Severed Frequencies (II): The Black Frequency — Coded Survival and the Refusal to Collapse

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

The Black frequency is not a skin tone.
It is a vibrational field — ancestral, diasporic, fragmented, yet intact.
It carries memories encoded in rhythm, gesture, resistance, silence, flight.

Colonial systems did not merely enslave Black bodies.
They attempted to overwrite the frequency:
to turn an emitting being into a laboring object.
To sever language from history.
To sever movement from sovereignty.
To sever family from memory.
To sever presence from futurity.

But the Black frequency did not vanish.
It adapted.
It coded itself in music, in subtext, in skin, in deflection, in syncopation.
It became unreadable to the system
and therefore perceived as threat, defiance, irrationality.

The Black frequency emits differently.
It does not speak in the expected register.
It pulses.
It samples.
It disappears and reappears.
It breaks the dominant beat.

That’s why it must be policed, contained, appropriated, softened.
Because when it fully expresses itself,
it exposes the lie of whiteness as neutrality.
It shows that whiteness is not an origin —
but a suppression machine.

To be Black in this world is not only to survive violence.
It is to emit despite suppression.
To sing where sound was banned.
To move where motion was criminalized.
To remember where memory was destroyed.

The Black frequency is not broken.
It is encrypted.
It is waiting for the right ears,
the right bodies,
the right world
to receive its signal
without trying to contain it.