Since I was a child, my family has felt like an expanding universe — a mosaic of non-biological and biological people from all corners coming together. The non-biological ones weren’t revealed as such until I was much older, and none of the step or half relatives I refer to in terms of portions.
Mainstream conceptions of Blackness are stuck on categorizing what and who is “real”— what legitimate Black is and ain’t. The exterior performed self is in contest with snapbacks, Black vernacular, baggy pants and the stuff reality shows and music videos are made of. Lack of “realness” is checked on elementary recess courts, labeled “not Black enough” or “you’re not Black like the other ones.”
Dear White People, I do not write this column with you in mind.
Colonial construction of the Black female body has been bent on her reduction. On the plantation, she is reduced to the utility of her biological sex organs.
Recently, I visited Cape Coast castle, the sight along the coast of Ghana, West Africa where millions of enslaved Ghanaians were violently shipped to the Americas.
From Missouri to Cape Town and back again, black university students are fed up. Transatlantically, campuses have been frequented with rallies and protests, all speaking out against anti-black practices in university systems.
The day before spring lectures ended at the University of Cape Town, Black student protestors shut campus down. Barricading entrances and roads with boulders, ropes, chairs and even their bodies, students made sure that school would not continue until the administration addressed two crippling injustices: university tuition and the outsourcing of university staff.
In contemporary discourses on identity politics, the term “intersectionality” is often thrown around.
“Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space,” Jared Sexton said.
