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Watcher Within, Watchers Without: My Black OCD Story

oaluz:

“As a Black person with OCD, and generalized anxiety disorder, I watch myself and watch the white gaze watching me; per 2pac with “all eyez on me,” it’s all just too fucking much. And checking for mistakes? Charles Murray and other racial superiority hucksters—their names are legion—assert that Black inferiority is an inevitable inheritance. Blackness is mistake, according to white supremacy. Our perfectibility is always possible, while at the same time always just out of reach. Every Black person has to negotiate with the spectre of Black failure as collective, even genetically ordained, failure: it is either absorbed into the skin or cast out, but no Black person is unaware of this reckoning, whether it is soundly rejected or not. Under an anti-Black surveillance culture, Black folks know that our fuck-ups (read: the ways we are but human) are expected, and even ardently anticipated.

Perhaps that is, in part, why I keep checking, checking, and checking; I am Black Orpheus, compelled to keep watch over and look back for any errancy, sealing my fate.

Fretting about my own laziness is one of my obsessions. Surely that some relationship to the fact the foundation of the West = eternally labouring (yet imperfect) black bodies, never at rest but never instrumentalized enough. There is always more labour to be squeezed from a superhuman yet subhuman black body; the extraction and expectation has no end.”