I AM HOME: A Love Letter to the Black Feminine Interior of This Place Called America

Dear Sistas,

I am…home. Let me paint the scene for you. It's a random weekday morning. My husband, Money$Ron, is working. My daughter, Cameron the Conscious, is at school. My son, Caiden the Curious, is being a tiny agent of beautiful chaos, roaming the house searching for some profound treasure. He discovers the TV remote, a device of pure power, and does what any sovereign toddler would do. He turns the world on and then disappears, taking his newfound scepter with him.

I don't even notice at first. I don't watch much programmed television anymore. Just my carefully curated rotation of crime-solving sitcoms, reruns of Living Single, and The Real Housewives of Potomac. #welcomehomeGRANDDAME. STAY UP!

But then I hear it. The grating and nauseating sound of Bill Maher's voice cutting through the air. When I look up on the screen, I see him, Michael Steele, and some White Woman with nothing to say. My last nerve said: Oh hellllll no!

But here's the thing. The mission could not be aborted. The commander of the remote had absconded. I was trapped on the couch, a prisoner of circumstance. Forced to watch this clown show. And it was a scene.

Maher says reporters on the ground were complaining they couldn't find Black people to interview at the protests. So he turns to Steele, a conservative who happened to be Black, but post-election a Black who now happened to be conservative. He launches this grenade of a command: "You talk! Where are the Black people?"

Steele, grinning like a Cheshire cat, tries to joke his way out. "We had a meeting," he says. The studio audience chuckles. He squirms and smiles like he's proud he told some cute, insider "Black people" joke. But let's be clear. Ain't nobody in the culture inviting him to no damn meetin'. The only meeting he was invited to was that one. On that panel. To answer that whack-ass question for these people.

And the remote is still in the wind. The irony was as thick as Popeye's biscuits. Dangerously delicious.

The joke was on him anyway. In that moment, the panel didn't need Steele the conservative. They needed a Black body to answer for Black people. The election and the protests had racially rehyphenated him, making his Blackness the only salient fact in the room. He'd spent years building a brand as a Republican operative, and now the national panic had reduced him to a demographic spokesman. He was tasked with explaining a collective he wasn't even sure he was part of. His flippant "meeting" was a desperate bid for personal agency. A way to say "we decided" in a conversation that had just turned him into a statistical proxy.

But here's the thing I noticed that really broke it open for me. Steele couldn't answer that question with any authority, though he usually tries to speak from that place in other instances. He fumbled. He joked. He squirmed. And then he mentioned the "Kamala thing," some throwaway line about former Vice President Harris. That was the smoking gun.

See, in that moment of discomfort, Steele confirmed something I always suspected. Blackness isn't just a social construct of race. It is a racially gendered construct. And he, as a Black man, was being asked to stand in for an experience he couldn't fully represent. The question wasn't really "Where are the Black people?" It was "Where are the Black women?" Because when America looks for its conscience, when it looks for its moral authority, when it looks for someone to carry the weight of the nation's racial grief and outrage, it's looking for us. Always us. Steele knew he couldn't speak to that. Not really. And his discomfort was the crack where the light got in.

So there I am. Stuck. Watching two people I have no fucking interest in, a token who knows he's out of his depth and a creep, plus some White Woman with nothing to say. They're pondering a question that wasn't theirs to ask, having a whole confused conversation about where the Black women were.

And I thought to myself: now why are we always in it?

And then it hit me. There was a conversation happening there that even they weren't aware of. A systems glitch, if you will. And I caught it.

THE MISSED CUE

Eventually, I found Caiden the Curious running full speed down the hallway with the now-wet remote in hand. Never mind what it was wet with. Once the TV was off again, I sat in the blessed silence. But the question kept repeating itself in my head:

Where are the Black women? Where are the Black women?

It played on a loop, sticky and strange. There was something in it. Something about visibility.

See, the crowd on that screen before I turned it off was a beautiful showing of solidarity. Something we'd never quite seen before in this country. Young. Seasoned. Rich. Working class. White collar. Blue collar. Democrats. Liberals. Republicans. Conservatives. Veterans. LGBTQIA+. ALL TOGETHER.

These are people who, in American history, have varying degrees of hypervisibility. But all of them are typically more visible than us. On that day, at that protest, in that moment, with that question hanging in the air, our absence was hypervisible as opposed to their attendance.

And here's what I need to be clear about. There were Black people there. There were Black men in that crowd. There were even a few Black women sprinkled throughout. Which is to be expected because, you know, we're not a fucking monolith. But it seemed the reporters were expecting a quota of Black flesh, not the substance of Black conviction. So the reporters' claim that they "couldn't find Black people to interview" wasn't true. What they meant was that they couldn't find enough Black people. They couldn't find the critical mass. They couldn't find the visual representation they needed to tell the story the way they wanted to tell it.

Think about that for a second. A sea of people, historically centered in different ways, shapes, and forms, and the most noticeable thing to reporters is that we weren't there enough. And if they couldn't get enough of us, they'd settle for Steele. Any Black body would do to explain why we weren't performing our assigned role.

Hmmmm...

And that's when it clicked. This hypervisibility thing can't just be some happening of fate. It wasn't just who happened to be in front of the lens. It signified that visibility, the American gaze itself, is perhaps prescribed with a purpose.

It hit me like that bitch I fought at The Moon in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2008. Hard. But not hard enough to keep me off her ass!

Was the protest a stage? Was the question a frantic stage manager's whisper from the wings? Did Black people, specifically Black women, miss their cue? We must have. Because if we were supposed to be there, and our absence was the thing reporters felt most called to talk about, then we must have had a role. A predetermined one.

So I had to ask the real question. The one buried under the panic:

What role were we cast to play? And if we had a role, did everyone else have one too?

But here's the thing about questions like that. They don't just appear out of nowhere. They sit with you. They marinate. They force you to look back at everything you thought you understood and see it with new eyes. So before I could answer who wrote us into this role, I had to sit with what that role actually was.

WHO DIS FA?

America, in its founding psychosis of white supremacy, needed a site to extract from and a site to define itself against. It needed a well. Think about it. To form an identity of superiority across the world and eventually through social proximity within its own borders, you need something to be superior to. You need a source you can draw from that makes everything else grow. And you need that source to be deep enough, dark enough, to hide all the things you don't want the world to know about you.

That well is us.

Every drop of freedom this country claimed was drawn from our enslavement. Every declaration of independence depended on our containment. Every myth of American ingenuity, American prosperity, American exceptionalism, all of it watered by the well of Black women's bodies, Black women's labor, Black women's care, Black women's silence.

We were made the well so they would never have to taste their own thirst.

Our suffering proved the system's power. Our expected resilience absolved it of the crime. Our nurturing capacity, twisted into Mammy, then Welfare Queen, then Strong Independent Black Woman, became the mechanism this country used to feel like a compassionate people, even as it tore our families apart in the process.

Our erasure wasn't a side effect. It was the central requirement. You can't keep draining someone of their life source if you see them as a person. You have to see them as a resource. A function. Infrastructure.

And here's what happens when infrastructure stops performing. When the well runs dry. Panic.

Because the American system of oppression and its beneficiaries never learned how to dig for their own water.

Which brings me back to that protest, that segment, that panic. When the system couldn't find its lead actress, everyone felt unease. Not because they missed us, but because we weren't in our assigned positions. The stage was set, the lights were up, and the role we'd been written to play, the grieving mother, the outraged citizen, the noble victim, the voice of conscience, was empty. They didn't know how to perform their own parts without us there to perform ours.

SYSTEMIC DIS-EASE

But is it unease or dis-ease? To know for sure, let's go back a little bit. To a time that seems both long ago and just yesterday. When the pandemic hit, the whole stage went dark. The directors, the politicians, the CEOs, the "leaders" froze. The script the American System of Oppression and its beneficiaries had been reading from for centuries suddenly had no next line. The system seized up.

Hospitals overwhelmed. Supply chains collapsed. Schools shut down with no plan. The economy teetered. And the people charged with leading us through it? They stared at cameras, shrugging, saying "we're learning as we go" while people died.

And into that silence, that vacuum of legitimate power, something else stepped forward. Not a new leader. An old knowing.

Black women stepped into the spotlight and displayed an emergent, organic response born of centuries of practicing survival and care under existential threat. The system's script called for Black women to be passive recipients of aid or hypervisible victims on the news. Instead, we became the primary authors of the response. Let me explain it through a metaphor every one of us knows quite intimately:

The Thanksgiving Kitchen

Picture the kitchen on Thanksgiving day. The house is all abuzz with cousins and friends of the family making all kinds of noise. The music is loud. The uncles are outside playing spades. The kids are running through the house at full speed. And the most reliable of the family, the aunties, are in the kitchen, preparing a feast for us all. In that kitchen, no one is inherently the "boss" because no one needs to be. The coordination is nonhierarchical, intuitive, and based on a shared, unspoken commitment to the outcome. A nourishing feast for the family and the preservation of the family itself. It is a sacred, distributed intelligence.

Now, map that onto America's response to the pandemic.

Preparing the Meats (Political and Legal Accountability)This is the role of grave responsibility. If the meat isn't handled right, people get sick. It requires precision, timing, and a steadfast commitment to safety and integrity.

In the pandemic kitchen: Stacey Abrams in Georgia, meticulously organizing to secure a presidential election and Senate amidst a pandemic and voter suppression. Fani Willis and Letitia James building meticulous legal cases against election interference and financial fraud at the highest levels. They weren't just making a main course. They were ensuring the foundation of the meal, the body politic, wouldn't poison us all. They worked with the bone-deep knowledge that a single misstep could cause catastrophic, national illness.

Seasoning the Greens (Public Health and Science)This is about essential nourishment. The greens aren't just for taste. They are for replenishment, for building the immune system. You make sure it tastes good, but its deeper purpose is sustenance and resilience.

In the pandemic kitchen: Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett at the NIH, developing the vaccine's scientific blueprint, the ultimate nutrient. Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith chairing the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, working to get those nutrients to the bodies that needed them most. Dr. Ala Stanford creating her own community vaccine distribution when the state failed. They were fortifying the community's immune system against a lethal threat, providing the foundational care the official system had neglected.

Mixing the Pies and Sweets (Community Care, Mutual Aid, and Joy Making)This is the nourishment of the spirit. The pies are for joy, for sweetness, for the reminder that care can be a delight. It is what makes the hard work worth it. It is love made edible.

In the pandemic kitchen: This took multiple forms. Mariame Kaba and thousands of unnamed local organizers created mutual aid networks, distributing groceries, rent relief, and PPE. This was the sustaining, soulful nourishment that kept bodies alive when institutions failed. On Youtube, the children's entertainer Ms. Monica became a lifeline. For exhausted parents and anxious kids, her channel was a daily dose of spiritual fortification, a reminder that laughter and play were not luxuries but essential ingredients for survival. She was delivering freshly baked pies of joy to our children while on lockdown. Together, this was the complete dessert course: a declaration that survival is not enough. We will also have our sweetness. We will also protect our children's right to wonder.

Managing the Front Room and the Phone Tree (Logistics and Narrative Leadership)This is the auntie who keeps the chaos at bay. She orchestrates the flow. She tells the kids to go play. She reminds someone to pick up the extra pans.

In the pandemic kitchen: Nikole Hannah-Jones framing the moment through the 1619 Project, providing the historical container. Brittany Packnett Cunningham offering daily moral analysis and clarity. They were managing the narrative, fielding the chaos of disinformation, creating the intellectual space for the moment to be understood for our people.

The Watchful Cousins (aka Aunties in Training) (Access and Accommodations)These are the cousins, big and lil', who move through the world with different rhythms. They are watching the kids, running interference, and most importantly, they are the ones who ask "Auntie, you good? You need anything?" before you even know you're straining. They see the barriers in the room before anyone trips. Their genius is in designing the table where everyone, including the aunties who cooked, has a seat they can actually sit in. A table built for all of our bodies.

In the pandemic kitchen: Organizers like Tamika Mallory were managing the national phone tree, translating boots-on-the-ground fury into actionable policy demands and mobilizing mutual aid. They orchestrated the response while the house was on fire. And in the halls of power, you had the new-school aunties-in-the-making like Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, using parliamentary procedure and viral clapbacks to defend the kitchen from the floor of Congress itself. She proved the front room could be anywhere we decide to hold our ground.

The Late Shift Aunties (Essential and Service Labor)These are the ones who show up later, still in their uniforms. The nurses, the firefighters, the transit workers pulling double shifts. They arrive exhausted. And you know what we do. We greet them with hugs, not questions. We have a warm seat waiting. We pull out the plate we hid in the oven and the whole pie slice we saved just for them. Leave her alone. Let her eat in peace.

In the pandemic kitchen: The Black women nurses, doctors, and transit workers. Chris Smalls and Michelle Valentin who organized unions after brutal shifts. They were given no reprieve by the system, so the community's kitchen, through mutual aid funds and mental health collectives, saved them a plate.

What was understood needed no explanation. No meeting minutes, MICHAEL! No org charts, BILL! The coordination flowed from a deeply encoded knowledge of how to sustain life under siege. It was leadership as kinetic care. Intelligence as practical love. The living archive in motion.

But this feast was prepared at a staggering, sacrificial cost. There were empty chairs at the table. Late shift aunties who never made it to dinner.

Breonna Taylor, an essential worker, was killed in her home during lockdown. Her uniform likely hangs in her mother's closet. Black women doctors and nurses died from COVID on the frontlines they were forced to hold. The college presidents and professionals succumbed to the invisible weight of leading our children through impossible times. The sisters we lost to suicide, the psychological toll exacting its final price.

Chief Danielle M. Cox was promoted to become Pittsburgh's first Black female fire chief in 2021, a historic moment during the pandemic. She resigned in 2023 after just 18 months, citing a "hostile work environment" and "retaliation" from within the rank-and-file and the city's public safety leadership. She was a "Late Shift Auntie" who was given the symbolic title but denied the actual authority and respect, then consumed by the system's toxicity.

Their absences are the stark, silent testament. The American system of oppression and its beneficiaries, in its moment of collapse, consumed the very potential it summoned to save itself.

And the response from that system? Witnessing this feast of sovereign potential, a world functioning on a logic of care, accountability, and distributed genius, the system didn't offer us gratitude. It tipped over the table. The feast was thrown around the room. And the torches flew in rapid succession to burn the kitchen down by:

• Discrediting the Chefs: The attacks on Fani, Letitia, and others.

• Disgarding the Food: The anti-CRT/DEI laws, the anti-vax disinformation.

• Reestablishing the Hunger: The clawback of accommodations, the crushing of union drives.

• Setting the Kitchen on Fire: The dismantling of public health networks, education departments, broadcasting services.

The pandemic rupture revealed a chasm between two ways of being in the world.

One operates on scarcity, outsources blame, measures success in profit, and holds us to a standard of flawless sacrifice. The other operates on faith and service, coordinates through care, measures success in nourishment, and saves plates for the weary.

The backlash we are seeing now is the traumatic reassertion of the first against the glimpsed alternative. It is a violent campaign to reimpose a scarcity mindset on a populace that tasted a different possibility. That care could be unconditional. That accountability could be structural. That community could operate on the principle of saving a plate, not fighting for scraps.

The empty chairs are the verdict. The American system of oppression and its beneficiaries, faced with its own inadequacy, consumed the very potential it summoned, then lit torches to chase the chefs from the hall.

It's giving ROSEWOOD. It's giving TULSA. It's giving all the other sites where Black potential and Black lives were destroyed to maintain the system this country was founded on.

WHERE WE ARE

So let me circle back to the question that started all this. Where are the Black people?

But now we know the real question, don't we? The question underneath the question. The one Steele couldn't answer. The one the reporters couldn't ask. The one that had Bill Maher's panel in a panic. Where are the Black women?

Here is what I have come to understand. When the American system of oppression and its beneficiaries asks that question, they are not actually looking for us. They are looking for someone to help put out the fire they created. They are looking for us to come put out the fire in their house.

See, instead of thanking the Black women who held this shit together while the house burned around us, the people in power panicked. They set fire to the only place in the house that was trying to function naturally within the chaos. They burned the kitchen down. And now they are running around with buckets of water, wondering why the flames are spreading to the rest of the house.

So where are we? It depends on who you ask...

Some of us are still inside that house, fighting fires, saving what can be saved, protecting the vulnerable who cannot leave. Some of us are standing at the exits, helping others get out before the ceiling collapses. Some of us are already outside, catching our breath, watching the flames leap from the windows, wondering if anything worth saving is left.

And some of us, like me, have decided we can’t go back.

MY REFUSAL

This brings me to my verdict. My refusal. Mine.

I tried to go back. Lord knows I tried. After the pandemic, after the field almost broke me, I still tried to make myself useful to it. But every time I walked back into those buildings, I felt it. The extraction. The expectation that I would give and give and give and ask for nothing in return. And one day I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't pour from a well that had already run dry.

This refusal doesn't come from nowhere. It is an act of protecting what Hortense Spillers called the "flesh," the vulnerable, sentient core of being, from being stitched into the "body" of the nation. That political fiction requires our pain as its binding agent. This writing is a broadcast from the protected interior. A signal from the flesh that got away.

AND THIS "I" WHO WRITES THIS?

It is a product of an unerasable "we." Remember the Watchful Cousins? The ones asking "Auntie, you good? You need anything?" before anyone even knows they are straining? The ones designing tables where everyone can actually sit?

That was me. Back in 2020, just before the pandemic hit, I was one of those watchful cousins. I had just completed my doctorate program and had this vision for an organization. I called it The Roaring Twenties, LLC. back then. I was unemployed, with a one-year-old, working hard to build something from within a system I was still trying to make work for me. I got the idea from a dark night of the soul, when I was trying to find out what my purpose was in this life. I awoke one morning with the concept of a protected space for just us. Somewhere safe enough to dream in wholeness and not just react in crisis. So that is what I wanted to build. And I did. Back then.

So imagine me, all excited, walking up to the Universe during the pandemic response. I had my laptop, my vision board, my whole presentation ready. And I was like, "Auntie, look what I made! It's a space for us, for Black women, to..."

And God looked at me with that look. You know the one. The "baby, that's nice but we're busy saving the actual world right now. Put that right there so I can look at it later” look.

CHILE. LOL!!!

That conversation didn't actually happen, but you get it. So you know what I did? I went back to the field. Education. Where I thought I could be more useful to the world. And I didn't touch that vision again for years. I thought I had failed us. I thought I failed myself.

My husband, who has ALWAYS told me I'm supposed to think BIG and write, kept pushing me to get after it. I was reluctant. I didn't think I could do it again. I was soul-tired. I didn't feel like being creative. Then my homegirls told me to do it too. I still sat. Then my Black woman therapist told me journaling might be a good place to start.

You know what we say in our culture? Death comes in threes. To me, that meant I needed to let the ego die and just submit to purpose.

As I was researching all this shit that came up from that random moment on TV that day, it forced me to think back on this organization. I went back and looked at what was there from 2020. And girlllllll! This shit looked like an organization built for Black women by someone outside of our community. Like some shit Michael Steele's token ass would create.

And I was disgusted. HA!

It read like I was still asking for permission. With all its problem analysis, funding invention, membership plans, begging for grants, trying to prove our worth to people who would never see it. It didn't feel like what it was supposed to be in my vision.

And I realized something. I needed to go through everything I had since 2020 to finally say fuck this. I rewrote everything from this sovereign place. This place of refuge. And this organization, The Roaring Twenties, LLC., is part of my commitment to myself and to all of you.

I WANT MY FUCKING FREEDOM FROM ALL THIS CHAOS NOW.

I realized if it had been poppin' back in 2020, if God had said "Ooh child, yes, let's do this!" it would have been more harmful to me and us. Because I would have built it inside that ole’ framework, using that ole’ scarcity logic, asking for that stale ass permission, seeking that ole’ validation.

But from this space right now, where I refuse to go back into that burning house? From this space where I've finally stopped trying to be useful to everyone and started being purposeful to me? It is exactly where I need to be.

THE NEW HOUSE

So I'm walking on faith and building something new. A new house. Entirely. And I'm starting with The Den.

You know the den, right? In our homes, the den is where the real shit happens. It is not the formal living room where we keep the plastic on the furniture. It is not the dining room where we bring out the good plates and silverware for guests. It is the comfortable space. The one where you can put your feet up. Where you can laugh loud without shushing yourself. Where you can say what you really mean.

That is what I'm building first. A den. A space for us. A place where we are welcome. Not tolerated. Not included. Not given a seat at someone else's table. Welcome. Longed for. Destined to be together.

A place where we can share wisdom and collect supportive advice from one another. Where we can rest. Where we can plan. Where we can be our full, ridiculous, brilliant, hilarious selves without performing for anyone else's comfort.

The American System of Oppression can keep asking where we are. It can keep looking for us to come put out its fires. Reporters can keep wondering why the well won't give water, why the infrastructure won't perform, why the lead actress missed her cue.

It's cuz' we're home.

And in our home, we are welcome all over the house. We are in our own kitchens, creating and experimenting with joy. We are with our own people, eating our own fruits and berries. We are tending to our own gardens in the shade of the burning house they are still trying to save. We are in our bathing rooms, soaking weary feet and smiling at ourselves in mirrors. We are in our bedrooms, listening to music, reading books, and rubbing our feet together under warm blankets before we drift off to sleep, dreaming about better worlds.

Together.

PULL UP ON ME

So this is the real sovereign invitation.

I welcome any Black woman in America who is done with the labor of justifying her humanity to a broken record to join me. Not in fixing the old world. But in breathing life into a new one.

Because Sistas, I am always seeking you. Seeing you. Searching for us.

If you were there at that protest, I probably would have watched the segment just to name that you were there but safe. But your absence, your relative absence, did something amazing. It allowed my beautiful brain to wander the way my son does around the house. Lifting up things, trying to find something even remotely interesting to keep my mind busy.

And when I sought after you, wandering, I was able to find the dis-EASE.

And from that dis-ease, I found my way home.

To us.

To The Den.

To whatever we are about to build together.

If you are down to spend whatever days we got left in this bitch, be they few or many, carving out our own version of bliss, loving out loud, thinking without permission, building our own systems, and cackling under the sun...

Then pull up, sis.

You can submit your request for access by visiting TheRoaringTwentiesLLC.com and signing up.

OH…and make sure your social media profiles are public. We gotta check your archives before you're granted admission here. All skinfolk aint kinfolk...IYKYK.

I Love You, Sistas. MUAH!

Talk to you soon,

❤️LIGHTSEY❤️