Butter-soft recliner, snacks spread like Super Bowl Sunday, watching Squid Game Season 2 turn playground joy into death theater. Their Mingle game got folks running like scattered pepper, just like Duck, Duck, Goose - dropping the slow ones, the lone stars, the rhythmless. Looking at all those hot pink suits with firearms, the truth hit me like a quick lash of a wooden spoon. The messages and antics behind this Netflix series are more like real life than I'd like to admit. Black in America means knowing every "game" has teeth behind its smile.
Later that night, Nana and I posted up at Kabuto Sushi Bar. Watching her 86-year-old hands make first contact with chopsticks and then decide to use her trusted fork instead, I tried not to burst into a puff of ancestral joy. My Nana has an adventurous streak after all these years. Between baby bites of a Maryland roll (she called it an "ocean sandwich") and Hibachi, I asked about her playground days. Her eyes launched into time-traveling, sliding back eight decades to dusty roads and open fields in the south. "Duck, Duck, Goose," she smiled softly like margarine melting. "Hide and Go Seek."
I thought to myself how those elementary games I even played 50 or more years after she still carried secret maps about when to shine, when to shadow, when to gather, and when to run.
Her fork froze mid-flight when I rambled on with details about Squid Game. That look crossed her face, the one that raised three generations right. "Jazzy," she said, shaking her head slow like a pendulum of pure knowing, "our circles were more than fun, they were lessons. Even our out-games had in-doors. Had to. The world has been playing elimination games with us since forever-long."
She told me about the church games in '43, how they'd create circles within circles - games inside games. "We learned to read the wind," she said, poking at the onions in her fried rice. "Learned when to let the breeze carry your voice full volume and when to let it dandelion-float away. Those were our games, Jazzy. Survival scrolls written in hopscotch chalk."
"You may think Duck, Duck, Goose is about running," she whispered, "no, Jazzy, you got to know that when you're the goose, it's your time to rise up and chase your chance, even with everybody's eyes watching." She sat back and let out a big laugh. I imagine she was remembering her rise up and chase.
That shook in my spirit like a can of soda while scrolling through my Black Women In Tech group on Facebook. The way the women in there speak about their success or lack thereof navigating the job market, I couldn't help but hear those voices in the middle of each Squid Game deciding if they will keep going; if they even have a fighting chance to survive. Sisters sharing how applications ask for LinkedIn profiles have turned resumes, once pure black-and-white testimony of their skills into another game of show and tell. Another playground moment where your face becomes your fate.
"I am still unemployed after nearly one year. Dozens of revamps later, and I have not received a single recruiter response or job offer. I am in debt and cannot afford my bills, groceries, or upkeep. I hope someone here can offer a referral or some relief. This is so embarrassing."
"I removed my pic from LinkedIn... well I hid it from people who are not in network with me. and recruiters started to contact me. I think there was a post I made and people were in the comments saying that when they removed their picture they started to get DMs from some recruiters."
These tech priests don't understand that AI isn't biased on its own. They forget that it is holding up a digital mirror to the same old playground politics. Fed on decades of who-got-picked-first data, these algorithms are remixing ancient rhythms in binary code.
Facial recognition plays 'Red Light, Green Light' at TSA, freezing our faces in digital amber while others float through security like morning mist. A playground game where some kids always seem to get tagged while others glide right through.
Hiring AIs cooking up their own flavor of Mingle, sorting resumes like playing cards, with people whose lifestyles aren't fit-the-mold-perfect steadily landing in the discard pile. Just like back then, when certain kids always got picked last, except now the choosing happens behind screens in silicon playgrounds.
The game hasn't changed, we got new playground equipment.
But we have been mastering survival calculus. Been practicing it in concrete classrooms and alley universities, in rope-rhythm laboratories, and in freedom-song theorems.
Our games were life school. 'Hide and Seek' taught shadow-walking, the art of choosing your visible moments. When it was SAFE to be seen and when to get low and disappear in the field. Double Dutch wasn't jump science, we were reading life's rhythms, learning to flow-merge with systems moving full speed, turn stumbles into style steps. Even 'Mother May I' was power navigation, the subtle art of forward motion without triggering system backlash.
These gatekeepers and system makers may think they're cooking up fresh formulas, but really we're getting the microwave reheating of old biases in digital dutch ovens. While they steadily digitize divide-and-conquer, our culture has been building unity algorithms since forever:
When the rope stings too sharp? The circle adjusts like breathing.
When the hiding spots run dry? We make space like love.
When the game turns tooth and claw? We remix reality and make new mathematics.
This is not about memory lane strolling. This is blueprint recognition. While tech companies stumble through ethics like toddlers learning to walk, we have been holding doctorates in community preservation, earned in playground laboratories, written in sidewalk equations and jump rope theorems.
My sister-seed is eleven, magic flowing through her box braids, teaching robots to catch the spirit. When her code stumbles, she doesn't trash it; she transforms it and makes it sing new melodies. Little genius already knows what these machines need to learn: victory isn't about leaving ghosts behind. It's about lifting spirits up, widening the cipher, keeping the flow flowing till everybody catches rhythm.
All of our children need to learn this playground quantum physics: games are never simply games. Whether it's hopscotch algorithms or hiring formulas, jump rope or facial recognition, rules shift but stakes stay sky-high.
We play different though:
Not eliminating but elevating
Not excluding but expanding
Not solo-flying but flock-rising
When these tech companies parade their new AI systems, proud of their sorting and sifting like digital window fans, I see Nana's hands pausing over that ocean sandwich. Remember how our games turned every out into a different kind of in, we turn elimination into elevation.
The world's running Squid Game programs on our future, coding corner-pocket traps in the algorithm. But our ancestors' playground protocols taught better mathematics. They showed us survival isn't about being the last one vertical. It's about making sure everybody gets to play their verse.
So tell me: when AI starts calling cadence, when the digital playground feels deadly as them pink-suited elimination equations, what rhythms will play in your spirit?
The circle's breathing. The rhythm's rising.
Your verse. It's time to be the goose that changes everything.
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