“Death pulls people from our spaces so often and we accept it as our final payment for having been here and having lived, however big or small. We don’t always have time to notice how things have changed in the absence of some of them. But then death pulls away someone we love, and we find that time. In here, we notice everything; growing grass and fingernails, and songs that end in a minor key. We are too sad to do anything else but watch a clock, applying seconds, minutes, and hours to the trauma and the lacerations. Time, the forever healer, they say. We find the time to wonder how everyone else is moving on, around our paralyzed selves. Ourselves unsure of roads and trees and birds and things. It all blurs and words aren’t words anymore. We find the time to attempt to figure a way to rethink everything we thought about this world and why we came to it.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Not everything set on fire will rise.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Gonna pretend to be a deaf mute who knows no sign one day, meet a woman, and we’ll write for the rest of our lives.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“The masters and overseers were so good at employee development, in their absence, the employees still achieved the company’s mission”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Anyone and anything can survive the daylight. It’s night that’s the hardest to live.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Sometimes, some of you speak about god, and I mistake him for an abusive lover you’re trying to escape.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Tell me what you’re looking for and i will become that for you. I can sacrifice my inner freedoms for you without looking twice at my old journals and solid promises I made to myself about such things. But you must be prepared to kill me when the smiles are no longer frequent. Do it while I sleep. While I hold your hand. Do it fast, baby. Do it fast.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“They sit there shouting “Don’t do it.” Someone told them revolution looked like the Cosby Show. A slight tug with a good lesson. Revolution is a tough struggle between what was and what needs to be.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“You ball up your fist each time you hear about an unfound injustice in the world. That makes me your brother.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“My ideas fuck like rabbits.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Sorrow is what I feel for people who aren’t doing what they love. I keep my distance from them as though they’re contagious. They are, I believe.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“The saddest thing about death, whether it’s our own or someone we care for, is when the world doesn’t stop when we do.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“The saddest thing about death, whether it’s our own or someone we care for, is when the world doesn’t stop we do.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don’t want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Even the Us’s are Them’s.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why’d she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn’t she care about the others?Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I’m still in America.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a “them” problem, we become another problem.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“You can’t forgive your captor and simultaneously be upset at your place in society.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“My heart isn’t big enough to care for the oppressors.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“They’ve been practicing racism so long, it’s perfect.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Black bodies have become ornamental, haven’t they?”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“It is in racists’ best interest to maintain white supremacy at all costs. They will defend it with their lives, but ONLY after they’ve defended it with ours.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Black people are either threats or entertainment.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway.”Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don’t sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they’ll need the energy and strength to build our homes.”Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“Dear Police:You can’t protect me and be scared of me.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
“When you’re marginalized, there are no “them people,” if we’re all on the outskirts of the same margin.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker