“When director, producer, screenwriter, and actress Issa Rae strolled down the red carpet at the Emmy Awards and told the world she was “rooting for everybody Black” to win that night, I hollered from the rooftops before subsequently entering a very anxious space, worrying about how those deeply honest words, not entirely comedic but spoken in a comedic tone, would be received by the White mainstream. Systemic racial oppression produces a very particular affiliation between members of the oppressed. What looks like unabashed racial pride to others is exactly that, but it’s also a reaction to how unabashed racial pride in others has ravaged Black communities, and yet here we are, every single day, still living, somehow defying even our own expectations just as we defy absolute death and collective (spiritual) destitution. This is what the poem celebrates, what it roots for and is rooted in.”
—Cortney Lamar Charleston