Ain’t Never Not Been Black

By Javon Johnson

2021 Midwest Book Award Finalist
2021 In The Margins Book Awards - Nonfiction Recommendation List

Ain't Never Not Been Black foregrounds Black pleasure Black pain and Black love in unflinchingly Black ways.

Engaging with themes of masculinity, racism, love, and joy, Johnson is at once critical and creative. His spoken word performance transfers effortlessly to the page, with poems that will encompass you.

This is a book about blackness and survival, and how in America these are inseparable. In a world of individualism, who can you hold close? In a world of danger, what makes you feel safe?

From a poem written in the form of a syllabus, to another about the time his grandmother literally saved his life, Johnson's creative expression is constantly enacting the feminist mantra, “the personal is political."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Button Poetry
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781943735891

Javon Johnson

Javon Johnson is a highly awarded poet, and Professor of African American Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He wrote Killing Poetry: Performing Blackness, Poetry Slams and the Making of Spoken Word Communities (Rutgers University Press). Javon writes for The Huffington Post, The Root, and Our Weekly, and serves on the editorial board for Text & Performance Quarterly. Professor Johnson has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, BET's Lyric Café, among others. Javon also co-wrote a documentary titled Crossover, which aired on Showtime, in collaboration with the NBA and Nike.

Book preview

BLACK

UNTITLED, OR A FEAR OF GIVING THIS A NAME

I start this with a simple confession:

I wanted to burn

this country down.

BLACK 201

Thoughts on Survival

Meeting: All Day, Errrrday

Professor: Javon L. Johnson

Semester: ALL

Office Hours: By Appointment Only

Office Phone: N/A

Office Location: Zora Neale Hurston Hall 241

Email: [e-mail]

Course Description: When the white man at the breakfast bar starts rapping I’m going going back back to Cali Cali because after small talk you told him you’re on your way home to California, you wonder if he does this to other white people. Your Black experiences tell you he likely does not. You pray he stops talking. He does not. You want to check him, but you are certain that being the only Black guy in a room of white people checking the well-meaning white guy would likely get you labeled. Angry. Hostile. Anti-white (whatever that means). Crazy. As if racism isn’t a thing. You decide today to swallow this foolishness, to let it die somewhere deep inside you. This is also unhealthy. This is all so BLACK. This is also a lesson in survival.

Required Texts:

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son

Carter-Knowles, Beyonce. Lemonade

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Public Enemy. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Simone, Nina. Every song she’s ever sung

Touré. The Portable Promised Land

And a bunch of other really Black shit.

Methods of Evaluations / Course Requirements:

Be BLACK

Be real BLACK

Be all kinds of BLACK

Course Schedule: This course will be mad fluid. This course operates on CPT. This is also a lesson in survival. BLACK.

NEAR DEATH

did I ever tell you about the time I nearly died?

my Mother, my Black mother, my five-foot

skyscraper of a mother, tells the story much better

than I do. she says I stopped breathing for so long

that my face turned blue. she says she didn’t know

what to do with me. says she gave me to her mother,

my four-ten cotton hammer of a Grandmother.

she says she has no clue what Grandmother did,

that she must have worked some Black girl magic,

some survival tactic she must’ve gotten from her mother

who learned it from her mother before her,

and so on. and I think that is an interesting way

to say she could have been a medical doctor

if not for the way the world tries to chew Black

women with its mouth wide open. no manners.

greedy and never full.

WISHING WELL

When my mother tells me to get home

safe, her voice is the last

Reviews for Ain’t Never Not Been Black

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful writing on a tragic topic, I too want to burn this country down. Something has got to change, it has been going on too damned long.