Time & Perspective Quote by Kevin Eubanks

The sting of Eubanks's line is how quietly it indicts the room. "Just be himself" sounds modest, even basic, until you hear the social cost baked into it: for a Black man, authenticity is treated like a provocation. The phrase frames Black identity not as a given but as a performance constantly judged, interpreted, and policed. It is the exhaustion of living with an invisible audience that demands you prove you're safe, palatable, or exceptional before you're allowed to be ordinary.

"We spend so much time in defense" lands like a musician talking about tempo: time is the real currency being stolen. Not money, not even dignity at first, but hours, attention, creative energy diverted into preemptive explanations. Defense becomes a default posture, a reflex learned from experience, because the surrounding culture assumes guilt, threat, or deficiency that must be argued away.

Then comes the turn: "something that is indefensible because there is nothing to defend". It's a compact dismantling of the entire burden-of-proof trap. Eubanks isn't confessing an inability to justify himself; he's rejecting the premise that Blackness is on trial. The subtext is both political and intimate: the demand to defend your humanity is itself the insult. Coming from a working musician who has lived in public-facing spaces where "professionalism" often codes as whiteness, the quote reads like a refusal to keep translating himself for other people's comfort - and a reminder that the real scandal isn't Black identity, it's the constant insistence that it needs a defense at all.