“I self-identify as a Black writer. That’s it,” said Quayson, a 20-year-old based in New York City. “I don’t like labels. I like as little labels as possible; that’s something that I’ve realized about myself.”

Laying in bed in her Gramercy Park apartment, Quayson leans into the camera, face almost filling the Zoom square. Behind her, posters are scattered along a white wall. A roommate sits behind her, at a desk not quite out of the frame. She props her laptop on some pillows, once again cropping her companion out.

“I could go back and reinvent myself. Instead of Black artist, I could say that I’m a queer Black artist,” she says. “But what do you wait for to say ‘I came out’ or ‘I identify with this’? Theoretically, you don’t have to wait for anything. That’s how I feel about labeling; it’s a constant waiting to step into the fullness of the word that you prescribe to describe yourself.”

It’s all quite nebulous, to Quayson. 

“Depending on who I’m around, I use different [labels],” she said. “Not because I’m lying or anything like that; it’s just different parts of myself that I feel like are important at different moments. To sum it up into one thing, am I supposed to be, like, multi hyphenate hyphenate hyphenate hyphenate? I don’t need all that, either.”

Quayson’s main areas of work are poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. She is studying “Language and Liberation” at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a self-created major she describes as “social linguistics, comparative literature, Africana studies and creative writing, all in the goal of being a better writer.” Some major themes in her work are love, Blackness, and the complexity of identity. 

“There’s this huge culture around identity, especially in our generation, and I just feel like it just emphasizes individualism. It’s always, ‘Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?’” she said. “It’s very self absorbed and I’m personally very self absorbed, so getting away from labels is something that helps me with that.”

But Quayson is tired of talking about identity. Moreover, she’s tired of identity only being significant when the artist is a person of color.

“We don’t ask white people: ‘How has being white made this story different?’ Because we don’t see those as productive questions for a writer to answer,” she said, describing the line of questioning as “grating” for her. “You can’t get away from making art within the scope of your identity, whether you label it or not.”

Earlier this year, Quayson released a poetry collection titled Hymn for Mirror Gazing. In one of the collection’s poems, “DRINKING WATER (VERB)”, she writes “IT’S HARD TO BE PROUD OF THE WOMAN I’M BECOMING / WHILE GRIEVING STILL FOR THE GIRL I DID NOT GET TO BE.” The piece concludes, “EVERY SO OFTEN– / I WAKE UP IN MY BODY AND I LIVE IN IT.” 

“The phrase just came to me one day when I was looking in the mirror,” Quayson said of the collection’s title. “Then, a few months later when I was working on the poetry collection, I just found that it fit perfectly; the themes were mirrors, reflections, religion so it just made sense. I also like to think of the poems as ones that can help you face yourself in the mirror in a new way.”

Quayson explained that the theme of reflection is her way of seeking truth, whatever that means in the moment.

“I think that fiction [and poetry are] true in ways that nonfiction can’t be,” she said. “And I don’t like to waste my time trying to get to the fact, as opposed to me exploring something that’s there and knowing that I can’t get to the fact of it.”

The post A Black artist refuses labels appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Damayanti Wallace, a queer Black poet, community organizer and Chicago native, recounted police disrupting recent open-mic nights where queer youths of color often found sanctuary.

“I was able to be around these adults who were queer and in queer relationships and it was so loving and so welcoming and so beautiful and, also, so messy,” they said. “I remember [when] cops would come into the open mics and try to stop whatever we were doing or [when] my mentors [had] to go stand at the door so the police wouldn’t come in.”

Wallace is a co-founder of GoodKids MadCity, a non-profit youth organization fighting to end inner-city violence, call for community resources and to abolish police. Through both their work and their experiences as a queer Black person, Wallace has seen the individual struggles of each identity, as well as the unique tension with police born from this intersection.

“Policing is inherently violent to a Black queer person because it’ is the embodiment of all of the things we are running away from or fighting on a day to day basis,” they said. 

To Julian Mohammed, a Black gay man based in Harlem, the tension is unsurprising. With two police officers for parents, Mohammed grew up around law enforcement. This closeness helped illuminate more overarching issues within the force, he explained.

“I know for a fact they do treat minorities different,” he said. “I’ve heard that from their mouths, that if a minority walks up to them they’re gonna be more likely to perceive it as a threat. That’s more common, I guess, in the neighborhoods they’re in.”

The issue, to Mohammed, is that police officers simply do not care about certain communities.

“I’ve seen a lot of cops say ‘f——’ and I don’t know if they’re just saying it because everyone used to say it back then,” he said. “But I feel like if you were hate crimed  or anything, it’s gonna get brushed under the rug.”

Police discrimination may be a driver of poor health outcomes and inequities among Black LGBTQ+ people, according to a 2020 paper published in Social Science & Medicine. The same paper found that four in ten Black LGBTQ+ men claimed they’d faced police violence in the last year. Another study found that Black transgender people are 50 percent more likely than their non-Black counterparts to be arrested following a police stop.

The singularity of these difficulties has left Wallace disillusioned with policing.

“You place black and queer together and it’s almost like you’re placing yourself in your own special kind of hell,” Wallace said.

The post Black queer community often at odds with police appeared first on Pavement Pieces.