Black LGBTQ+ People Deserve to Feel How They Want About Nipsey Hussle
April 1, 2019I first heard about what happened to Nipsey Hussle in the Out Slack room. One of my colleagues mentioned the burgeoning feud between queer people (mostly Black cisgender gay men) and others (mostly cis straight folk) about the righteousness in publicly mourning or not mourning him. It turned out the rapper and entrepreneur was shot multiple times in front of Marathon Clothing, the store he owned in Los Angeles’s Hyde Park yesterday evening.
I won’t lie. When I saw his name trending on Twitter, I felt a pang in my heart. I wasn’t a fan or anything — I haven’t really engaged with his work on a deeper level. But it was a knee-jerk reaction, one steeped in the muscle memory of all of the senseless deaths I’ve witnessed in the Black community via the media. The depth of the pang was nowhere near what I typically feel when another one of my Black trans sisters is murdered or when I hear about the latest Black queer brother that has lost his life at Ed Buck’s residence, but it was still noticeable.