As I sat down to give my post a once over before running it today I got a Twitter notification that lots of people were sharing that same tweet so, being the ultimate procrastinator, I clicked over to see what was going on. It was the story of the auctioning off of the gun that was used to kill Trayvon Martin (I am purposefully not using the murderer’s name). I am going to admit that at that moment I sat there and cried. And those tears flowed for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the proceeds from the sale of the game are reportedly going to be used (in part) to fight against the Black Lives Matter movement.
My tears can be directly connected to the post that I wrote for today on my need to be unapologetically Black in the face of all of the things in society that attempt to erase race in some fairly significant ways that we see all around us with attempts to replace #BlackLivesMatter with #AllLivesMatter without consideration for how race plays into the ways that people are treated in potentially violent situations and what happens when that potential becomes an actuality.
Last week I talked about the book that I was reading, Whistling Vivaldi. Whistling Vivaldi gets its name from the young Black man whose story gets shared by the author, Claude M. Steele, who finds that while white pedestrians on the street would move away from him or otherwise indicate that they felt uncomfortable or threatened by his presence. In an attempt to alleviate this discomfort/fear, the young man began whistling Vivaldi (or show tunes) while he walked down the street. So by making himself appear to be one of the “good ones” who would know Vivaldi well enough to be able to whistle it from memory. And this makes me ask the question of why this should even be necessary. Why do we need to make ourselves less large, less Black, less us for the comfort of others? Do they make themselves “less” for us? Less racist? Less condescending? Less oppressive?
There is a lot of good in diversity studies like Whistling Vivaldi, they give statistical proof (for those who need it or will choose to believe it) of racism and the effects of racism, but what they don’t do is offer solutions. And if they do those solutions often involve creating environments where students of color find themselves lessened in some way. Or even worse, forced into the role of educating others out of their ignorance. And this is not to say that education is not one of the possible solutions, but it is to say that the task of education should not be forced onto the oppressed. As I recently said in a “diversity workshop”, I signed on for this shit, my students of color did not.
We should not have to be less in order to get to a place of more. More safety. More life. More equity. We need to have the right, scratch that…we need to DEMAND the right to get in #Formation, to drink #Lemonade in order to work through the intersectionality of our pain as women of colors, and ultimately to just be UNAPOLOGETICALLY BLACK. We have to come to a place where we no longer (nor are we expected to) apologize for our Blackness. We need to revel in that shit! We need to put it in people’s faces in ways that have previously been seen as being unacceptable or just “too much”. And we need to have a space for that Blackness to be our own. In the same way that the love, pain, and death that have and continue to come with it has been solely ours, our BLACKNESS is ours. Ours to portray, to analyze, and respect.
This is not to say that our Blackness is exclusionary. Non-Black folks share space with this Blackness and are free to experience it as well, but that experience is secondary. It does not come with the same lifetime of understanding and pain. It takes a back seat and that’s ok. Taking a seat is not a bad thing for folks whose privilege has historically allowed them to stand while others have lain prone. It offers a new perspective, a new point of view, but there are seats to take and lanes to stay in.
So today (and everyday) I reaffirm my right (and the right of all of the folks of the African Diaspora) to just fucking BE. From our ratchet queens to our black intelligentsia. From bell hooks to Beyonce. We reserve the right air our dirty laundry and make sense out of the world around us as we seek to heal, survive, and flourish. We are UNAPOLOGETICALLY BLACK.
