifts. The kind that asks what you need before things fall apart. The kind that makes room for your emotions instead of managing around them.

I didn’t have that.

What I had was something else. Something more practical. More distant. Love that showed up in responsibility, not presence. Love that expected me to figure things out. Love that didn’t always make room for me to be soft.

So I adapted.

I became someone who could make decisions early. Someone who could take care of herself. Someone who could read a room without being taught how. Someone who could keep going without needing much.

At least, that’s what it looked like.

What it actually meant was that I learned how to live without being held.

And when you grow up like that, something subtle happens. You don’t go looking for softness. You don’t expect it. You don’t even always recognize it when it shows up.

You just move.

You build a life. You make choices. You become responsible. You become the kind of person who can take care of others, even if no one ever taught you how to do that gently.

There’s another layer to this that people don’t always like to talk about.

Motherhood isn’t always born out of softness or even desire. Sometimes it’s obligation. Sometimes it’s circumstance. Sometimes it’s a decision made in the middle of everything else you’re trying to survive.

I’ve made different choices in my life. I’ve chosen to continue pregnancies. I’ve also chosen not to. None of those decisions were simple, and none of them came from a place of having been deeply nurtured myself.

So when I say I became a mother without knowing what soft love felt like, I mean that in more ways than one.

When I became a mother, I did what I knew how to do.

I showed up. I handled what needed to be handled. I made decisions. I kept things moving.

And there is love in that.

But there is also a difference between love that sustains and love that soothes.

I didn’t know that yet.

I didn’t know what I was missing.

I only knew how to keep going.

I still have the picture of my mother at eighteen.

It’s one of my favorites of her. She looked cool without trying. Settled in herself in a way I didn’t have words for yet, but I recognized it.

The picture of me—the one I took years later because I wanted to look just as cool—is harder to find.

Maybe that says something. Maybe it doesn’t.

But I remember it.

So I went and got my own picture taken.

Back then, you didn’t need an appointment.

You went upstairs to this little studio, picked your background, and for twenty dollars you walked out with an 8x10, a couple of 5x7s, and a stack of wallet prints. It was quick. Twenty minutes, maybe. Everybody did it.

Not just for graduations. Not just for birthdays. Not for the kinds of photo shoots people do now in fields with golden-hour lighting and coordinated outfits.

This was different.

This was: it’s Saturday, you just got your hair done, you have a new outfit, and you want proof that you looked good in that moment.

That day, I felt good.

I had on a lime green sleeveless top. Lime green and black were my colors back then, and I had a few outfits that worked those colors hard. My hair was straight, cut into a pageboy right at my neck. No bangs, because I have never really been a bangs person. I had a job. I had just graduated. I was getting ready to leave for college.

I was stepping into something.

And I was proud of that picture.

When I brought it home, I showed it to my mom.

And the first thing she looked at was my arm.

Not my face.

Not the way I had put myself together.

Not the fact that I had tried to capture something I saw in her.

My arm.

I don’t even remember exactly what she said. I just remember the shift.

That quiet, familiar shift where something that felt good suddenly didn’t.

I didn’t have the language for it then. But I know now that was a moment where softness could have met me.

Someone could have said, You look beautiful.

Someone could have said, I see you.

Someone could have said, You did good.

Instead, I learned something else.

Something quieter.

Something that would take me years to name.

I went to see One Spoon of Chocolate at its premiere opening in Portland.

I didn’t go alone. I went with my middle daughter, and the decision to go came after a weekend that left a particular kind of residue. We had gone out dancing—one of those queer events that promises community but delivers something narrower. The music was familiar, but not for me. ABBA. “Dancing Queen.” The B-52’s “Love Shack.” A playlist, not a set. Nostalgia, but not exactly mine.

There is something about being Black in white spaces: we are expected to be fluent in everyone else’s nostalgia, even when it has never been ours.

It was a white space. A lesbian space, yes—but still white in a way that felt curated rather than shared. A true DJ is not just someone with access to songs. A true DJ knows how to mix and blend, how to take familiar ingredients and make something new. They are part chef, part conductor, part cultural translator. What we had that night felt less like a set and more like someone opening a personal archive and asking the room to dance inside it.

So when I saw there would be a set tied to this film—something rooted in Wu-Tang Clan, in ’90s hip-hop, in a sound that raised me—I was ready.

That music is home.

Hip-hop is not just music you hear. It is music you touch and feel. It is rhythm, memory, posture, weather. It lives in the body before it becomes nostalgia. I was 20 when Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came out, and it found me during a time of transition. So when the DJ started, I felt it immediately: the nodding, the recognition, the quiet gratitude of being in a space where something familiar finally showed up.

And yet…

There was a dissonance. It was like being fed, but not fully nourished. Like the plate was familiar, but something in the seasoning was missing.

Looking around the room, seeing who else was moving to that same music—people wearing merch, people claiming the same cultural touchstones—it raised questions I couldn’t shake:

How are we all here? What does this mean to you? Do you feel this like I do? Can you?

It wasn’t about deciding who belonged there. It was about realizing I was experiencing the room from somewhere they might not be able to reach.

By the time we sat down for the film, that awareness hadn’t left. It had sharpened.

You could feel the room shifting as the story unfolded. Certain scenes landed differently depending on where you were sitting, who you were, and what you carried into the theater with you. Moments of violence, racism, and reversal drew reactions—applause in places that made me pause, awkward silence in others.

And throughout it, my daughter and I were talking.

Not to disrupt, but to process in real time. That’s how we move through stories, and how we make sense of what we’re seeing.

The difference is that I have learned to measure myself in public. My daughter has not learned that same kind of shrinking, and I am trying not to teach it to her. I know what masking can cost. I know how easily a person’s natural rhythm can be corrected out of them and renamed manners, maturity, or respectability.

For her, especially, the social contract of “sit still and be quiet” does not override the need to engage, respond, and question as things happen.

So the film wasn’t something we passively received.

It was something we moved through—together, in conversation, in a room that was also telling its own story.

And all of that—the music, the room, the reactions, the conversation—shaped what came next.

There’s a particular kind of disappointment that only comes from watching a story that almost works.

The premise of One Spoon of Chocolate is not the issue. In fact, it’s potent. A racially hostile enclave operating as a closed system of harm—one that preys on Black bodies under the guise of order and community—should feel chilling, expansive, and uncomfortably plausible. It sits in a lineage with films like Get Out, where horror emerges not from spectacle alone, but from the quiet normalization of violence.

But where that lineage relies on precision, this film leans too heavily on familiarity.

Let me be clear: this is not a dismissal of RZA. As an artist, he has long demonstrated an ability to build atmosphere, to create texture, to evoke something deeper than surface. And there are moments here—brief, flickering—where that instinct shows up. The use of origami as a symbolic throughline. The restraint in the central relationship, where intimacy is allowed to exist without being reduced to spectacle. A final image that gestures toward a reversal of power.

Those moments matter. They show intention.

But intention is not execution.

Too often, the film relies on its themes to do the heavy lifting. Racism is stated rather than revealed. Dialogue leans into the expected—slurs, declarations, the language we’ve heard before—rather than unsettling us with something quieter and more precise. The result is not that the film is offensive, but that it becomes predictable. And predictability is the death of tension.

There is also a structural issue that undermines the story’s credibility. The world is over-engineered. Key figures are too conveniently placed: the coroner’s office, the mortuary, law enforcement, and social ties all intersect in ways that feel less like an ecosystem and more like a constructed maze designed to move the plot forward. Instead of expanding the scope of the horror, it contains it. It tells us this is happening here, in this one place, among these specific people—when the more frightening truth would be that it could happen anywhere.

And then there is the question of complicity.

One of the most striking missed opportunities lies in the portrayal of those who know and choose not to act. A mother who works within the system, who has likely seen evidence before, only arrives at moral clarity when harm touches her proximity. This is not just a character flaw—it is a thematic doorway. The film brushes against it but does not step through. What could have been a sharp critique of selective empathy becomes instead a narrative convenience, a trigger to propel the protagonist forward.

The treatment of Black women within the film further reflects this imbalance. While the story centers the suffering and symbolism of Black men, Black women are often relegated to the periphery—functional rather than fully realized. Even when afforded more dignity, their roles remain tethered to the arcs of others. This absence is felt.

And yet, what lingers most is not anger—it is the sense of something unfinished.

Because the film contains ideas worth exploring. The metaphor of “one spoon of chocolate” is simple but evocative, speaking to fears of transformation, proximity, and perceived contamination. The quiet discipline of origami suggests a character capable of control, patience, and internal evolution. The final confrontation hints at a shift in power that could have been far more unsettling had it trusted silence over explanation.

This is what makes the film difficult to dismiss outright. It is not devoid of vision. It simply does not follow that vision far enough.

We are in a moment where storytelling—particularly stories rooted in race, power, and history—demands care. Not perfection, but rigor. Not just bold ideas, but the willingness to sit with them long enough to make them land. Cultural memory is not something to gesture toward; it is something to engage with fully.

And that is the ask.

Not to abandon experimentation. Not to shy away from genre. But remembering that style cannot replace substance. That homage—to blaxploitation, to kung fu cinema, to directors like Quentin Tarantino—requires more than aesthetic borrowing. It requires discipline, intention, and a deep respect for the audience’s ability to see beyond the surface.

There is a stronger film inside One Spoon of Chocolate. You can feel it trying to emerge.

And that is precisely why it matters to say: we deserve that version.

Not just as viewers, but as participants in a culture that recognizes when something is close—and refuses to settle when it falls short.

I want people to see this film.

I want it supported. I want the doors to stay open for artists like RZA to keep experimenting, to keep building, to keep reaching. That matters.

But support cannot mean silence.

Because we have seen these images before. We have lived these dynamics before. Racism, exploitation, the casual and systemic dehumanization of Black bodies—these are not new ideas to us. They are not theoretical. They are not distant.

So when those themes are brought to the screen, they require more than recognition. They require care.

Not a solution—this film is not obligated to solve anything. But it is obligated to engage its own premise fully. To push beyond what is familiar. To trust that the audience does not need to be reminded of what racism sounds like, but invited into what it feels like beneath the surface.

That is the difference between repetition and revelation.

There is a version of this film that does exactly that. You can feel it in the quieter moments—the restraint between characters, the symbolism carried in small gestures, the ending that resists over-explanation and simply… drops.

And that ending works.

It doesn’t tie everything up. It doesn’t set up a sequel. It leaves space. It lets the weight sit where it lands and trusts the audience to carry it forward with their own questions:

What happens next?
Who walks away changed—and who doesn’t?
What does power look like now?

That kind of ending lingers. It doesn’t chase you—it waits for you.

And that is why the rest of the film matters so much.

Because when you end on that kind of note, you are asking your audience to stay with you. To think. To feel. To wrestle. And if you’re going to ask that of us, then everything leading up to it has to be just as intentional.

We don’t need perfection.

But we do need more than what we’ve already seen.

We need the full version of the story that is trying to be told.

And we’re not wrong for expecting it.

This reflection turns toward the body — toward the burden of proof, the expectation of endurance, the quiet redistribution of risk. Some people are required to carry documentation, explanation, justification, vigilance. Others move without friction.

The imbalance is not accidental.

It is designed.

In this piece, I’m tracing the quiet evolution of control — how it moves from the visible to the procedural, from spectacle to paperwork. Chains did not disappear. They were redesigned. Violence did not vanish. It relocated.

This is not an argument about nostalgia or inevitability. It is an examination of mechanism.

Because when harm changes form, it becomes harder to name — and easier to deny.

How Harm Is Reassigned

There was a time when chains were visible.
Metal. Iron. Flesh bound to flesh.

When control was intimate. When it pressed into skin. When it left marks that could not be explained away as policy.

But control does not disappear when the chains come off. It adapts. It refines. It relocates.

Long before voter ID debates and passport requirements, documentation functioned as a gatekeeping mechanism. Enslaved people carried passes. Free Black people carried proof of status. Movement required permission in writing. Freedom depended on paper.

Identity was not assumed. It had to be verified.

Frederick Douglass secured his passage to freedom by trading papers with a sailor. The document did not describe him accurately. It described access. Authorization. It described who the state believed had the right to move.

The paper was not truth.
It was power.

Throughout American history, documentation has served as a filter: literacy tests, poll taxes, registration rolls purged and re-purged, property requirements, affidavits, “proof.” The founding framework centered a white, male, propertied citizen as the default body imagined by law. That blueprint has been contested, expanded, and defended across generations. There were moments — Reconstruction among them — when the architecture of participation widened and Black men were elected to represent their communities. But those gains were met with violent retrenchment and procedural innovation. The mechanism changed. The impulse did not.

Control rarely announces itself as exclusion. It presents as procedure.

It is not framed as a denial of humanity. It is framed as a verification of it.

Today, the debate once again centers on documentation. Passports. Birth certificates. Names that must match. Proof that must align perfectly with state records.

But documentation has never been as clean as the law assumes. Records contain errors. Names change through marriage, divorce, adoption. Clerks make decisions. Mothers answer questions under pressure. Paper trails fracture. Bureaucracy assumes linear lives. People rarely live them.

My own birth certificate does not reflect the truth of my lineage. The man listed is not my father. The state recorded a transaction. It did not record a relationship. The man who acknowledged me in life is gone. The document remains.

And I am not unusual.

When participation depends on perfect documentation, imperfection becomes exclusion.

Friction is introduced — not in dramatic spectacle, but in administrative detail. A missing record. A name that does not match. A requirement that assumes stability many people do not have.

Systems built to exclude rarely stay contained. The barriers designed for one group redistribute themselves, widening until they catch others in their reach.

Harm rarely disappears.
It relocates.

Chains did not vanish. They became surveillance.

Control once required proximity. Now it requires data. Tracking. Verification. Monitoring. The question is no longer who is physically restrained, but who must continuously prove they belong.

Mobs did not disappear. They became policy.

Where crowds once gathered to enforce racial hierarchy through spectacle and terror, legislatures now codify restriction through language that appears neutral. The violence is no longer public. It is procedural.

Whips did not vanish. They became bureaucracy.

Delay. Denial. Documentation requirements. Administrative burden. Harm delivered in increments small enough to deny and large enough to accumulate.

Because the mechanisms are less visible, we tell ourselves a story about progress.
Representation. Reform. Incremental expansion.
Some of it is real.
But progress can also function as anesthesia — managing impatience while the foundation remains intact.

Reform rearranges the room.
Liberation questions the blueprint.

When harm relocates instead of disappears, progress becomes difficult to measure.

And when the burden of proof becomes the price of participation, we should ask who benefits from the friction.

Who Bears the Cost — and Who Never Has To

The burden of proof is rarely placed on those who design the rules.

It is placed on those who must survive them.

Enslaved people had to prove they were free.
Black citizens had to prove they were eligible.
Women had to prove they were rational enough to vote.
Immigrants must prove they belong.
Disabled people must prove they qualify.

The harmed are asked to document their suffering.
The architects are rarely asked to justify the structure.

Pain must be evidenced.
Power is presumed.

And the requirement is always framed as fairness.

Just show us your papers.
Just verify your status.
Just confirm your name matches.
Just prove you are who you say you are.

The language is procedural.
The impact is personal.

The friction lands in real bodies.

It lands in the woman whose name changed.
In the family whose paperwork was incomplete.
In the person whose records contain clerical error.
In the citizen whose life did not follow a bureaucratic script.

The question is never whether the system works.
The question is whether you can survive navigating it.

And the cost is not distributed evenly.

Some people move through the machinery of the state as if it were built for them.

Because, in many ways, it was.

Others move through it carefully —
documentation in hand,
proof prepared,
contingency plans for clerical error.

Not because they are less lawful.
But because they have learned that belonging must be demonstrated.

The burden of proof rests where harm has historically rested.

And it rarely shifts on its own.

This Is the Trigger: Who Must Carry the Risk Now

There is a truth that keeps returning to me — the uncomfortable hinge beneath all of this.

Change accelerates when insulation collapses.

Lucy Burns’ torture mattered not because brutality was new, but because it disrupted expectation. A white woman subjected to state violence could not be dismissed in the same way. The optics destabilized the narrative. The cost became visible to those who had not previously borne it.

We see this pattern in modern moments as well — when individuals expected to remain insulated refuse silence. When they offer aid. When they interfere.

The reaction shifts.

Not because the harm is unprecedented.
But because the insulation has been breached.

This is not about virtue. It is not about heroism.

It is about structural exposure.

Systems remain stable when disruption is contained within communities already marked as disruptive. They strain when the cost redistributes. When the friction spreads. When the risk is no longer predictable.

The labor of disruption cannot remain permanently assigned to those already targeted.

And when insulation collapses, action is no longer theoretical.

It becomes inevitable.

Change does not always arrive as spectacle.

Sometimes it arrives as entry.

Water does not shatter stone from the outside. It finds the smallest opening. It seeps. It settles. It expands.

It does not invent weakness.

It discovers it.

Harm relocates.
Risk redistributes.
Insulation thins.

Water finds a way in.

And once inside, it brings change. 💎

It goes something like this: things were bad, people protested, laws changed, and the arc bent toward justice. We mark the moments of reform as proof that the system learned, evolved, corrected itself.

But I’ve been sitting with a quieter, less comforting question:
What if reform is not evidence of …

Read more

In this piece, I reflect on:

• resistance as continuity rather than spectacle

• the difference between reform and reluctant concession

• how systems respond when silence fails

• what it means to refuse martyrdom while remaining present

This essay situates the present moment within a longer historical pattern and asks what endurance actually costs — and who is expected to pay it.

🎧 Listening note: This piece is meant to be heard slowly. Pauses are intentional.

About the series

This essay opens a four-part Black History Month series, with weekly major entries and midweek reflections released throughout February.

Access notes

• The written version is available to all subscribers.

• Audio is shared first with paid subscribers, then opened to everyone later in the week.

This piece references historical state violence and incarceration.

The ocean holds what I can’t. The trees offer silence without demand. Between them, I remember that resistance doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it simply refuses to disappear.

Lately, that refusal has felt quieter than outrage and heavier than hope. I’ve been moving through the world with a kind of watchfulness—present, but not rushing to the front of every line. Not absent. Not asleep. Just aware of where my body is welcomed, where it is expected, and where it has historically been used as evidence.

Not indifference, but discernment—the kind that comes from knowing when presence turns into performance.

I go to the ocean to visit my mother at Depoe Bay. I have the coordinates. She donated her body to science, which is the polite phrasing for a harder truth: she died in poverty, and we were not speaking at the end. Silence has a lineage. So does harm. I choose to believe that wherever she is now, she sees more clearly than she could here. That she understands the weight she carried, the damage she never had language for, the inheritance she left behind without meaning to.

The trees are different. I go to them for alliance. They do not read me. They do not require context or explanation. They do not turn me into symbol or lesson. They simply stand, having survived centuries of weather, fire, and human interference. Their resistance is not loud. It is uninterrupted.

This is where I begin to understand resistance not as spectacle, but as continuity. Not as a single act, but as a posture. A way of remaining intact when the world keeps asking you to fracture yourself for proof.

Because what has broken my heart lately is not just the violence itself—it’s the insistence that this is new. That this escalation is surprising. That if we just wait, just vote, just speak nicely enough, it will stop on its own.

And water is still wet, y’all. That’s not cynicism. It’s memory.

The system has always been willing to consume and destroy. Pretending otherwise has always been the luxury of those it protects.

And this—this moment, this pressure, this visibility—is not a deviation from history. It is the continuation of it.

Lucy Burns and the Mathematics of Cruelty

In 1917, the United States government decided that silence was a threat.

Lucy Burns was not arrested for violence. She was not accused of theft or sabotage. She was arrested for standing still. For holding a banner. For refusing to leave when told—politely at first, then forcefully—that her presence was inconvenient.

The women who stood with her were called the Silent Sentinels. They picketed the White House without chants, without riots, without spectacle. They asked President Wilson a single question: how could a nation claim democracy abroad while denying it at home?

The answer was not debate.
It was incarceration.

When arrests failed to stop the pickets, the sentences lengthened. When jail failed to break them, the state escalated. Burns and dozens of other women were transferred to the Occoquan Workhouse, a facility designed less for rehabilitation than for humiliation. What followed became known as the Night of Terror.

Lucy Burns was singled out not because she was weak, but because she was strong. She was educated. Unyielding. Organizing even from behind bars. The guards understood something fundamental about power: if you break the leader, you break the line.

So they hung her.

They shackled her wrists above her head and chained them to the cell door. Her feet barely touched the floor. The position forced her shoulders to bear her full weight for hours. It damaged her body permanently. This was not a loss of control. It was control, exercised with precision.

This is what consumption looks like.

The goal was not simply to punish Lucy Burns. It was to use her suffering as leverage—to drain resolve from the women who could hear her, to turn endurance into a warning. Her body became an instrument. Her pain became policy.

And still, she did not recant.

The state miscalculated. What it treated as disposable became evidence. News of the brutality escaped the walls of Occoquan. The public, unmoved by banners, recoiled at chains. Judges intervened. The women were released. Years later, the 19th Amendment was ratified.

This is often where the story is told as progress.

But that framing misses the point.

Lucy Burns did not win because the system evolved. The system conceded because exposure threatened its legitimacy. It did not stop consuming—it simply adjusted its tactics. Burns’ health never recovered. Her body paid a price that history rarely tallies when it celebrates outcomes.

This is the pattern.

The system extracts until resistance becomes too visible, too costly, too destabilizing to maintain as-is. Then it offers a concession—narrow, conditional, carefully controlled—and calls it change.

What Lucy Burns endured was not an anomaly. It was a rehearsal. A demonstration of how far the state is willing to go when challenged by people who refuse to disappear quietly.

And the lesson it taught was not mercy.

It was this:
when silence fails, the system reaches for the body.

Quick check-in so nobody thinks I vanished into the ether. I’m deep in the lab working on a few things that need my full focus, which means my writing cadence has been quieter than I’d like. But I haven’t forgotten you — not even a little.

I really loved sharing the voice notes last week. That space felt good, and I’m looking forward to returning to it soon with more intention and a little more breathing room.

Also… it is Black History Month.
So just know I am absolutely coming through with the smoky tea when I resurface. ☕️

Thank you for being here while I gather, build, and stir the pot responsibly.

More soon,
Jewels

Last night I went to the movies and saw The Chronology of Water.
I’m still processing.

The cinematography was intense — not just visually beautiful, but invasive in that way certain films are. You don’t simply watch them; they insist on being experienced. I don’t mind blood on screen. Violence, strangely, feels less personal to me than sex scenes. Sexual imagery is intimate in a way violence isn’t, and when it appears unexpectedly, it can feel less like storytelling and more like intrusion. That’s my reaction — not prudishness, just awareness of where my comfort lies.

There’s also the proximity factor. I know Lidia. I’ve met her sister. I’ve met Andy. That changes how you watch something. It collapses the distance between “art” and “person.” The story isn’t abstract when you’ve shared physical space with the people whose lives inspired it. It becomes less voyeuristic and more… complicated. Respectful. Maybe cautious.

Her story, like most human stories, is messy. And I mean that in the truest sense — layered, nonlinear, emotional, contradictory. Many people are gushing about the film. I find myself more reserved. Not critical, just contemplative. Some art doesn’t land in a single viewing. Some art needs to settle, to be revisited, to be understood from multiple angles. I suspect this is one of those films for me.

There’s also a subtle dissonance I feel around literary circles in general. The name-dropping, the shared references, the unspoken assumption that everyone in the room has read the same canon. Half the time I haven’t. And I don’t know that I want to pretend I have. The writers who shaped me are Baldwin, Angelou, Walker, hooks, Lorde. That’s my lineage. It doesn’t make me less of a writer — it just means my bookshelf is arranged differently.

Which brings me to an unexpected realization.

I own many books, but they live in boxes. I’ve never owned a proper bookcase. My walls are full of art and images of women who inspire me — visible lineage, visible influence — but my books, my intellectual inheritance, are tucked away in cardboard. I’ve been waiting for the “right” bookcase. Real wood. Heavy. Something that feels like a miniature library instead of a temporary shelf.

Watching a film about memory, trauma, and storytelling reminded me that stories deserve space. Not just in the mind, but in the home. Maybe putting my books up isn’t about décor. Maybe it’s about acknowledging that these voices live with me.

What I appreciated most about Lidia’s work — both on the page and on the screen — is the nonlinearity. Memory rarely arrives in order. Emotion rarely behaves. I don’t write the same way structurally, but I do think I’m good at making someone feel a scene. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s my strength.

I’m not leaving the theater declaring this my favorite film.
I’m leaving it thoughtful.
Sometimes that’s the higher compliment.

This final movement is not a conclusion so much as a crossing. Heresy names what happens when you step outside the stories you were handed—when you question what was sacred simply because it was old, when you refuse to keep bowing to what never loved you back.

Who Decided? has always been an invitation more than an argument. An offering. A slow unfolding meant to move through the body before it ever lands in the mind. If something stirred in you over these seven days—if a sentence lodged itself in your chest, if a memory surfaced, if a question wouldn’t let you go—that is the work doing what it came here to do.

Awakening doesn’t arrive like a lightning strike. It moves the way truth always has: quietly, persistently, finding those it’s meant to find.

May what you’ve heard continue to echo in the places that matter.
May it meet you where you are.
May it loosen what no longer serves.
May it remind you that you are allowed to choose.

Thank you for walking this path with me.

This section turns toward proximity.

Part VI of Who Decided? asks what happens when harm stops being abstract—when it’s no longer a headline, a villain, or a story about “somewhere else.” It’s about the moment we realize that systems survive through ordinary people, preserved innocence, and familiar faces.

Anchored in the story of Eudora Welty and the man who murdered Medgar Evers, this part isn’t about spectacle—it’s about recognition. It reveals how power hides in plain sight. How cruelty becomes domestic. How “good people” learn to look away.

It’s an invitation to notice where harm feels distant.
To question what innocence protects.
To sit with the discomfort of recognition.

This is where the myth of the monster breaks.
This is where the neighbor comes into focus.

Listen slowly.
Let it unsettle you.

The Pyramid is about hierarchy disguised as destiny.
About fairy tales and romance as training grounds.
About how “happily ever after” becomes a system—one that sorts us, ranks us, and teaches us to accept our place.

This is the first curriculum.
The one we never consented to.
The one that still lives in the body.

Listen for the scaffolding.
Notice what you were taught to reach for.
Notice what you were taught to accept.

For the next seven days, I’m sharing my essay, “Who Decided?” in spoken form—one section at a time—so it can unfold slowly, in the body, not just on the page.

This part looks at what happens when authority learns to sound like family—
when protection becomes control,
when guidance becomes governance,
and when the father becomes the state.

Listen for where safety began to feel like obedience.

In this section, I look at the stories that arrive disguised as innocence—the fairy tales, romances, and “happily ever afters” that quietly train us in obedience, longing, and restraint.

This is where desire is shaped before it’s named.

This is where compliance first feels like love.

Listen closely.

In this section, I explore the first stories we’re ever given—the ones that teach us who we’re supposed to be before we ever choose.

This is where fairy tales become training.

Settle in.

In this section, I explore how our earliest stories teach us who we are allowed to be long before we ever get to choose—how power enters the body as lullaby before it ever arrives as law.
It’s an invitation to notice what we were taught before we ever chose—and what it might mean to unlearn it.

The full essay is available in print on Substack.
Paid subscribers receive early access to the audio, one section per day.

Thank you for being here.

My last essay here was December 18, and I know some of you have been quietly holding space for me since then. I feel that, and I don’t take it lightly. When people choose to sit with your words, even in absence, that’s a kind of relationship.

I didn’t disappear because I ran out of things to say.
I went quiet because everything I wanted to say began rearranging itself.

Sometimes thinking isn’t linear. It can be tidal, with the same questions circling until they finally click into a shape you can live inside.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pulling on threads I’ve always carried:

• Why obedience is dressed up as love

• Why girls are trained to wait

• Why authority so often wears a masculine face

• Why systems built on hierarchy feel “natural”

• Why belonging so often asks women to shrink

And why, at sixteen, I walked away from a faith I wanted to believe in—not because I rejected morality, but because I refused to amputate myself in order to belong.

What’s been forming isn’t just an essay. It’s a reckoning with stories we inherit: fairy tales, sermons, myths of protection, myths of order, myths that tell us who we are for before we ever get to decide who we are.

This piece is me following those threads—through princesses and pulpits, through patriarchy and power, through a quiet Mississippi writer who once forced white readers to recognize themselves in a murderer.

It’s not neat. It’s not polite.
It’s honest.

And if you’ve been here since December, thank you for waiting.

Let’s begin.

The First Story We’re Given

Before we ever learn how power actually works, we’re taught how it’s supposed to feel.

It arrives wrapped in velvet and lace. In castles and crowns. In hymns and bedtime stories. In the soft authority of “happily ever after.”

When I say “women” here, I’m not talking about a narrow biology or a single story. I mean anyone who lives in, claims, or is shaped by womanhood—through body, psyche, spirit, culture, or choice. Woman is not a function. It’s a field.

The earliest myth most of us are given is not about becoming—it’s about being chosen.

You are taught that safety comes from being desirable.
That goodness is quiet.
That love is something that happens to you, not something you build.
That your reward is arrival—at the altar, at the kiss, at the ending.

The knight comes. The spell breaks. The story closes.

No one tells you what happens the next morning.

No one teaches you how to negotiate, how to disagree, how to leave. No one shows you a woman who belongs first to herself. The architecture of the story is simple: wait, behave, endure, be saved. It’s the same architecture I would later recognize in church—different costumes, same choreography.

Even the “progressive” updates keep the same spine.

Brave tells us Merida doesn’t want to be owned. She wants to fight for her own hand. It feels rebellious. It feels modern. But even there, the battle is framed around marriage—around whether she will be given or choose. The axis doesn’t move. It just tilts.

The myth persists:
Your life is a narrative someone else completes.

This isn’t just Disney. It’s sermons. It’s wedding culture. It’s the way girls are praised for being “good,” “easy,” “low-maintenance,” “understanding.” It’s the way we’re trained to interpret discomfort as devotion.

And that training is political.

Because a person who believes safety comes from proximity to power will not challenge the system that holds it.
A person who is taught to wait will not lead.
A person who sees themselves as protected property will hesitate to become a threat.

Fascism doesn’t begin with uniforms.
It begins with stories about who deserves to be guarded and who must be governed.

Patriarchy doesn’t begin with violence.
It begins with romance.

And by the time the world asks us to accept hierarchy—God above human, man above woman, some lives above others—we’ve already rehearsed the choreography.

We didn’t learn this from law. We learned it from lullabies.

The Fairy Tale Curriculum

We like to pretend these stories are harmless. Just cartoons. Just songs. Just dresses and tiaras and glittering castles.

But stories are how a culture teaches its children what to expect.

Long before we understand law, or money, or politics, we learn narrative. We learn what a life is supposed to look like. We learn what kinds of endings are worth wanting.

And for those of us shaped by girlhood—however that girlhood arrives—the lesson is consistent:

You are not the subject of the story.
You are the reward.

Princesses don’t build kingdoms. They inherit them. They don’t leave. They’re chosen. Their virtue is measured in patience, purity, and endurance. They are good because they wait. They are worthy because they are wanted.

Even when the stories modernize, the arc remains intact.

The heroine may be clever now. She may swing a sword. She may say no at first. But the climax is still arrival. The frame is still romance. The center of gravity is still being seen, being selected, being secured.

The world is something that happens to her.

And that becomes muscle memory.

You learn to read rooms before you read books.
You learn to soften your edges.
You learn that being “too much” is dangerous.
You learn that safety lives somewhere outside your body.

This is why the wedding becomes a cultural crescendo. A woman’s value is ritualized in white. Thousands of dollars, months of preparation, an entire industry built around one moment of being witnessed as chosen. We are taught to spend our lives moving toward a single photograph.

No one teaches us how to stay, how to leave, or how to belong to ourselves.

We’re handed a script where love looks like rescue and commitment looks like containment. Where endurance is mistaken for devotion. Where discomfort is reframed as depth.

And this is how obedience gets dressed up as romance.

Because a person trained to believe their future depends on being chosen will learn to tolerate almost anything in the meantime. They will confuse patience with virtue. They will interpret erasure as intimacy. They will wait for permission to become.

This isn’t about fantasy.

It’s about rehearsal.

It’s about teaching bodies to accept hierarchy before they ever encounter it in law, in church, in the workplace, in the state.

By the time authority arrives with rules, with borders, with guns, with God, the posture is already familiar.

We have been practicing submission in silk and song since childhood.

Training for Obedience

What these stories teach is not just romance. They teach posture.

They teach how to hold the body in relation to power.

To be good is to be agreeable.
To be loved is to be low-friction.
To be safe is to be small.

Over time, this becomes instinct. You don’t have to be told to yield—you anticipate it. You don’t have to be silenced—you edit yourself. You don’t have to be controlled—you learn to manage your own edges.

This is how hierarchy becomes intimate.

It doesn’t arrive first as law or threat. It arrives as tone. As praise. As the subtle reward for being “easy.” It arrives as the soft correction when you’re “too loud,” “too intense,” “too much.” It arrives as the smile that says that’s not how a woman behaves.

And the lesson sinks into the body:

Safety lives outside you.
Authority knows better.
Resistance is risk.
Endurance is virtue.

By the time power shows up in uniforms or policies, in pulpits or boardrooms, it doesn’t feel foreign. It feels familiar. It feels like home.

This is why fascism doesn’t need to invent obedience. It inherits it.

A population already trained to associate protection with submission is easy to govern. A culture that confuses authority with care will accept almost any hierarchy if it promises order. A people taught that goodness looks like compliance will mistake domination for stability.

Patriarchy does the emotional labor that fascism requires.

It teaches us to locate our worth in proximity to power.
It teaches us to interpret control as concern.
It teaches us that being chosen is more important than choosing.

And the training doesn’t end when the tiaras come off.

It just changes costume.

As we grow, the stories grow with us. We graduate from castles to cubicles, from ballgowns to blazers. We’re given new myths—9 to 5, The Devil Wears Prada, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, How to Make an American Quilt. These feel like progress. They center women. They name injustice. They offer friendship, ambition, voice.

And in many ways, they are a gift.

But notice where they land.

In The Devil Wears Prada, power is intoxicating—but wanting it too much is framed as a moral failing. Ambition becomes something a woman must flirt with and then renounce. The lesson isn’t “you deserve to lead.” It’s “don’t lose yourself.” Which quietly becomes: don’t want too much.

In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, growth is real, but the horizon remains relational. Love, loss, and connection carry the story—but power is emotional, not structural. The girls are allowed to become, but not to reorder the world they inherit.

Even 9 to 5, radical for its time, couches rebellion in comedy. The women win by fixing the system, not replacing it. The boss is softened. The office becomes humane. The hierarchy remains.

These stories crack doors. They matter. They gave many of us our first mirrors.

But they still orbit the same center:

Be better within the system.
Be fulfilled around power.
Be whole without overturning the order.

They teach us to negotiate, not dismantle. To survive, not redesign. To be exceptional without being foundational.

So even our “empowering” narratives often stop short of sovereignty.

They give us permission to cope—but not to command.
To be resilient—but not to be architects.
To be loved—but not to be dangerous.

Obedience doesn’t always look like submission.

Sometimes it looks like success that never threatens the structure that made it rare.

So when the world says trust me, the body remembers.
When it says this is for your own good, the muscles soften.
When it says stay in your place, it sounds like common sense.

This is not because people are weak.

It’s because they were trained.

Long before there were borders or ballots, there were bedtime stories.
Long before there were laws, there were lessons.

And those lessons were never neutral.

The Father Becomes the State

For a long time, I thought my break with Christianity was personal. Emotional. A teenage refusal dressed up as independence.

Now I see it as structural.

So much of Western religion is built on a single metaphor:
God as Father.

Not parent. Not ancestor. Not source.
Father.

Authority made intimate. Power made familial. Obedience reframed as love.

In that architecture, the divine becomes a man, and the man becomes a god. The household becomes a rehearsal space for hierarchy. The father’s authority is mirrored in the priest, in the king, in the boss, in the state. Doubt becomes disobedience. Disobedience becomes sin. And sin becomes something that must be corrected.

The father becomes the state.
The state becomes the father.

For some, that metaphor feels comforting. Protective. For others—especially those raised without a father, or with a violent one, or with a man whose authority was unpredictable or unsafe—the metaphor is not holy.

It is terrifying.

What happens when “father” doesn’t mean safety?
What happens when authority has already taught your body to brace?
What happens when the person who was supposed to protect you was absent, volatile, or cruel?

In those bodies, obedience doesn’t feel like love.
It feels like survival.

So when a system tells you to submit “for your own good,” it echoes something older. Something intimate. Something learned in rooms where leaving wasn’t an option.

This is why these structures hold.

They don’t rely on belief alone.
They rely on memory.

They draw power from the earliest relationships we have with authority—who fed us, who disciplined us, who left, who stayed, who scared us, who held us. They take the chaos of family and elevate it into cosmic order.

And then they tell us it’s natural.

This is where fascism finds its emotional footing. It doesn’t need to invent obedience. It sanctifies it. It wraps hierarchy in the language of care. It promises protection in exchange for surrender. It says: trust me, I know better.

For those taught that love comes from above, that safety comes from submission, that questioning is dangerous, that structure is salvation—this feels familiar.

This is how private wounds become public order.

It feels like home.

Which is why breaking from it is not just political.

It’s personal.

The Pyramid

Every system like this needs a shape.

Not just metaphorically, but materially. It needs a way to distribute power, value, safety, and meaning. It needs a way to decide who is centered and who is expendable. Who is protected and who is managed. Who belongs and who must prove they deserve to stay.

The shape is a pyramid.

At the apex sit white, cisgender, straight men—not because they are inherently more capable, but because the architecture was designed to center them. Patriarchy assigns authority to masculinity. Christianity, as empire, sanctifies that authority. Capitalism rewards accumulation and dominance. Fascism hardens it all into law.

Stacked together, they produce a world where:

• White men are framed as leaders, protectors, owners, deciders.

• White women are positioned as symbolic property—innocence to be guarded, lineage to be reproduced, morality to be performed.

• Everyone else is cast as labor, threat, resource, or problem.

This is not a binary of “men versus women.” It is a stratified system of roles. Gender is one of the levers. Race, class, ability, citizenship, and conformity decide how far up or down a body is placed. The pyramid doesn’t care who you are. It cares how useful you are to its shape.

This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a map.

It’s how the machine allocates humanity.

What makes this structure durable is that it doesn’t only distribute power—it distributes meaning. It tells people who they are for. It teaches white men that authority is inheritance. It teaches white women that safety comes from proximity. It teaches everyone else that survival requires accommodation.

Each tier is given a story that makes the arrangement feel natural.

Men are told they are burdened with responsibility.
Women are told they are cherished.
The rest are told they must earn their place.

No one is told they are standing on someone else’s back.

And because the stories are emotional, not just ideological, people defend their position even when it harms them. The man defends dominance as duty. The woman defends proximity as protection. The worker defends exploitation as opportunity. The citizen defends violence as security.

The genius of the pyramid is that it turns hierarchy into common sense.

You don’t have to be cruel to maintain it.
You just have to believe it’s the way things are.

That belief is the load-bearing beam.

Which is why the most dangerous question in a system like this is not who’s in charge?

It’s:

Who decided?

Eudora Welty and the Murderer Next Door

In 1963, a white writer in Mississippi did something most of her peers would never have dared.

Eudora Welty was not a radical by reputation. She was known for her gentility, her restraint, her deep Southern voice. She belonged—comfortably—to the world that taught women to be polite, to soften truth, to make things palatable.

When Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own driveway, Welty did not write a eulogy. She did not reach for uplift. She did not perform innocence.

Instead, she wrote a story from inside the mind of the man who killed him.

Not a monster.
Not a caricature.
A neighbor.

An ordinary white man irritated by a Black man’s visibility. A man who believed the world was changing in ways that threatened him. A man who acted. A man who went home and expected to be understood.

What Welty exposed was not the extremity of hatred, but its normalcy. The way violence grows out of everyday grievance. The way supremacy lives in kitchens and marriages and small talk. The way it sounds reasonable to the people who carry it.

That choice unsettled everyone.

White readers did not want to see themselves in the killer’s voice. Activists wondered why she would grant him interiority at all. Both sides were asking for the same comfort: a clear line between “us” and “them.”

Welty refused it.

She understood that systems survive by preserving innocence. By convincing people that harm only belongs to monsters, never to neighbors. That danger is external. That “people like us” are exempt.

She had lived too long among them to believe that.

Her resistance was not theatrical. She did not become a public crusader. She did something more destabilizing: she withdrew her cooperation from the lie. She wrote what she saw. She refused to perform for segregated audiences. She let institutions choose whether they would change or disappear.

She did not break the system.

She broke the spell. And spells are how systems survive.

And that is the kind of courage this machine cannot metabolize.

Because fascism depends on distance.
Patriarchy depends on innocence.
Empire depends on the belief that harm is always someone else’s work.

Welty made it intimate.

She showed that the murderer does not always wear a hood.
Sometimes he wears a wedding ring.
Sometimes he eats dinner and complains about his day.
Sometimes he thinks he is justified.

She did not give white readers a villain.

She gave them a mirror.

Heresy

I didn’t leave faith because I wanted chaos.

I left because I could feel the cost of belonging.

I could feel the way my body was being drafted into a story I did not choose. The way my doubt was being treated as defect. The way my hunger to become more was being framed as danger. I could feel the slow, polite pressure to make myself smaller in order to be safe.

And something in me said no.

Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just: no.

That refusal has followed me ever since.

It shows up every time a system tells me that hierarchy is natural.
Every time authority insists it knows my place better than I do.
Every time power dresses itself up as protection.
Every time I’m asked to trade wholeness for belonging.

What I believe now is simple, and it is heretical in a world built on pyramids:

Human beings are capable of morality without submission.
Care does not require domination.
Biology is not destiny.
Hierarchy is not sacred.

We do not need a father in the sky to be good.
We do not need a king to be safe.
We do not need to be small in order to be loved.

What we need is the courage to unlearn what was trained into our bones.

Because this machine—this braid of patriarchy, fascism, capital, and sanctified authority—only survives as long as we mistake inheritance for inevitability. It only holds if we believe the stories are older than choice. It only works if we never ask how any of it began.

But this was built.

Which means it can be unbuilt.

And the most dangerous question you can ask a system like this is

not Who’s in charge?

It’s Who decided?💎