Everything is racist. Yes, even when you sleep, you’re a part of systemic racism. This is according to our friends at Teen Vogue. Sorry guys, Vox did it first:

Fannie Sosa and Navild Acosta, creators of Black Power Naps, which is a self-described, sculptural installation, vibrational device and curatorial initiative that reclaims laziness and idleness as power, are here to tell young American teenage girls who eat this stuff up that sleep in now racist:

We’re dealing with an inheritance of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation was a…deliberate tactic of slave owners to basically make the mind feeble. That same tactic has only evolved.

Slavery is a regime of stealing and extraction: Stolen wages, stolen life, stolen land, but stolen time was one of the main things. We need time,” Sosa said. “We need time off, we need time out. Our ancestors never got to take a month off for holidays, they never got to take a sabbatical, they never got to take a nap. When you pile all of those together, you see the reparations that need to happen are monetary, but they’re also time and space.”-Navild Acosta

Acosta identifies as intersectional transgender, queer, and black-dominican. Sosa, is an afro-sudaka activist, artist, and scholar, currently doing a France-Brazil co-directed PhD, who “uses her gender studies degree to pop her pussy even more severely than before“. Both despise the false stereotype that black people are lazy, so they want to use their privilege in their chose friends of academia to proclaim laziness as powerful. They, who have never experienced slavery in their lifetimes, want others who have never experienced it to rest and have reparations for the restless torture their ancestors endured.

We are having to go out in the streets during a pandemic, expending our energy in really huge amounts in order to ask for reparations and rest and energy. It is a … double edged sword to navigate as an activist or organizer. You are putting your body on the line to reclaim it. That creates a lot of burnout. We have people who are 20, 21, they are burnt out. They need time off. They need not only to sleep, but to know their people are going to be ok, to know they’re going to be ok, to know they can take a break.”-niv Acosta

You know what’s fatiguing? Reading the pretentious-ass, pseudo-intellectual word salad Acosta and Sosa are posting on their web platforms. Dear Jesus. Pleasure as a “radical act of resistance for an embodied afro-diasporic evolutionary praxis”? What in the actual eff? Think about this. These “Power Nappers” have the time and the luxury to come up with this stuff about themselves and write it in third person!

Currently, Sosa and Acosta are working on ways they could provide their “experiences” in a safe environment during a pandemic. They know protestors are having to go out and they are tired. But they are risking their lives. Hurling sledgehammers at other tired business owners’ windows and stealing their goods is exhausting work. But someone has to do it in the name of reparations. Even if it is white, spoiled brats from suburbia who break into businesses owned by hard-working African Americans who are also beyond exhausted because they were up at night wondering if their business was going to be there the next morning after said riot.

Note, these two (Sosa and Acosta) called out the black “lazy” stereotype and Teen Vogue put it into print. Namely, author of this article, Brittney McNamara, who is “Identity Editor” at Conde Nast and as white as can be! Don’t you love it when privileged little white girls write articles in these magazines about the plight of African Americans and spout off on how woke they are? I mean, they have to be “woke” because they’re white and they are not entitled to the “reparations” of a mid-afternoon siesta, right? Can I say “siesta”? Or is that racist now?

Don’t worry, huddled, tired, protesting-in-the-pandemic masses. Sosa and Acosta will facilitate some fabulousness for you to get that deeply desired REM sleep respite soon. And Teen Vogue’s Brittney will write about it with veiled disapproval of another ugly stereotype she puts in plain print from her Brooklyn flat for sure and tell you how you should be damn ashamed. It doesn’t matter you’ve covered for someone who took the day off to riot and who now needs sleep. Don’t worry, we’ll cover for you. It doesn’t matter that your ancestors also came to this country dirt poor and worked hard, long hours in coal mines, factories, as maids, as food vendors all with no sleep. You’re white. Sleeping is not for you. And don’t dare to dream, either.

I’m going to take a cat nap now with some tiny little lionesses. (Those felines are racist little buggers, aren’t they?) Because like Sosa and Acosta said, Idleness is power. Wake me up when this nightmare of jackassery is over or when I sleep through my alarm because I need to show up for work.

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