TW // Discussions of suicide, death, implications of racism
Image depicts a black background with two hands holding a singular candle, illuminating the photograph. Candles often being associated with paying tribute to the dead.
Image depicts a black background with two hands holding a singular candle, illuminating the photograph. Candles often being associated with paying tribute to the dead.
A quote I’ve seen on Twitter a while back reads, “many people suffering with depression and anxiety can be cured with financial stability,” which might sound strange to those who have been lucky enough to never experience financial hardship. I’ve always known I was poor, I always knew my peers who engaged in criminal acts were poor, and for most of my life I’ve viewed my death as a way to escape. Escape the sights of my mom stressing, escape the nights without food, escape an existence that only served to make me suffer. In my eyes death has never been a “sacrifice or a sin, it was simply efficient. I wouldn’t have to exist in a system that wanted me dead at every turn, and my mother would no longer have to be burdened with caring for me and be free of the label of “another black single mother.” Everybody wins. Everyone. Wins. Including the very system who didn’t want me to walk this Earth in the first place.
When watching The Strike, seeing many people who came from backgrounds just like the kids I grew up with, I didn’t understand what made them decide to protest via a hunger strike. Self-immolation is no doubt an effective form of protest, but what made me question it was the simple fact that, is this not what our oppressors want? For us to kill ourselves off, making things easier for those above us because now they have less work to do? It was a form of protest that I could understand being effective, but only for those who the powers that be actually care to lose. If the undesirables died, what reason would those in power have to care to change? For people that the powers that be actually care about, suicide is a sacrifice, an act meant to encourage others to act to insure that no one else should feel the need to die just to end their suffering. But when those whom society deems as less than commit suicide, it is just that, a suicide, an isolated incident that no one should think much of.
