Thanks for commenting on my work. I hope you give me a follow so you can keep up more with the project of Established in 1865- of exploring Black personhood.

I wanted to write a bit about your point here:

"But I'm pretty confused about this whole 'claiming the essence' and claiming dead Black men. Mixed race over here, maybe that's a part of my confusion. Just seems so off to me though, that in the midst of grieving there is a complaint about who gets to claim who. Who is actually doing this claiming? What does being claimed even mean, in the context of a death that impacts so many, from MJ to Prince to DMX."

I wrote about claiming--and I feel this is a common theme with Black musicians,--because of how I came to know DMX's work. I went to a nearly all-white middle school in Queens when I got introduced to "It's Dark and Hell is Hot." This white kid was claiming kinship with this angry Black rapper from Yonkers and couldn't even say the n-word. No matter what, the West had put up a barrier rooted in the history of slavery and oppression that would fully stop white people from claiming him.

DMX's life and music reinforced this. He was a Black addict as my father was. He was reared in Yonkers where my godmother lived for a time. He was a stickup kid who I had fallen prey to a few times in Harlem and Brooklyn. He was the family member who was always a night away from getting his life right but could never step out the dark.

His life is the more painful aspects of Blackness that white writers, I feel, glaze over when trying to understand him. Yet they write anyway. That is the claim whiteness makes on our artists--producing writing without true understanding to meet an Associated Press deadline or to garner clicks. To white people, Earl Simmons was a headline, or a soundtrack for aggression or moshing. To Black people, especially poor Black people, we have a DMX in our family or friend circle who we pray for every night.

I cried that day in Little Rock when Prince died. My world stopped. There is a bring on I-430 that leads to the tony town of Maumelle, the richest zip code in Arkansas. To commemorate his death, they lit the bridge purple. No cars stopped and in my resting in the city--I am a fan of coffee shops and cigar bars--white people did not talk about Prince or have their worlds stop. But I had to play "Purple Rain" whenever I drove over that bridge. I just had to do it.