On Nipsey, and our family processing loss in a most profound and humanly imperfect way

I didn’t know Nipsey Hussle personally. Not that I needed to. His general approach to the life he was given, and the one he was building, suggested a great deal to me about him. What was transparent about his life and being, allowed me a certain understanding of the brother, even at so great a distance.

For a mind like one, one so wedded to my craft of Psychology, he would serve as a fascination, and encouragement, and a character study, and conversation piece, and a realized, three dimensional representation of the struggle of becoming something rather complicated, and Black, and male.

He represented, all at once, brilliance, and privileged toxicity, and potential, and drive, and carelessness, and magnificent flawed ideals, all at once. He felt like a becoming of us all, in some way, and too many of our family that we want to become more, and better, and faster.

All of this was still buzzing around then, when I was made aware of his murder. Before any great proclamations or processing of this tragedy in any public space, I felt a profound sense of sadness. I felt, from so great a distance, the very real human loss. I didn’t ask why, not in this instant. That would be for later. I waited first for the rage and the raucous. I knew it would be coming, as our community breaths that out whenever we lose one of ours, and ascend toward a shared processing space. Messy, and necessary, it would come. And it did.

I first thought about the wildfire, always live, that is the emotional compass of Black boyhood and manhood. I thought of the means by which we, as a tribe and family, go about neglecting to spend time with our boys and their hurt, and fear, and how we fail to develop a language of human expression with them that doesn’t include the sound and shout, and how our boys are left to wander until they find a braille which best suits their emotional flailing about, and becomes their plan and emblem.

And so often, the despair, and powerlessness, and doubt, are made into the stiletto, the fine point, and the bodies of all other powerless and near us, are the effigy, and we cast all of the anger and fear upon those, over, and again, just to feel, and feel powerful, and for no other reason than there is no patois we have for our experience, and our own internalized hate and self directed misandry, and he was murdered, and so many like him. And more still.

I wonder aloud, what language Nipsey was crafting in his music, and how hip-hop has become a kind of psychotherapy for our condition, and yet, it is so unrefined and undeveloped a language, and all of the good he aimed to do, and the still fresh harm he did cause, and how this, all of it, is by necessity the human condition, and his potential, and the potential of his craft, and what we may do to save all those like him with it.

If there is any one magnificent and terrifying reality of our time, it is our ability to emotionally and psychologically process our human experiences with our neighbors near and far. I knew that Nipsey’s death would bring about a kind of divide. There would be emotional warfare. It would come, and it did.

We should start there, as we, as a family, Black, and so traumatized, generation over generation, should never insist, or demand, or advise, our family to refuse processing. Out loud, in shared spaces, free of expectation. We should, by necessity, craft spaces for those among our family who have been silenced, and marginalized, and subject to our erasure. We should chase away, extinguish and tamp down, any instinct we have toward demanding that all these of our family wait until some appropriate time and landing to vent about the wounds traced on their person’s by someone’s life.

We should continue there. With Nipsey, and his life. There was remarkable balance and conflict, at least from where I could view him. He had intensely varied interests in the hard and social sciences, and in developing a Black economy free of dependence and cannibalism, and a spiritual sense of his place and work. The more time I spent with what I was able to learn of Nipsey Hussle, the more I came to think of the brother I could sketch out in my awareness as a polymath, which is rare in my experiences of rappers. He was an evolved version of a rapper, and gang member, and tribe member. He was not alone in this, but still, a remarkable rarity, given his constellation of life circumstances.

He was also publicly, and blatantly, homophobic. Like far too many other brothers, he chose to speak, from his place of power and influence, and with a voice that so resonated, about the relationship, in his mind, between cishet presentations of maleness and manhood being powerful. With an image, and with his words, and with his judgement, and influence, he had dehumanized, and re-victimized, so many of our family. Many of them fans and believers in who they knew believed him to be. There was the wound, yet again. There was the trauma, and the betrayal. Yet again. All these of our family, queer and gay, and so many other hard fought identities, rejected, and thrust to the battlefield, yet again. I can recall wondering, how someone so curious about the human condition, could find rest with these feelings. But, human, always human.

Those very wounds, that trauma, that alienation, are what so clearly and directly triggered many of our family to speak of the hard he had done them, and others. There would be shield bearers who would rush forward ot protect his legacy, one that needs no protecting or buffering, and the fight would commence.

Processing, so human, need be carried out for those who need it, when and how they need it. The wounded, and healing, should assume, and take, whatever space and time they need, to treat those wounds. None of those others among us, we privileged enough to be unharmed, and free of that hurt and betrayal, should seek to undermine those of our family who have been impacted.

That approach is just furthering the spread of the trauma. That is simply asking for silence, and for our family, so wounded, to give more of their silence and blood, and bone, to a monument that need not be built. Our toxicity is a Colossus, and here we are again asking our family to feed and sacrifice to it. No.

Our family should do and say all that they need to. We others should have no rebuke prepared for that. Allow our family whatever they need, support them in it, enter only if invited, and remain quiet in those processing spaces until you are called on.

This processing need not be perfect. It should be messy, as our feelings so readily are. Let them spill to all places they may go. There is value to be had in this.

There is then, still, the process of minimizing the grief process. There are those who would suggest that you cannot grieve a member of our family, a spirit, you did not know. Or, further, that you should not grieve someone who came equipped with obvious human failings. Nonsense, truly. These many others are grieving a tragic human loss. In a time when we so readily disconnect from others, I cannot see the harm in memorializing another soul who impacted our lives. Truly, those who are grieving should be left to do it, at their pace, and in their way.

This grieving need not be perfect. Set it free from the bounds of convention and time. Allow the very real humans most affected to find their way back to whatever sense of balance and stasis carries them day to day.

And yet, still the battlefield. Where those who grieve him, and those wounded by him, take up arms. And yet, in my understanding of him, he would not want for anyone to feel obligated to defend him. He spoke for himself. He would, likely, want our family, our tribe, to carry on and gather some meaning from his life, even if it meant being critical of some part of that life.

I never felt that Nipsey was dictating right or wrong to any of us in his music. He was, to my mind’s eye, a being in development, and I would have loved to see him 20 years from now. I would hope that we, here, present, would find some way to refrain from dictating to those who have been most affected by his life and loss. Let the humans present do what they must, free of the echo chamber and the loud clarity of self-righteousness.

I think now, of a family, and a community, visited by trauma yet again. By the footage, and the loss, and all of the images, and a broken body, and the fallout. All of it. I consider broad implications, and what part of the work must be done next, and how we can all process, as is necessary, and protect processing spaces for all those others who need it.

And I think of our family, and how we process and fight all at once. And that is our human, real imperfect, profound and lovely. That we fight while we heal, and fight to heal, and live through and with our trauma, and remain vigilant and relentless in asserting our personhood. That is a riot, and is ours. It is our way, and I would not see us change it, censor it or shame it. I’d rather we made music to it. Chorus and dance, fighting it out and growing with it. Evolving, and hopefully one day, making something like the music Nipsey would have made 20 years from now, that album where he would have looked back and corrected the harm he did these years back here, and guided the child he was, here.