Still Here at 39: Black Survival

It's my 39^th birthday.

On paper, 39 isn't a milestone. There's no Vegas trip like 21, no magical escape like 40. At 39, you stay home and chill, at least I am. I chill because for a Black man existing in a world that wasn't built for him to grow old, 39 feels less like a quiet in-between and more like a life checkpoint asking the same questions: how am I still here, and who am I becoming?

Maybe part of the problem is the paper itself. Before the Eurocentric-style birthday, African nations didn’t fixate on the precise day you arrived in the world. Instead, they recognized when you advanced into a new kind of life: becoming a mother, elder, or a warrior. A "birthday," in that sense, wasn’t just another day; it was a public way of saying who you had become and what role you now carried. Among the Masai, for example, boys advance through rituals of initiation to become a warrior, while girls are taught how to be a woman.¹ Across much of Africa, life and growth were welcomed with music, blessings, food, and family.

If you were born in America, you received the same paper I did, a birth certificate. On the surface, it's just proof you arrived. However, it's a document that puts you on a path to individualism before you even open your eyes. Even more, if you are born Black, the birth certificate is an instrument of separation. The day your parents receive it, it ties you to a country that has already planted landmines around your existence.

The innocence of being a Black baby keeps you blind to all of this until you come of age where society determines that your Black skin is tough enough to encounter law enforcement. Thus, the birth certificate, for a Black person, is a right, better yet a keycard to America's created structures; 1) the ghettos, 2) jails and prisons, 3) and racism.

Capitalists build and maintain these structures, and the people who benefit from them want us to look away and accept it. They'd rather us be known only as consumers. In that role, we are not seen as human or nonhuman; we're just numbers that can be marketed to, policed, and studied without ever having our humanity affirmed. 

Your first birthday is an introduction to the insatiable desire of America's materialism. With each subsequent birthday, those desires grow louder and more automatic until finally, we're adults, passing along the same broken system we inherited. America thanks you for your contributions to the system by providing your kids with a new recession proof birth certificate.  

As a 39-year-old Black man, to still be here is to have encountered and survived forms of social death throughout life. Orlando Patterson describes social death as the loss of social vitality, a type of alienation that renders a person nonhuman and nonexistent in society.² Ghettos alienate. Jails and prisons alienate. Even the spaces Black people occupy at work are often built on racist principles that isolate us and quietly mark us as less than fully human.

I am reminded that Frederick Douglas did not know the exact date of his birth. He didn't have a birth certificate, but he still became. He refused to fully submit to the norms of the system that tried to own him. Education, patience, courage, creativity, and a Black sense of self, were the tools he left us to fight back against the consumerist system we've been relegated to.

American birthdays, without this kind of reckoning, are hollow. If we are serious, each birthday should push us to ask not just what we can get, but what we are willing to give to ourselves, to our people, and to the communities we say we want to build.

At 39, I'm at home chilling with reflective purpose.