I got canceled on Twitter. Related, my thoughts on race, hip-hop, and the future.

Apparently, I’m a tap-dancing sambo. This was not supposed to happen.

24 hours ago, I wrote a 21-tweet thread in relation to an issue raised by my fellow Washington, DC-area resident “DJ Chubb E Swagg” regarding the necessity for employment as a lead hip-hop curator by the National Museum of African-American History and Culture of Timothy Anne Burnside, who, for purposes of this post, is a white, female, and well-regarded music and cultural curator — especially in the African-American cultural space. This post has ultimately ended up with me being almost comically canceled by what feels like a solid 99% of African-Americans who have come across my missive.

The nature of being a black person, a PROUD black person, and to have my commitment to the history, evolution, and excellence of Our shared heritage be called into question in a savage manner, has been undoubtedly painful. It’s so painful that it’s dredged up 40 years of emotional angst that has made me decide to reach this point. A point of honest self-reflection. Ideally, I feel, if I’m honest with myself in a public forum, then, minimally, there’s the slightest chance for a better-shared space to exist than this one borne of anger. And, ideally, space to exist for conversation and acts based in full cultural and social awareness of where we are as not just black people, but as Americans in general.

It’s time, to tell the truth. I have to stop lying to everyone around me and presenting a false front about my humanity.

For the better part of my entire life, I have spent a solid 95% of my days rather aggressively harboring, and furthermore contemplating, my extraordinarily negative feelings about the intersections of my own race and class. I have never, though, in the midst of these moments, ever found myself at a place where I found myself to be a sellout, “coon,” “Uncle Tom,” or “race traitor” on any level. Rather, after getting myself angry to the point of having manic depressive thoughts occupy those times when I sit in contemplative silence, I’ve never broken ranks. I’ve never sat my blackness on the table and made it some sort of pawn available to the highest bidder. Instead, I’ve always found somewhere to store that negativity, to hide my blackness from predatory hands, and instead, smile through the pain. However, due to the rather astounding Tweetstorm I caused today, I’ve finally, after forty years of life, run out of places to store my panic, anger, and sadness about these things about myself, and I’ve found it literally impossible to be able to smile my pain away.

It wasn’t always this way, though. I grew up in far Northeast Washington, DC in the 1980s, which, as anyone aware of the legacy of Marion Barry knows, was a moment for tremendous Black pride in America. I also went to school at Bunker Hill Elementary, a public school in Northeast DC that had a 99% African-American population. While there, I was in the Academically Talented Student program. One of the great benefits of being in that era of Bunker Hill’s ATP program was that you were being taught by a generation of hyper socially-aware African-American women who, from Black History Month Quiz Bowl tournaments to singing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” in assemblies instead of “God Bless America,” gave off the sense being both black and proud were notions that, above all else, were the most important things to remember about living in a time and place where lessons learned at 14th and Michigan Avenue, Northeast was honing me as a leader who could replicate and profoundly carry forth the legacy of not just Marion Barry, but Fred Hampton, Shirley Chisholm, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and a plethora of other black leaders who inspired my youth.

However, simultaneously, I was raised in a largely African-American lower-to-middle income housing in a lower-to-middle income neighborhood. This was a neighborhood at 12th and Eastern Avenue, Northeast that bore a stunning similarity to areas I saw described by white people and — similar to my teachers in school and members of my family — black people worthy of respect on the evening news as being havens of crack cocaine abuse, prostitution, gang violence, and all manner of socially maladjusted and otherwise “bad” or “othered” behavior. It created a double consciousness and deeply negative stigma about my race, class, and gender that I have let fester as an open wound on my spirit for 30 years.

Add into this the fact that I was a hyper-intellectual child with thick glasses who actually loved the sound of how words were phonetically formed and physically written. From the 2nd grade forward, my style and manner of speech and writing have been profoundly affected by this notion. Most of the reason that I write — and ask any editor that’s had to read my pieces in the past ten years about this — is because I adore words. Synonyms and antonyms especially related to adjectives, but I digress. The point here is that anyone who has ever argued that I “sound like a nerdy white guy” when I talk, well, that’s related to the fact that Carolyn Pinckney, one of the greatest teachers and black people in general, that I have ever known, encouraged, embraced, and fostered that in me. Then, noting that having such diction, as well as mannerliness, could ultimately lift me out of my lower-to-middle class surroundings, and I was again, double-bound.

I’ve come to feel a certain level of despair about the nature of black people in America. For as much success as we’re having, we’re also still faced with large parts of our collective population dealing with the same type of blight (or worse), than they were faced with during my youth. It’s this doubling down on being double-bound, AGAIN, for what seems like yet another ten years of my life, that has me so massively distraught. It indeed left me distraught enough to tweet about the idea that the gap between black and white in America is a bridge too far to build. I am open to contemplating a world wherein we’re thinking of solutions, but if we’re stuck in this much of a stand-still malaise, creating solutions seems impossible.

I tweeted from a place of realizing that we’re in an untenable position as not just black people, but Americans in general. The actions of November 8, 2016, retrenched America in its wicked Founding ways. When it comes to how that impacts hip-hop culture, it’s intriguing. Hip-hop is the greatest of African-American inventions. What Kool Herc did in a basement in the South Bronx in 1974 has likely had a far greater global impact than the combined work of Garrett Morgan and Madame CJ Walker combined. That’s an impact, though, that has superseded African-American as a governing racial and cultural notion, of its genesis and culture of origin. All of this, at a point where a redevelopment of White American-led white supremacy is dominating our lives.

This bizarre confluence is where, amongst many tweets, one saying that — for many people, problematically — “That being said, I’d MUCH prefer hip-hop in the hands of a white woman from Wisconsin, then well, a black man from the South Bronx. There’s something about where we are with things now — on multiple levels — that makes this a smarter, safer, & more comfortable gambit,” emanates. Here are more facts that influenced my thinking.

• The Smithsonian, as a museum collection, is visited annually by roughly ten times as many white people as black people
• Likely the best curator for the job — with a working knowledge of Smithsonian protocol and larger business initiatives — of curating hip-hop as a larger part of what is the creation of an ongoing multicultural narrative and conversation about race and music, is a white woman.
• Hip-hop, as a genre, now likely has as much to do with black people as it does white people, brown people, red people, and yellow people. Wholly globalized as a pop cultural touchstone, to somehow limit hip-hop to a “black-only” or “black-first” perspective is limiting. Yes, it may be on some level historically necessary, but it also presents a viewpoint that is just not realistic when contemplating the spread of the genre. It is my intrinsic belief that what was once JUST “black” and “hip-hop” is now something that’s actually universally quite easily understandable.

Context, even in just south of the 6,000 characters I used in my tweets, is hard to truly convey. Add into my context on hip-hop the fact that for the better part of ten years, I covered electronic dance music. EDM being a genre wherein, for a large percentage of the 2010s, largely privileged white kids spent more money than most “othered” and “bad” black people will see in ten lifetimes jumped up and down screaming “nigga” at the top of their lungs. While stealing the social cues invented by black people, they, from a raw numerical standpoint, occupy the commercial lead and dominate the mainstream push to unforeseen levels of musical and societal relevance of hip-hop culture. If there’s any time you’ve seen a picture of me smiling and happy while at Electric Zoo or someone else’s neon PLUR fest, know that somewhere deep behind that smile, there’s a 12-year-old proud black boy with a broken heart.

Maybe I shouldn’t tweet while depressed and broken-hearted. Or, maybe I shouldn’t tweet while being aggressively angst-ridden about my racial and cultural history. Or, maybe I’m just beyond exhausted from spending 40 years in an ever-present emotional paralysis regarding my race, plus wondering how America, on multiple levels, is regarding and will regard both me and my future.

I am unquestionably apologetic for shocking and alarming people unaware of my particular perspective on matters like these. Regarding next best steps following the hubbub I have unexpectedly caused, I would like to place forth a solution. Moving forward, I am willing to — with the aid of those who wish to accept the depth of my resolve regarding this matter — develop ideas and concepts that highlight and preserve black culture in America, while simultaneously creating sustainable cultural bridges between ourselves and the world-at-large.