Living as a Black Person in this Moment

I recognize that I cannot speak for all black people because not all black people are experiencing this moment in the same way, there is a scale we must recognize. Simply put, black people are not a monolith. 

And because black people in America and across the world are not a monolith, our stories are multifaceted, nuanced and are promulgate by many layers of ‘complicated’. Which means, I must also hold space for black people who say they have never experienced racism – even when deep down I am inclined to believe that they are in denial because racism, in its full and varied scales, is systemic and structural and therefore we, people of color and black people, are experiencing it at varied scales. Yet, not everyone sees it, holds it nor experiences it intimately nor chooses to engage with it. I must recognize that too.

I recognize that there are black people, people of color and white people who believe that the ‘black lives matter’ affirmation, social mobilization and call to action eclipses all other types of injustices. In fact, I must recognize that there many who reject the binary black vs. white and see ‘people of color’ as a phrase that should be inclusive of everyone, including whiteness. I understand the spirit of that perspective, that race is a social construct, or perhaps because proponents of that perspective are direct or indirect benefactors of white supremacy.

I recognize that white-supremacy, like anti-blackness, can feel like challenging concepts and realities to unpack and digest. To paraphrase James Baldwin, to be in a relative state of consciousness about racism and its very intrinsic nature, is to be in a state of perpetual rage. I also recognize that if we do NOT work within a state of consciousness – framing these conversations and shifts within anti-oppression, anti-blackness frameworks to tackle the foundation of which white-supremacy is built, perpetuated, and instigated on, the symptoms of racism will persist because the root, the heart, the foundation of this active ill will have not been addressed and  uprooted from its core. 

The Now

I also recognize that the overt and subversive way we can organize and protest in America for black people - for equity, for equality, for justice - is not the same across the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa or places where anti-blackness is so thick that any resistance equates to immediate death. I lift those spaces up, in recognizing just how inextricably linked our struggle is. We are not free, unless we are ALL free.

I also recognize that the little black girl in me can be free. That having been called a ‘nigger’, ‘prostitute’, ‘slave’, ‘ugly’ from ages 11-16 all across the world by both white and non-white people is not the truth of those people who hurled those words. It is not the truth of who I am. My spending years wanting to be lighter-skinned, with a more pointed and pronounced nose with finer hair, is not the reflection that is ‘right’. I am still perming my hair to this day, and although informed by colonial/white notions of ‘beauty’, it also does not make me less ‘black’, less ‘woke’, less of anything. I am free. The truth of who we all are is unfolding, rapidly.

The last couple of weeks have reminded me to stop and recognize the multiple forms, shapes and sizes in which privilege operates including that of black people. It has reminded me that an intersectional lens is critical to this conversation; 

black lives matter

black lives matter globally,

black women’s lives matter

black lives matter over and over and over again. 

I recognize that we, black people, as a community are hurt. And so, we hurt one another through crime, through acts of de-valuing our existence, through jealousy, through tribalism, through caste systems, through death. That forgiveness can be a means of transformation…perhaps a beginning to re-imagining a more equitable world. I wrote 15 years ago, one day out of the blue

We will break cycles of violence

We will break cycles of violation

For forgiveness and knowledge

Know a different kind of love

We must know better. Heal better. To do better. We Matter.

The Gratitude

One afternoon I lay beside my grandmother, inhaling her, touching her soft oak skin. I asked her why she felt sad. She simply responded, ‘when the heart is full, it cannot speak’. No words were spoken after. We just lay on her bed, under Sierra Leone’s summer heat. I, taking all of her in. She passed away a couple of weeks later.

There have been countless times I too have had my heart so full I could not speak. Yet, the last two-weeks have been one of prayers – answered.  An awakening, an opening, a channeling of indescribable pain into power. The articles, the stories, the photos, the marches, the honesty, the anger, the truths, the fragility, the witnessing, the ACTION and all the in-explainable things in between, are an explosion of a heart so full it burst and spills onto every corner, every street, every country – demanding that we matter. Hope, resurrected. Faith, in sustainable change. We cannot go back to the way things were. 

This is a note of recognition and gratitude.