Regulation Is a Black Inheritance | Cotton Fields, Dysregulation, and Black Embodiment
- Kiing Curry
- Mar 10
- 6 min read
Regulation Is a Black Inheritance | Cotton Fields, Dysregulation, and Black Embodiment
Legacy, cotton fields, dysregulation, and the feral work of reclaiming Black regulation as inheritance.
A Black inheritance that arrived with no instructions, no map, and generations of Black elders who learned to wear their dysregulation like pride. The messy residue of it all was handed off to invisible men in the sky.
Except the residue never left.
It is alive.
It is the dust and rot stuck within and between the walls that keep us from one another.
A Black legacy turned inheritance.
An inheritance that now reads reparations we must claim, because they will never claim them on our behalf.
Those familial tings we point to with pride, humor, and sometimes shame are often the exact places where dysregulation hides.
It was there in the way my mother chewed ice to hold her tongue still.
It was there in her early morning piddlin, as I used to call it — small, repetitive movements meant to set the day in order when the night had already dissolved according to the mood of the monster in her bed.
It was there in her high blood pressure, which really reads high, high anxiety, which then reads OCD. But when Western medicine profits from Black disembodiment — and Black men profit from the disembodiment of their Black women — the legacy becomes an inheritance that has been tainted.
And reparations, then, may only be yours to claim.
Because assimilation requires blindness.
It was there in the microscopic lump she found in her breast — no faith in her body to heal, but full faith in the colonial coins that told her to let them experiment on and destroy her body the way a good slave should.
It was there in Granny’s dialysis. A body spent supporting the fullness of others until it forgot how to support itself.
It was there in the way Daddy Ranse could not — would not — sit down. Always something to do. Always movement. Always motion.
Until the body finally said enough, and it was his time to go.
I think about Big Mother.
Mother Odessa.
I remember what little I can from old photographs — the shape of their faces, the stillness in their eyes — and I wonder what parts of their lives were cast as normal but were actually dysregulation being chained forward, another link added so a white man could keep his lie alive.
I watched my not-father and his brothers.
Men fully dysregulated and unhinged, transforming their lies into s(hell)s no one dared disturb. The coddling of violent Black men, which is itself tied to a lifetime of dysregulation.
A man who could not — would not — hold a regular job. Whose anger, violence, and abuse were excused. A man allowed to disappear for long stretches and return “better,” without accountability.
And the community would simply continue.
And we did.
When we should have not.
I think there are too many spells swelling in our heads.
Too many words to keep up with.
Too much theory and nuance when the equation is simple.
Their distraction becomes our confusion.
And the theory cycle continues.
Unchecked dysregulation becomes dis(ease).
And dis(ease) exists far beyond the tidy lists Western medicine keeps for itself.
Because when I say Black regulation is inheritance, we get lost in the cleverness of the phrase.
But the inheritance we are currently passing to one another is not regulation at all.
We build platforms and events that amplify dysregulation.
I vended at a Black History Month event that was nothing but pure dysregulating performance. As long as we perform, that is all that matters.
It does not matter if people cannot hear one another.
It does not matter if disabled people in the community need real accommodations.
It does not matter if we are honoring people who have done more harm than good.
We keep doing the same thing over and over again and calling it excellence, until everyone believes it blindly.
Meanwhile we have dysregulated an entire community for a celebration that centers nothing.
For regulation to become inheritance, there must be grounded presence in the reality of who we are.
We must remove ourselves from the illusion that we are catching up, when we have never been allowed to catch up.
The dysregulation of chattel slavery was never dispelled. Regulation was never restored.
We were simply expected to regulate their harm and continue.
And that expectation still lives inside our bodies.
A body never allowed to process the fullness of what was done to it. A body forced to move forward while carrying a diabolical lack of care imposed by others.
Because they know something.
If regulation were reclaimed as birthright, the rights they claim would crumble in the face of what has been done.
The cotton fields understood this long before we had language for it.
Cotton grows soft and white above ground, delicate enough to rest in the palm of a hand. But the plant itself is not gentle. The stalk is rough. The husk bites. The work demands a body bent forward under the sun for hours, fingers moving faster than breath.
Skin scraped.
Lungs filled with dust.
Spines bent into memory.
Generation after generation of Black bodies were forced into rhythm with that plant — bending, pulling, breathing, repeating.
Cotton was never just an industry.
It was a training ground for dysregulation.
The field became a nervous system.
The body learned a tempo that was never meant to sustain life — only production.
Fast hands.
Held breath.
Alertness without rest.
A nervous system trained for survival inside violence.
And those signals are still flaring through us.
Sometimes as anxiety.
Sometimes as rage.
Sometimes as bodies that cannot sit still or cannot get up at all.
The cotton field is gone for many of us.
But the rhythm remains.
I have spent nearly thirty-five years of my life in groomed dysregulation.
And that is just speaking about generalized Black dysregulation, if there even is such a thing.
I am not even speaking about the additional layers — being a differently-abled child, the grooming and abuse that came with my inability to perform normalcy.
Because that was all it was.
Normalcy as performance.
I was born into a body genetically predisposed to dysregulation.
Look at the lineage.
My grandmother worked on plantations turned “family properties” that still employed Black bodies like property, the wages reflecting exactly that.
My grandmother did not end up in Denver, Colorado from Lexington, Tennessee by fluke.
None of our ancestors who fled southern soil soaked in blood arrived where they did by accident.
Now the babies are here.
And I am not even speaking about my generation.
These children carry needs many of us still scoff at.
“I didn’t need that.”
But you did.
Our inheritance to one another must become the regulation of the Black body, wildly and fully — not just according to therapists or institutions that act as agents of the state.
Because if you are truly doing the work, eventually your licensure and your healing will come into conflict.
This healing reaches beyond the state.
It moves into the territory of indigenous wildfire.
Regulation as inheritance is feral liminal territory.
There is no one-size-fits-all.
No DSM category.
No framework capable of holding the fullness of what it means to see and heal ourselves w(hole).
It is not cute.
And it has nothing to do with obedience.
Regulation means unbraiding every way you have been told to remain contained.
It is a bursting through.
It is riding the glitch in you all the way through Black presence and into futurity.
Regulation is feeling deeply in a world that tells you numbness is the flex.
It is turning on the tech(know)logy of your own body and calibrating a flow that moves beyond legacy, beyond inheritance, beyond even reparation.
A flow that carries us somewhere else entirely.
Toward the other side.
Toward what hasn’t always been.
trans.
Regulation Is a Black Inheritance | Cotton Fields, Dysregulation, and Black Embodiment
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