Saturation Points

Chemistry has answers.

A point is such a tiny thing.

And then again, it isn’t. It is a locality that potentially specifies where major shift occurs.

Monumental shift. As in tidal wave-like proportions.

By definition, a saturation point is the stage at which no more of a substance can be accepted or absorbed into a solution. But chemistry has a stage breakdown of the principle: unsaturated, saturated and supersaturated solutions (of course there is also a precipitate stage, but I’ve made a conscious decision to control the descent down the chemistry rabbit hole). Maybe like me you knew about the first two but had to research a bit to remember how to achieve the third. Supersaturation, or the achievement of increased saturation past the saturation point, is attained through manipulation of the external environment, in this case through temperature. Raising the temperature for example, will allow a saturated solution to receive even more solute (or the substance to be dissolved), into the solvent (liquid or some such medium). When the temperature is returned to the original parameter; voilà! Supersaturation: a solution so concentrated crystals form in it. There. I’ve just condensed a whole segment of high school chemistry inclusive of that mundane rock candy experiment.

So, understanding some chemistry, what saturation stage could be assessed/assigned to the Black people of the African Diaspora after 400 plus years post slavery, racism and oppression in current climate? On every test as memory serves, there was always that ridiculously easy question given so that you were guaranteed at least one correct answer. This is it.

In varying jurisdictions, I have often wondered about how much we as a people could continue to take. I kept thinking that at some point the proverbial ‘rock bottom’ would be hit and unity and mobilisation would skyrocket the Black community into an era where no young children had to be given “the talk”, or continue to bear the brunt of institutionalised racism, or become a disproportionate statistic.

Apart from shall I say, the real-deal-Holyfield clairvoyants and visionaries, I don’t believe many saw this coming. The year 2020 managed to sucker-punch the masses.

During a viral pandemic in quasi-lockdown, an all-consuming global Black rage.

George Floyd.

Countless others of us.

Over way too many decades.

Black people have become the universal solvent; a constant over time, into which hatred and racism was freely discharged; from pre and post enslavement, to Jim Crow in its various guises across the globe, the civil rights struggle, stop and search, and gentrification . Separate, unequal and at high risk whether youth in Montgomery, Alabama or the Jarawa tribe of the Andaman Islands, India. First stage saturation points, which according to scientific principles would have breached long ago, have by manipulation of the external environment continued to allow more of the same into an already “done had enough” people. So, the heat of vitriolic treatment of Black South Africans during the apartheid era of 1948-1990, granted increased hateful solute to be absorbed into a solvent of us facilitated; for example, by the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Student Uprising of 1976-1977.

And the federal and state sanctioned venomous solute aimed at children and babies of the Stolen Generation 1910-1970, among Aboriginal and Torres Island Strait Islanders of Australia took supersaturation to a blatant whole new low level. To abduct and secretly lure children from their parents due to deranged notions of superiority while you imprisoned, abused, neglected and enforced slave labour upon them; the traumatic impact of which is still felt to this day, speaks to the depravity of aforementioned human souls. This, one of many snapshots of a long history of aggression and subjugation, created trauma that reverberated among the entire Aboriginal and Torres Island Strait communities with the effects of a deliberate and steady toxin, leaving mental health issues, poverty and reduced life expectancy as a small sampling of its effects.

Lifeless Black bodies always the crystallisation end stage result when the temperature/hostility of the dominant oppressor has decreased/subsided.

It is scientifically justifiable why there is so much all-consuming global Black rage.

So, eliminating saturation points equates to no supersaturation as an option. And should those considering themselves superior ever even consider modifying the external environment in the future to extend as it were experimental reach, the quote of the present generation is apt, “We are not our Ancestors. We will f@%k you up!”

Although there is no real comparison, it is somewhat akin to global warming. There’s a point (that word again) at which the outcome cannot be changed; irrevocable catastrophic result, no matter how many carbon footprints are scaled back. Too little, too late.

The clamour for a complete and immediate cessation of all tyrannical substances inclusive of prejudice, hatred and violence aimed at Black people planet-wide is long overdue and will no longer be ignored. Redress and restitution are a requirement. And eradicating the societal infrastructures that cultivated such terrorism against Black people? It would be fitting that the terrorists themselves dismantle these constructs while reflecting on the many different ways all manner of resolution can be made for the longest standing chemistry demonstration that we, the Black people of the planet, never chose to be in.