The Violence of Normal

Contrasting shadows and playful letters challenge the notion of "normal" with a dramatic twist.

Normal is a joke. I refuse to mince my words in that regard. Everyday people die at the hands of the status quo, the oppressive hegemony that is violently enforced on our communities through economic apartheid and state sanctioned violence. It’s important to sit with that, to understand the stakes of the situation. It’s imperative we dismantle normal, brick by brick, from social expectations and conventions, to the physical organization of our spaces. When I talk like this with people that aren’t my close friends, the first thing they respond with is how pessimistic it seems. How despondent must I be, to desire the destruction of all that surrounds me? They say, let's look forward and try to reform/redress/reframe all the structures that murdered your ancestors and continue to pain and dissect your family members, and make something new and better. And to that I say, how can you possibly even attempt a good faith reconstruction of society without meditating on the heavy weight of that task and the current violences that prevent it? 

I’m what they call in the biz, an Afro-Pessimist. Afro-pessimism is a fairly new term that I apply to thinkers retroactively. There’s a long lineage of Afro-Pessimist thinkers and writers that I admire like Franz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartmann, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Orlando Patterson, and even figures from Black Nationalist Religious traditions like Ben Ammi and the Noble Drew Ali. In African Traditional Religions, there’s an understanding that the world that we occupy is not all that there is, or all that there will ever be; as above, so below. These giants of black thought all spoke in their various methods and modes to the realities of how anti-blackness has been foundational to the construction of what we call the modern world. We can pinpoint specifically how as well. Should we talk about the advent of insurance within the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, allowing human-traffickers to profit from the murder of their victims? And now I have to pay insurance and debt payments to some of those very same corporations. Or maybe we should talk about the destruction of indigenous architecture, that now “we” understand to have been optimized for cooling and heating within their environments, something that we’re now burning a hole in the ozone layer to achieve with air conditioning systems. Or we can talk about the demonization and criminalization of indigenous medical practices, that now we like to call “holistic” health approaches with no nod to or acknowledgement of the communities who had their doctors lynched for keeping those practices alive. When I look around at the world around me, with the hard fought privilege of being able to learn so much about it, all I see is blood, the blood of my ancestors and the blood, sweat, and tears I witness my family toil everyday. I wish more people saw how bloody normal truly is. 

As a multiply-neurodivergent first-generation African-American person, I’ve felt, fought, and tasted the violence of normal on a daily basis. Normal is responsible for both the infliction of traumatic experiences onto people, and the construction of some brains as being more productive and worthy of life than others. I love all the readings we do about creating inclusivity and belonging, but sometimes they are really hard to sit with, because they often take for granted that not just disabled people are struggling with the status quo, and that the status quo is also actively disabling. It’s hard to accept that there are some brains that are just “non-normative” when I know all that I know about the world. Normativity is not something that anyone is or isn’t; it’s an active cultural campaign of domination and settler-colonialism. Neuro-convergence is not a neutral thing happening in society, it’s the result of centuries of settlers explicitly and violently setting themselves apart from indigenous people of the world so that they can call us and our heritages backwards and deserving of destruction. I’d venture to say that neuro-queerness is simply a return to indigenous ways of being in the world, and that neurodiversity as a framework has a responsibility to actively decolonize our understandings of the brain, medicine, and societal constructions in very actionable ways. Why would I respect an institution like the American Psychiatric Association, when they called my enslaved ancestors disordered for not wanting to be enslaved anymore? What does that say about their orientation towards the world and their commitment to hegemony? Why is it acceptable that an institution like that gets to continue to dictate the confines of mental health and psychiatric medicine? To be as honest as possible, I find it utterly disgusting and despicable. It’s not just bad, or just needing reform, it’s incomprehensibly reprehensible and requires swift and wide-sweeping intervention. But because that doesn’t happen, because people have such an allegiance to hegemony and this concept of reformation, the American Psychiatric Association gets to continue to publish copies of the DSM, declaring the deficits, disorders, and incompetencies of our neurodivergent community members. I think it’s important to be willing to abandon that which perpetually marginalizes entire communities of people. And it’s not something that scares me, because I’m so incredibly excited to finally occupy a world I feel does not seek my destruction. 

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Happy New Year! I hope going into 2025 you have the ability to condemn normal/business as usual in defense of yourself and your communities. Check out my playlists Dystopia 20xx and Liberation Talks on Spotify, for life defending and sustaining vibes. Sometimes music is the greatest way to process a moment, past, present, or future. Do your best to stay here and have a hell of a time while your at it!

Dystopia 20XX / Y2K Playlist

Liberation Talks Playlist