As an incumbent of the American education system, I was breast-fed on historical mythology. It emphasized American supremacy gained by pious Christian values, blue-collar hard work and liberty through disbanding British occupiers. These myths disposed me from knowing my history, my people and ultimately myself.
When I did encounter self, it was as an enslaved subject, cotton-bloodied, a sojourner of freedom through underground pathways. Emerging, I was granted emancipation from a white man — my savior once again. Decades later, when the question of my subjecthood was again boycotted, my civil rights leaders, all men, marched to the mountaintop of 1964.
But this is an ahistorical water-hosing constructed for white comfort and black sedation. American soil is and will remain a space of native genocide; a space built on the backs and opposition to black bodies; a space where capitalism regards black and brown bodies as fungible, disposable objects purposed for trade. This results in a nation that regards integration as inclusion in a genocidal system — not a dismantling of it.
At the University of Cape Town, a long-term initiative is transformation, which works to decolonize the university environment and to borrow its rhetoric. A call for transformation is long overdue at UNC. Embracing the concept of transformation acknowledges the fixity of racial terror. A nation, or a campus, constructed on racial subjugation must acknowledge how the violence of its past is foundational to its present.
It cannot continue without naming systematic and individual actors in this violence. Notions of decolonization — whether it be in the total removal of white supremacist architecture or mental unshackling — interrogate the intergenerational violence our bodies inherit.
It’s not only embracing Hurston Hall but ceasing contracts with companies like Aramark, a corporation invested in the expansion of prisons. It’s all workers being paid a living wage and guaranteed affordable housing.
This is not radical. Though it is fraught with objections by nonblack, nonqueer, cisgendered, able-bodied heteropatriarchs who are complicit in continued profit and entertainment from black death, who play victim, who subscribe to candidates with hair and politics we should be embarrassed of.
We can no longer waste breath on vaudevillian actors who crowd the comment section of articles when the normalization of their politics have fatal repercussions.
To be African transatlantically circumcised as American, I am born stolen — without soil, without tongue, without name, forced to constantly mitigate for white comfort.
