On Kool-aid
I brace my body in the short moments before it happens. Concentrating on the syncopation of heartbeat and breath, I remind my body to unfurl and relax. I wonder if you can see it – how your words cut the warmth of our discussion to sew my mouth shut. Do you see how this flippant colloquialism makes me retreat? The way eurocentrism shrouds around your analogy and buries me alongside my people's history.
Don’t drink the Kool-aid.
You said it with the same ease lovers reach across a short distance to entwine their fingers in one another's. Casually, as if Jonestown was a sleep away camp where the slumber was too delicious a respite from everyday life. As if the lives lost were only White. American. Valuable.
Don’t drink the Kool-aid.
I’ve heard this phrase throughout my whole life. When I zig zagged across playgrounds on sandaled feet, my teachers would caution us on peer pressure. When uncurled atop a well-worn couch or velvet theater recliner, celebrities and sitcom scenarios offered this as a word to the wise. It spilled out in lectures during evening seminars and quotidian interactions with loved ones, colleagues, strangers, and manifestations of popular culture.
I will not offer you a brief history. I will not lecture or ameliorate your discomfort with a teachable moment, or accept performative platitudes on not knowing – or even worse, that you were just joking. I should not have to tell you your glib reference comes from the largest mass murder-suicide in American and Guyanese history – that this massacre happened in my mother’s home.
I should not have to remind you that I am Guyanese or evoke examples of other massacres and violence to offer me the same courtesy. I will not play the oppression Olympics and do the labor of forgiving the tension and displeasure of your chagrin. I will not paint pictures of the Peoples Temple, Jim Jones, or the 300 minors murdered under the guise of salvation.
I will not offer your absolution.
I can only offer the truth. You must do better.
