Christa Bell: Claiming blackness is a political act that shows solidarity with people of the African diaspora whose humanity has, for hundreds of years, been deeply violated and impacted by white/European colonization/enslavement and the disease of white supremacy. “Black” is a coalitional term used in much the same way the term “People of Color” is used. Not to minimize individuality, but to acknowledge, if not identify with, people, across the globe, who have an historical relationship to one another and to whiteness based, in no small part, on the theft of land, ancestral genocide, enslavement, exploitation and discrimination that white people have imposed on the black world. Denying blackness doesn’t solve white supremacy and the world’s inability to claim you as ‘just a human being’. It’s interesting to me that the New Black/universal (black) humans always identify with their white selves first–and by white, I mean both the whiteness that’s coded as “human” and “American” as well as any genetic whiteness that, more often than not, has nothing to do with their actual parentage or the culture they grew up practicing. Raven Symone, for example, identifies as “colorless” and “an American” although the mother who raised her and made sure she got a spot on the Cosby Show as a little black girl, is black; Tiger Woods is “Caublasian” even with no identifiable white or mixed-race parent; Beyonce is French, Indigenous and Black (though her lacefronts hide a different story); and Pharrell is running around in a Native American headdress talkin’ bout he’s mixed race, when both of his parents identify as black. All of this is fine. Whatever. Identity is personal and everyone should be able to identify how they like. I also understand keeping it neutral (and by “neutral”, I mean white) so you’re less threatening to the muti-billion dollar corporations who pay you to be as racially neutral as possible (and by “racially neutral”, I mean black-less). Get your coon on. Do you. Get paid. ‘That’s not my business,’ as it were. But, in my mind, being black takes you out of the isolation of tokenism and unifies you, UNIVERSALIZES you with the billions of folks whose humanity and self-identity has been compromised by white supremacy. It’s the ultimate in universal identities. But that’s just me.
?#?CarryOn? ?#?BlackIsTheOldBlack? ?#?BeingBlackIsAPoliticalAct?