In pursuit of being original and right

“When they come for me and say I used their grief for gain…” I thought. I fantasized about talking in an interview again.

When I started reading Farming While Black (FWB), at first, and for a while, I thought the writer was cashing in on a version of “Black” (as in American Southern descendant of the Slave Trade) that wasn’t hers. It felt like an erasure and displacement for me to use this shorthand to market the book. And yet I was overwhelmed by how thorough it and the surrounding programming were.

With knowledge, culture and relationships, we spill into each other so it’s no telling what’s mine or yours. It makes me ask: who owns the lessons I’ve learned about myself, me or the people whose relationships taught me those lessons?

Who has the authority over a learning? How do we own it and honor what shaped it, too?

I want so much to be right and original so I can feel safe from ridicule when I speak. I’ll suffocate in the meantime, I know.

There was an envy there, too. I thought I could never be what I had decided was loud and wrong. Because that’s dangerous for Black girls. You can’t speak until you have your message just right, and be sure it won’t make anyone unhappy.

I realized later that I was rejecting that in myself, the permission to be unliked, contradictory, nuanced and not above critique.

(I look forward to a time when envy doesn’t get shamed, so it’s easier to celebrate it as a discovery and a chance to reclaim a part of ourselves we thought we couldn’t accept.)

If I try to seperate what’s yours from what’s mine, I wind up cutting off a piece of myself. Either that, or I’ll try and say it’s not there, as if to cleanse myself of the other person’s impact/influence/affect on me. That way I can say I was original.

In culture work and in justice work, how do we own the authority of what we know, while also honoring the complicatedness of the fact that that knowing didn’t just happen in a bubble?

(Power ruins magic if you keep putting it first. I know this preoccupation with ownership is getting it the way of everything. The only way I can let go of that control is to trust that I’m safe here. In my skin. No mask.)

For the record, I do think Blackness specific to the American South is the Blackness the world understands when we say the word “black.”

“Black” has become a white shorthand that creates a dilemma for Black folks across the diaspora: yes, the solidarity and the culture we call Blackness belongs to all of us, but our identities are not interchangeable, and we can be in solidarity on clearer terms if we stay specific about the nuances of each of our identities.

…I also have to remember that America is posited as a world power, so it’s possible that the privilege of assuming the American perspective also aids in this shorthand, and my territorialism.

Maybe we — all of us — access a space or an identity marker like “Black,” or in my case, like “organizer,” because we’re trying to get to a true expression in ourselves, and that marker reflects that in us. And I think we ( I) could benefit from being more compassionate around that. We just want to belong. To ourselves, and to each other in a way that feels true.

Wheww. It’s complicated.

The market for getting enlightened about yourself is still largely centered around people who were taught to identify as white.

No one’s checking for a Black femme looking to heal herself of her ingested and inherited oppression and dominance; there’s no foundation money going to organizations to work through how we’ve learned to immulate our aggressors so as to never be rendered powerless again. Nobody’s checking for our humanity in a full way like that.

So when they come for me for being human, I just have to remember that shaping the perception of other people can’t be my work. It might help me build power but it will also starve me of my magic. I can’t survive that way, let alone thrive as myself.

(Again, I feel myself writing to someone other than me and trying to bring it back. Because it’s not un-violent to shape your speech in anticipation for what someone else might hear. To try and self-reflect only to have the writing hi-jacked and commodified by the presence of a gaze. To see myself through another set of eyes, always judging.)

I use to think that if I acknowledge that I have ugly parts, and learn what they are and how they affect me and the world around me, that those ugly parts disqualify me from having the right to show up all the way. People can be so unforgiving. And because Black femmes are assumed to have this monopoly on victimhood — which is a problem because it reduces us as people and assumes that being a victim is the only way to access power — the minute there’s even a flicker of oppressive behavior that she’s inherited or ingested, people are ready to burn her, because she’s not allowed to human: her belonging is contingent upon the extent to which she aspires to perfection.

So maybe understandably, I thought if other people saw those parts in me it would also disqualify me. Because we can’t afford to be fallable, I was taught, least of all people raised as Black girls.

Gaul is what I’m after. Having the gaul to know yourself and be known, and to show up anyway.

I wonder how that unforgivenness of myself, rejection of myself, has distorted my perception of other people and who they get to be.

I’m healing an inheritance of patriarchy, colonialism, amd imperialism all in my body. And I still get to be here. I see myself, and am no less worthy of love. So I don’t have to reject or ignore those parts of myself, and I can handle them with care. And I don’t have to wait til I’m pure of these things, as if there’s such a thing, before I can realize myself. Bet that would change how I see and treat others. (whoooooah…)