When Do You Wake Up? No One's Coming To Save You

This is Advice From Unk. Today's column is longer than usual. It's also the most personal thing I've written for this publication. If you've been reading The Human Player for the past month, you know I don't do fluff. This is the piece that started it all — the essay that made me realize I needed a place to write without guardrails. Pour something. Sit down.

There's no magical man coming down from the sky to save you.

-William Torain

I'm not trying to disrespect anyone's religious beliefs. I just believe that Christianity has been the longest and most detrimental form of oppression for Black people.

From August 20th, 2001 through 2011, I used to think Jesus Christ was coming to save me. But at some point, after learning about the possibility of the misrepresentation of who Jesus might've been, I woke up from the dream of being saved by someone else's hands.

My faith wavered as I wondered how I could happily exist in heaven while my friends and family from Earth, who hadn't been devoted, were nowhere in sight. Wouldn't I mourn for them? Should I abandon them and only befriend Christians? I felt anxious thinking about praising God for all eternity. Heaven sounded like a lonely prison.

Although the end result of these thoughts led to me leaving Christianity, while I was a Christian, my life felt fulfilled. I learned about love and humility in those ten-plus years. Praying, attending church, and building a relationship with faith brought me closer to embracing the metaphysical — what exists beyond our reality and the five senses. I'm grateful because without Christianity as a foundation for seeing beyond myself, I would probably still be suffering from depression, nihilism, and misanthropy.

But I woke up. I realized that if there wasn't an omniscient being coming to save me tomorrow, then there wasn't a physical being coming to save me today. I had to start saving myself and work with other people to start saving each other.

Christianity was indoctrinated into the global Black experience by way of colonization. From there, the cultures of African countries began to lose significance. As Africans became enslaved and were shipped to various countries throughout the Americas, Jesus — an apparent white man born in the Middle East — became their lord and savior and the constant social reminder that white is right, even if you're in shackles.

The oppressive Black experience in the U.S. has been consistent. It's gotten relatively better overall as values, ideologies, and representation have changed, but at the core of the American experience, Black people are collectively viewed and treated as third-class citizens.

Every few decades, a cultural experience shifts the Black American dynamic — notably the Civil War, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). All were dealing with the oppression of existence. And as Black art, expression, and access were gradually allowed post-CRM, movements like the Harlem Renaissance and Hip-Hop emerged.

The Harlem Renaissance was freedom and Black-owned. It might represent the height of creative freedom in Blackness because it was Black-owned and community-driven. Hip-Hop is now the dominant music genre, and it started as a culture. However, its direction eventually became controlled by systems, corporations, and non-Black faces.

Although there is a new class of Black people, their goal was the dream of what Blackness needed in the past: equality. But Blackness doesn't need equality as long as the entirety of oppressive history is still taught as footnotes.

Currently, the Black people and couples who feel equal are there because whiteness allows. Jay-Z and Obama can lose it all at the snap of a finger or a disrespectful gesture to the wrong person in power. Although they are in relative positions of influence, if everything falls apart, who’s sticking their neck out?

Medgar. Malcolm. Martin. Black men kept trying and kept dying. Now that pattern transitions into Hip-Hop. And within Hip-Hop, it’s a reminder that this is the height of what your generation currently offers society.

At first, it was the superstars of the present being murdered to curb egos. Then it became men of the past like Jam Master Jay being murdered, to remind artists that their pasts can sneak up on them. Then it was the youth like XXXTentacion, as a reminder that there is no youthful innocence. Then it was Nipsey Hussle — a reminder that you’re not allowed to elevate your hood.

Hip-Hop has been the most longstanding form of social elevation Black America has been allowed to have. And like all things Black, it feels inevitable that Hip-Hop will lose its roots.

Once whiteness opened new doors in entertainment by way of music and television, it felt like Black people collectively left behind jazz and the blues. With Black people gradually being integrated more into society, what reason was there to sing the blues? So the culture shifted, and those genres were absorbed. R&B was prominent through the ‘90s, but Hip-Hop reintroduced oppression until it was taken over and focused on materialism. And then the access opened wider, and now the question is whether Hip-Hop will last another fifteen years in its current form?

Losing culture is definitive of the Black experience. Without culture, what elders can Black people look to in guiding the present and future generation? My grandparents’ experiences are removed from an entire generation. They can only guide me if they have the luxury of time to stay current with how society is changing. If I only have one parent, I’m losing an opportunity to understand and accept change through conflicting perspectives.

I think about the significance of Beyoncé wearing a 128.54-carat yellow Tiffany diamond — unearthed in South Africa in 1877.

Beyoncé is the fourth woman and first Black woman to wear the famous [128.54-carat yellow Tiffany diamond] — unearthed by De Beers in South Africa in 1877.

-NY Post

Doesn't Beyoncé have enough recognition, power, and influence to create a brand that can eventually become comparable to Tiffany's? Why does powerful and successful Blackness still aligning with social limits?

For centuries, Blackness believed in external salvation. Obama became a household name and he became the hope and future that was just as great as any savior. Except he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. A president’s a president for the country, and most importantly, for the structure that maintains it.

During the 2020 election season, Black America was back at the feet of a candidate who offered to provide but wouldn’t meet before the election to discuss policy. People were angry with Ice Cube for having a dialogue with the other side — the side that actually welcomed dialogue and offered a plan. It was insulting in many ways, but the point stands: without dialogue, how does anyone in power know what Black America needs?

How can you expect someone to help your cause if you refuse to have a conversation with them? If no one’s allowed to have dialogue, then how do you expect to progress? Instead of judging, why didn’t Black Americans rally behind the effort to say, “Hey, let’s see your plan. Did you consider X? How about Y?” You need influential people to get into the ear of people in power to honor your needs. They should be used as a bridge.

Regardless of what you identify, people have sacrificed to allow people who look and think like you to be where you are today. Can’t you sacrifice your ego to have a dialogue?

Black sacrifice creates Black innovation, businesses, jobs, financial stability, inspiration, hope, families, communities, and wealth. It’s all for you. Directly and indirectly.

So when do you wake up? When do you realize that no one above you cares about you? The few people that do care, you attack for the sake of clout and likes.

Living in Brooklyn, we were always wondering what the people upstairs were doing. Water would leak from the ceiling of the building lobby. Water would leak from the ceiling into the apartment. There’d be fighting and wrestling at 3 AM. Sometimes we thought they were bowling. A chair was always being dragged around, and we joked that they only had one chair that they all shared. Or it was a ghost. All up in their business, worrying about what they were doing because we knew they existed and that they were affecting us, but we didn’t have access to know what was going on upstairs.

Politicians might see you in a crowd or shake your hand on the campaign trail, but you’re in the apartment below. Irrelevant to them. The only things that matter are the people on their floor and the people above them. They don’t care because the people below them don’t force them to care. Regardless of race, income level, or gender — what are oppressed people collectively allowing?

What actionables have the growing poor class collectively agreed on this year? Are they boycotting until policies change? Are they disrupting businesses?

The robots aren’t here yet, so you’re still needed. And if you don’t act now, there’ll be nothing to fight for because you won’t be needed in a few years. The economic changes we’re seeing guarantee that automation is coming sooner rather than later. The people at the top are preparing for the future because they see the big picture.

The Overview Effect denotes that the higher you climb the ladder, the more aware you become of possibilities and limitations. Which possibilities do you see? What are you preparing for?

I work from home, and I see my cat’s daily habits. He roams the apartment, sleeps wherever he wants, eats and drinks when he wants. Like all domesticated pets, he’s a byproduct of conditioning.

His life purpose is being independently dependent on us. But he isn’t consciously aware of that. His brain hasn’t evolved into understanding his natural limitations. It can’t, unless we consistently create new experiences for him. And even then, at some point, his knowledge will hit a wall.

The cat is a cat forever. He’ll never break free. He can’t. He may jump out into the hallway to snoop around, but eventually he comes back to the door because he knows this is where it’s safe and this is all he knows. He lives in fear.

In some way, you live in fear too. And although you have a higher consciousness and the ability to break free from domestication, you’re conditioned to believe that exploration is dangerous.

As an individual, you don’t have real power or knowledge unless you actively look for yourself and within trusted people and communities. Media is scripted content to tell a story that inspires you to be a specific type of person. That’s why good always wins — to give you hope that if you keep pushing through, you’ll stop evil. But evil seems to be winning in real life, all the time.

Good wins once you accept that sometimes you have to relinquish something for the sake of other people. And you should be the one deciding what you’re willing to sacrifice

No one cares about you outside of the people who care about you. I care that you exist, but I can’t care about you the individual unless I know you. And I expect the same.

Outside of the trending chaos, what are you doing daily to promote love, unity, awareness, and — most importantly — change and progress? What’s your life philosophy besides “X person or group is bad”? What beliefs do you have that aren’t rooted in hate, anger, or emotion?

If you say you’re woke, what did you wake up from? How comfortable was that bed? And was it a twin or king?

I think about Inception and the layers to awareness. Even if you wake up from the third tier of sleep, there are still two more levels to get through.

Being awake requires action. When you wake up in the morning, you don’t lay in bed all day and go back to sleep once the sun sets. Instead, you live through this life experience and enjoy it as much as you can.

Do you think you’re at the top tier of awareness? Is your knowledge and wokeness at this level all there is? Do you have the capital, resources, and information to do everything and anything you want? Or does this life experience have more layers that you need to discover?

If growth were easy, we’d all do it. We’d all be willing to step outside the apartment, open the hallway door, and walk up or down the stairs to see what else is there to explore, without the fear of missing or losing what we once had.

You can’t just be woke. You have to keep waking up and unraveling the layers. You have to step outside of the social limitations placed on you because of what you were born as. You have to understand that the best people to support you are the people on the same level as you and the ones who bang on your door and tell you to stop dragging the damn furniture on their heads. Bottom-up change until the top-down people meet in the middle. Because although you may be awake, they might be sleeping on how their choices are affecting you.

They’re not going to save you. So while you work on saving yourself, get together with the people you love and make enough noise above the heads of the people who you need support from. Let them know that if they don’t offer a hand in the change and growth society needs, they’ll need saving sometime soon.

But it has to start from you.

✌🏿.

This is the longest Advice From Unk column I've written, and it probably won't be the last one like it. If you read all 2,300+ words, you're my people. Subscribe to The Human Player for weekly essays on bodies, screens, and systems. Share this with someone who needs to wake up.

Posts drop every Tuesday. Start the week with yourself, and then let other ideas influence you.

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