Black Sense

when a child is taken from us and the one who took him walks free, the heart reaches for something that feels like power. for many of us that something is the boycott. we have been taught it is the one tool the powerless are allowed to hold, so we reach for it in grief, in rage, and we aim it at the nearest face.

but the person behind the counter is not the system. he is its most visible and least protected servant. the chain that truly grows rich; the makers, the importers, the owners far upstream, never feels our refusal at all. to wound a person in place of a structure is not justice. it is domination borrowing our hands, teaching us to do to others what has been done to us.

black sense asks us to do the harder and more loving thing. not to swallow our pain, and not to return it as hate, but to turn it into knowledge. to become literate in the chain itself. to learn where a thing is made, who profits at every link, what it quietly takes from our bodies, our wealth, our sense of worth. this literacy is not cold. it is a form of self-love and collective care, the practice of a people choosing to understand the world that shapes them so that they might remake it.

out of that knowing comes a power worthy of the name: to do without what harms us, to make our own, to build; here at home and across the diaspora, an economy we hold in common. this is boycotting from growth rather than from hate. it is the difference between performing our anger and practicing our freedom.

we do not have to answer contempt with contempt. we can refuse the old lie that loving our own requires hating another. we can choose, instead, to build a beloved and self-determining community; and to honor our dead not with more burning, but with something that lives and grows.