Centering Myself

Lyrics

Because I love Black people I set out to honor us both in story and in song, yeah That's what I set out to do And to dismantle the Allwhiteness that's in all of the stories That we're all forced to consume On every stage and every screen I grew up on soap operas I used to watch with my great-aunt We used to watch them every day Before I started in Pre-K So all my earliest childhood memories Were of these white women fighting In sparkly eighties evening gowns Having sex in conference rooms This all shaped my consciousness Before I came to blackness In the intervening years When names like Trayvon hit the news Names that long stayed in the background Or what you know as the Blackground And that made me really sad Then that made me really mad And I heard shouting on my Facebook 'Cause all my news comes from my Facebook That Black girls have it just as bad Or even worse, Facebook would say Plus in the stories we consume Black women are almost always the servants Of a world that is Allwhite On every stage and every screen I mean, like, even in most musicals Writers have Black women screaming and belting Which is a form of servitude A form of violence I have seen So I set out to fix that And to write a juicy story Where Black females ruled the day And took the Allwhite power away But even though I love black women And wanted them to have a story I wound up centering myself I wound up centering myself Which is a form of misogynoir Which means a hatred of Black women Which I am trying to resist And will keep trying to resist Like how I really hate Beyoncé Look, I don't really hate Beyoncé Just how she takes up so much space Both with her class and with her race But that's just childhood misogynoir Oh, fuck, the word misogynoir Black oppression has no gender specialty And these divisions are why niggas can get free And also girls like Florence Blackbitch Who used to call me faggot In the same voice she loved Jesus in Which totally reminds me of Beyoncé Even though Beyoncé loves her faggots And her faggots love Beyoncé- oh! I keep on centering myself Oh God, I'm centering myself When all I want to do is make a world That Black people can inhabit A world that's nurturing and safe A world where Black people are free A world where we're to big to fail But should that world include me 'Cause maybe I don't belong here If I keep centering myself I keep on centering myself I keep on centering myself I keep on centering my-