Why People Be Mad at Me Sometimes

Performance, Politics, and Piety for the (Self) Righteous

Indhira Udofia

why some people be mad at me sometimes they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep on remembering mine. — Lucille Clifton

I have been sitting with these lines for a while now.

Not because they are new to me — Lucille Clifton has been a mother tongue for as long as I have been trying to think clearly about Black institutional life. But because they keep arriving with fresh precision every time I watch the same performance cycle through Black Church digital discourse. The names change. The occasion changes. The grammar stays the same.

The grammar goes something like this: perform the social dance, revere the venerated figures, position the Black Church as the sole legitimate representative of Black spiritual and cultural life. Remember the institution’s version of its own story. Center its saints and sages in your public accounting of where you came from and what you owe. And when you fail to do any of this — when you remember your own memories instead of the ones the institution has authorized — prepare to be called out, dressed down, and subjected to the particular social violence that Black Church culture reserves for those who betray the performance.

What triggers the cycle is almost always some version of the same transgression: a public figure fails to perform the correct deference to an institutional elder at the correct moment, in the correct register, on the correct timeline. A prominent preacher does not invoke the right mentor. A politician does not genuflect to the right ecclesiastical authority. Someone who has proximity to Black Church power does not demonstrate that proximity loudly enough for the gatekeepers to feel honored. The specific figure at the center shifts with the news cycle. The demand underneath the outrage is always the same: remember our memories, not yours.

I am a child of the Black Church. I came into my voice through her. I attempted to serve her unrepentantly for years. I cannot look away from the mess that lays underneath the veneer.

—

What troubles me most about these recurring moments is not the controversy itself. It is what the response reveals about what we have collectively decided matters.

One neglected acknowledgment — one failure to perform the correct public deference — and the discourse mobilizes. People call each other out of their names. Idle threats circulate. The machinery of institutional loyalty activates against people whose primary crime is remembering differently, or grieving publicly, or simply declining to perform a reverence they do not feel toward figures who did not earn it from them.

Here is what I notice about who is loudest in these moments: the folks crying hardest about liberatory politics are, in many cases, simply auditioning for the power and hegemony they claim to critique. Liberation, in this register, means the right people being centered — not the dismantling of the centering logic itself. The governance grammar stays intact. Only the names at the top of the hierarchy are up for negotiation.

What gets lost in all of this is the question of who is not in the room.

—

I sit in the back pew.

I have been sitting in the back pew my whole life, in various configurations — as a child, as a youth pastor, as a researcher, as someone whose relationship to the Black Church is shaped equally by love and by the accumulated weight of what I have witnessed and carried. The back pew is where you go when you are not sure you fully belong but cannot fully leave. It is where people sit with stories they have not been given permission to tell. Stories of silence. Stories of shame. Stories of the particular betrayal that happens when the institution that was supposed to hold you decides your testimony is inconvenient to the narrative it needs to maintain.

My work — the research, the writing, the years of sitting with people whose spiritual harm had no institutional address — was built in the back pew. Not in the academy’s version of the Black Church, and not in the institution’s version of itself, but in the actual texture of what people carry when they love something that has also hurt them. I have held those stories. I have been inside that complexity my entire vocational life. And I have watched, repeatedly, as the digital discourse about Black Church accountability manages to make those people — the ones whose testimony is the actual evidence — invisible.

The back pew people are not in the discourse about who failed to acknowledge whom. They are carrying the actual cost of the governance grammar — the ways that institutional loyalty has been deployed to manage, silence, and sacrifice them — while the digital discourse performs liberation in their name without ever actually looking for them. Their pain gets invoked as justification for the performance. Their bodies are never actually in the room.

What right do we have to demand repentance or public deference from people who fell victim to the very figures we are asking them to honor? What does it mean to call someone a traitor to the tradition when the tradition is the site of their harm? What kind of liberation politics requires the people most wounded by institutional power to perform their loyalty to it as the price of belonging to the conversation?

—

Clifton’s poem is not about forgetting. It is about the difference between remembering together and being required to remember correctly.

They ask us to remember — and what they mean is: remember what we have authorized. Remember the greatness. Remember the legacy. Remember the institution’s account of itself. And set aside, or never speak aloud, or subordinate to the official narrative, the memories that complicate that account. The memories from the back pew. The memories that the governance grammar has no container for because they reveal what the performance is designed to conceal.

I have no dog in the fight for the soul of Black Church celebrity culture. I do not have the stomach for the posturing — for the way that craving the acceptance of Black Church power gets dressed up as concern for the legacy, as righteous indignation, as liberation. For the way the back pew people get invoked as the reason for the performance while remaining invisible to the performers.

The back pew holds something the front of the room cannot afford to hold: the full complexity of what it means to love an institution that has also caused harm. The people who sit there — who have been demonized for their honesty, dismissed for their grief, punished for their refusal to perform a reverence they could not feel — are not the threat to the tradition. They are, in many ways, its most faithful witnesses. They stayed close enough to be wounded. They loved deeply enough to grieve. They remember precisely because they could not afford the luxury of forgetting.

The true seat of liberation — the path that keeps the Black Church as a living site of reverence rather than a performance of its own legacy — runs through the complexity they carry. Not around it. Not over it. Through it.

What the governance grammar cannot tolerate is exactly what the tradition most needs: people who tell the truth about what happened to them inside the hallowed halls, not to destroy the institution but because the institution cannot be made well by people who are only permitted to remember the authorized version of its story. The diagnosis requires the full archive. The healing requires the back pew testimony. The liberation requires that we stop sacrificing the most honest witnesses to the comfort of the most powerful performers.

So yes — some people will be mad. They will be mad because the memories I keep are not the ones they asked for. They will be mad because I will not trade my testimony for proximity to the institution’s approval. They will be mad because the work I am committed to — loving Black folk enough to tell the truth about what has been done to them in God’s name — does not leave room for the performance.

I keep on remembering mine. Not in spite of my love for the tradition.