Greetings! It’s been a minute since I’ve written here — long enough that it felt appropriate to give the blog a fresh coat of paint and reintroduce myself.
My name is Jakebe T. Lope, and I am a jackalope online. I am also a Black American, part of the wonderful African diaspora, though I’m not as plugged in to the culture as I’d like to be. I grew up in the forbidding urban wilds of Baltimore, MD, where an awkward and sensitive leveret like me was consistently forced to the edges of the group. But this happens to most nerds, so I’m not particularly special. But it does mean that my formative years were spent as an outsider; it’s the uniform I’m most comfortable with, and I still like dressing the part even now.
At this point it’s fair to say I’m a lapsed Buddhist. I’m a lifelong meditator, though I’ll admit I never developed a steady practice; overall, I average 4 – 5 days a week. Zen Buddhism, in particular, provides a framework that allows me to contextualize my life, relationships, and troubles in a way that gives me the best chance to improve them. I love the fact that it only concerns itself with this life, this moment, right now and nothing else. Everything is geared toward teaching yourself how to be perfectly imperfect, present in your own bones. For a while now I’ve been anything but present. If you’ve lived in the United States over the past several years, maybe you’d understand why.
On August 9, 2014, an 18-year-old Black American man named Michael Brown was shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO. According to reports, Officer Wilson approached Brown and his friend in a patrol car because they were walking in the middle of the street; 90 seconds later, Brown was down with six shots to his front. However, it took four hours for authorities to remove the body from the street. Federal and state authorities concluded that Michael Brown’s civil rights were not violated, and that Officer Wilson had acted in self-defense. This happened three days after my 34th birthday.
The incident and its aftermath woke me up, in a way. Even though I had grown up watching the video of LAPD officers beating Rodney King, watching them get acquitted, watching Los Angeles lose its shit for six days. The abstracted reality of racial discrimination became real to me. I realized there was an entire state-backed apparatus that could arrest or abuse or even murder me without consequence, and if it happened and drew attention, there would be a media apparatus invested in making me the aggressor. There were also so many people in the US ready and willing to believe it.
Since then, over 330 unarmed Black Americans have been killed by police officers across the country. Their ages range from 4 months to 68 years old. It is very rare for the families of victims to see any consequences for the officers who murdered their loved ones. The ones that make the news have their reputations and intentions thoroughly examined; they are frequently given the most uncharitable view in right-wing media. I’ve seen this play out time and time and time again; I recognize the playbook very well now.
In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton — but he won the Electoral College, so he became the 45th President. I’m not exaggerating when I say it was a traumatic moment for me. I had seen this man prove he was so wildly unqualified for the office over the past year, and yet 62 million Americans voted for him anyway — including people I had counted as friends and allies. The ideological ground evaporated beneath me, and my naive ideas about the inherent goodness of people were smashed to pieces.
Then came 2020. When COVID became a pandemic, anti-Asian racism swept the country. Common-sense measures like wearing a face mask and social distancing were rabidly resisted by huge swathes of the country. The President fought with scientists in his own administration and promoted snake-oil cures time and time again. One million people in the United States died due to the poor response. On top of that, George Floyd was killed by police officers in New York, sparking a wave of protests over the summer that police seemed primed to crack down on.
While I struggled with the mental burden of quarantine and the rejection of social responsibility from half of the country, I also watched civilians being beaten in the streets for demanding the police stop killing Black Americans without consequence. White American friends I had considered close allies came to me through that summer, asking why Black Americans would destroy their own neighborhoods over an unfortunate incident that wasn’t as racially-motivated as it was made out to be. I was asked to explain the rage, fear, and despair people like me were feeling to people who refused to acknowledge the very reasons we were out in the streets. It was not a good time.
Since 2016, it has felt like the world is incredibly unsafe. The hurt I felt over friends who voted for Trump, or who insisted that our response to police brutality was overblown, hardened inside of me. I just couldn’t face trying to be understood by a world that seemed determined to not get it. If even the people I considered close were unable to see how I’m affected by hundreds of years of racial discrimination when it’s so crushingly obvious, how could anyone interpret more complicated or more nuanced things? It felt like I couldn’t trust anyone to see me the way I’ve determined myself to be seen. So I simply stopped trying to be seen.
During that time, I fell back on coping mechanisms from a difficult childhood that prioritized navigating an unpredictable, dangerous space. Self-expression was useless, so I focused instead on numbing the emotions that needed to be expressed. I stopped writing or trying to connect with other people. I dove head-first into a marijuana habit. I let fear blind me to pretty much everything except survival. I stopped believing in the promise of a better world and resigned myself to sleepwalking to the apocalypse.
Earlier this year, I restarted therapy in the hope that I could find a way out of that downward spiral. I learned how much I had internalized anti-Black sentiment very early on, and how retreating back to that space meant being so untrusting of other people I couldn’t imagine healthy connection most of the time. As it turns out, my whole view of things have been distorted for a while and I’m learning how to clear away the warping.
So, I’m aiming to dust off this blog properly in 2026 and learn how to express myself again. It will be messy, but I’ll do my best to be open, earnest, and accepting of feedback. I trust myself to handle it and trust you to interact in good faith. Let’s get to know each other again.
From the Desk of Jakebe T. Rabbit 