This piece is a part of the Wildest Dreams project.

The city was on fire and we were exhausted. We were weary, our spirits wounded, and we had no time to grieve.

As a videographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer’s visuals team, I was on edge through most of last summer, constantly awaiting being sent to cover the next uprising or extrajudicial police killing. We had spent weeks covering protests — spasms of long-ignored grievances, justifiable anger and righteous outrage, all in the midst of a deadly pandemic. At night, I learned to acclimate to the sound of helicopters over my neighborhood. In the morning, I’d wake — like so many Black folk — feeling weak in my bones, lacking the energy to describe it to colleagues, but still having to show up.

This all finally came to a head in a phone conversation with my supervisor Danese Kenon, who is both the managing editor of visuals for the Inquirer, and a Black woman who shared my exhaustion. We needed stories that weren’t reactive to news events or reliant on Black people’s pain. Something that would let us talk directly to Black folk in Philly with empathy, compassion, and love. But it had to feel right. It had to come from the depths of our souls. It had to speak to who we really are.

After that conversation, I went home and began pondering our legacy — both what we’ve all inherited, and what we hope to leave behind.

Over the last year, I’ve been working alongside a team of Black journalists at the paper to create this series. Wildest Dreams is our collaborative mini-anthology of storytelling about Black cultural inheritance, legacy and joy, told through essays, poetry, video and music. Presented by the paper’s Black journalists, and with the help of some amazing contributors, we are creating a space for Black creatives in Philadelphia to share our work, and to honor both our ancestors’ dreams and our own.

I don’t take dreams for granted. I am a queer Black boy with Southern Baptist roots, with one branch of ancestors from the woods of Georgia, and another lineage of queer and same-gender-loving ancestors who built their chosen families from scratch. These legacies live in my work, in my style, in my Black delight. It’s my late Auntie’s pound cake recipe passing down through the family and still touching my lips years later. It’s the stories of my same-gender-loving uncles who continue to remind me what radical, expansive Black love can look like.

Wildest Dreams is a multimedia anthology centered on Black inheritance, legacy, and joy presented by the Black journalists of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

This compilation of articles, poetry, videos, photographs, and music explores what being Black means to Black people as we create a space for Black writers, photographers, videographers and designers to share their work, and to show that our stories matter.

Join our Wildest Dreams community on Instagram to take part in the conversation, or sign up for our newsletter for a behind-the-scenes look at the project. You can also listen to the music that inspired the Wildest Dreams project on Spotify.

My ancestors’ wildest dreams included simply learning to read, or securing the right to vote. These were bold dreams because, for them as Black Americans, humanity wasn’t a basic right. As America continues to reconcile itself with centuries of racism, Black journalists have had to acknowledge that we work in an industry that for far too long has required that we tell our stories through an oversimplified white lens. A lens that creates the perception that our wildest dreams are shaped by white America’s expectations.

Black writers and photographers in mainstream media often have to explain our art, music, fashion and food to non-Black people through rubrics that we didn’t design or build. When we explain dimensions that are obvious to us, we flatten our culture and we participate in the othering that shapes how white America sees us and how we see ourselves.

But our birthright is much grander than any lens prescribed to us. The Wildest Dreams project reclaims our narrative by celebrating how Black Philadelphians are living now, and illustrates the vitality and multidimensional nature of our culture. It’s also designed to create a space so that successive generations may step into their own inheritance of Black creativity and imagination.

Over the next several weeks, we will be rolling out this collection to honor the cultural heirlooms we have inherited, explore the complex identities we inhabit, and reflect on the art and music that fill us with jubilee.

Our intent is to center ourselves — our mental health, our beauty and our identities — and to put our truths out there, on our own terms.

This Wildest Dreams project is a love letter to Black Philadelphia from Black journalists: We see you. We love you. We are you.