Legibility Is Not Truth | Writing, Authority & Empire

Because if everyone can do everything, then nothing has to be protected, cultivated, or held with care.

Legibility Is Not Truth | Writing, Authority & Empire

legibility is not truth. empire has always confused readability with honesty. some bodies survive by becoming difficult to flatten into language too quickly. Dumi is about the intelligence of pause, the politics of withholding, and the refusal to perform certainty just because someone is watching.

Substack is social media. 

And like all social media, it operates within the same logic as the state—visibility without disruption, circulation without transformation.

It’s not where you go to find the best writers. It’s where you go to find what is legible. What is allowed. What can circulate without disrupting the structure that holds it.

Popularity becomes proxy for depth.

We see this everywhere. The rapid elevation of cultures once they are made legible and exportable—K-pop being one example. Or the constant hype cycle around any culture performing fragments of Blackness, while Black people themselves remain over-scrutinized, under-supported, or rendered excessive when we move outside of performance.

Familiarity becomes proxy for truth.

And so people learn how to write within the edges—just radical enough to feel like something is happening, but never so far that it cannot be absorbed, reshared, or monetized.

There is a template.

There are guidelines.

And those guidelines are not about community. They are about containment. About legal protection. About ensuring that what is said never destabilizes what is.

Colonialism teaches you that everybody can do everything.

Because if everyone can do everything, then nothing has to be protected, cultivated, or held with care. Depth becomes optional. And what cannot be replicated quickly gets ignored.

And that is one of its most extractive lies.

Because it flattens skill.

It erases lineage.

It removes the necessity of devotion, time, and relationship.

It tells you that access is the same as capacity.

That proximity is the same as knowing.

And so people move quickly into spaces they have not earned—not in the colonial sense of permission, but in the embodied sense of relationship and depth.

I find myself constantly questioning what it means to even participate in these structures.

Because how do you get heard inside something designed to distort signal?

And to be clear—I’m not heard.

I am moving in silence.

Not because there is nothing to hear, but because what I am building does not translate easily inside systems that reward speed, familiarity, and repetition.

There is very little external affirmation that what I am building is being received, understood, or even seen.

And maybe that is the confirmation.

But my OCD brain struggles there.

Because it has been trained to look for markers.

For response.

For proof.

And what I am doing does not produce that kind of feedback.

So I have to sit in something else.

I don’t think we understand our gifts—not even within colonial frameworks that pretend to name them.

Many of us are engaging work we have been trained to believe we are good at.

Not the work that is actually ours.

Even for me, when I look back, I can see where I was pulled off path.

I should have been deeper in visual worlds—costume, lighting, scenic design, graphic work, ceramics, sculptural building.

That was the language.

But instead, I was rerouted.

By the time I left theater, I had been shaped into something else entirely.

A function.

A role.

A certified mammy for the stage.

And that wasn’t accidental.

That’s what happens when your gifts are recognized only in ways that serve the system.

So now, watching younger people move through knowledge—it’s unsettling.

To see someone encounter a concept, a language, a framework—and almost immediately position themselves as an authority within it.

Not because they’ve lived it.

Not because they’ve sat with it.

But because the system rewards speed.

Recognition arrives before relationship.

And process gets discarded in favor of visibility.

But what you’re watching here—on this site—is process.

Iteration.

Return.

Adjustment.

This did not arrive fully formed.

And it was never meant to.

This is not something you scroll through to consume and move on.

So what does it mean that we are so willing to discard process

in exchange for belonging?

Belonging that is shallow.

Belonging that is immediate.

Belonging that does not require transformation.

And what does it mean that the places offering that belonging are the same places that require us to remain legible in order to stay? 

This is not separate from empire. This is how it sustains itself.

Legibility Is Not Truth | Writing, Authority & Empire