The early June sunshine creeps behind an afternoon cloud in Washington, D.C. The humidity is oppressive, a sticky haze that slows the psyche and makes one’s feet feel like they’re stuck in sand. Yet across 16th Street Northwest, near the black gates that block citizens from the White House North Lawn, the air feels freer; it’s filled with Black jubilation. Suddenly, a James Brown track blares down the block: “Say it loud! I’m Black and I’m proud!”
Bands play “Hallelujah” with a go-go tune near St. John’s Episcopal Church. Black boys form a circle to breakdance on the asphalt under the hot sun. Skateboarders shred the empty parking lots of boarded-up hotels. There’s praise dancing, gospel music, rejuvenation. The protesters who gathered in the nation’s capital stand tall, anew, as if war has been washed from their bodies. I’ve never seen anything like it. Racism, as the professor Imani Perry recently said, is the ravaging terror on Black life. But Blackness? Blackness is joy, unrivaled bliss in the face of a nightmarish American system. “We turned protest into a party,” Dayesha Sims, from Columbia, Maryland, tells me. “This is our culture, bringing everyone together to speak our truth and put everything on the line. We are showing a different side to America they don’t want to see.”
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