I Am The Fight
If you have an adverse reaction or are averse to the concept of Black liberation, it is because you are recognizing that such an identity was born under the onslaught of oppression. That onslaught of oppression was the construction of Whiteness, which was only created as a vehicle for repressing others, but has consistently been presented and intellectualized about in the guise of liberation. As the culturally conditioned version of humanity that we currently present as, we do not actually recognize desperation when and where it is.
You might reflexively imagine that Black Power will mean the same thing White Supremacy does because it's the construction of Whiteness that made Blackness, as a socio-political and cultural construct, a prerogative. Essentially, you fear Black people will do you dirty the way we've been done dirty by White Supremacist delusion.
And those who imagine this have never known better because they have expectations and trauma responses forged through generations of oppression, repression and Nihilism. They cannot imagine better than the worst that has or can be done (to them and others). Essentially, “Whiteness” as the long wrought epigenetic response to the suppression of and lack of excavation done regarding Nihilism within European and Russian families and cultures. And this as THEE ancestral challenge passed down the lineage of those currently identified as “White People,” just as globalized and systemic anti-Blackness and enslavement is the challenge of people of Afro-Diasporic lineages.
Black ethos and ontology, which is born of African ethos and ontology, is not a binary construct. We are fundamentally unattracted to (and therefore unlike) what White Supremacy does and is because we are the proof of how Whiteness is a false premise to begin with. Evidenced by the fact that Whiteness was constructed in opposition of whatever has been projected upon Blackness BY WHITENESS ITSELF. Where people who identify as “White” have invested in an identity that is predicated on the rejection of and resistance to everything Afro-Diasporic people have wanted personally for themselves.
Therefore, Black Liberation does not equate to White Supremacy. IT REMEDIES IT.
Many people are convinced the antidote is the poison because they're so toxified that they don't realize they've long been the source of their ailment. What ails them is their beliefs, their history and their choice making. Individually and collectively.
You want Black women to Harriet Tubman for you but have you ever brought up the struggle of Black women, Black femmes or Black people up at your family dinner table, friendly gatherings or professional meet-ups? Will you do it this holiday season? When you serve the animal known as Turkey as an arbitrary symbol of "thanks" and "freedom" on top of the Mass Indian Burial Ground that is “America.” A place named after an Italian who never even set foot on the land attributed to him. Consistently giving credit everywhere other than where it is due.
Every freedom and liberation movement under the sun has benefited from the Civil Rights movements invented and spearheaded by Black, Indigenous and African people from the US South, to South Africa, to Haiti, to Canada. Every person today experiencing freedoms born of the STRUGGLE of African, Black and Indigenous people directly owes much of their freedom to Black, Indigenous and African people who have laid their lives ON THE LINE, ON THE GROUND AND IN THE WATER of the lands which birthed us FOR CENTURIES UPON CENTURIES.
Do you speak of landback at the dinner table the way you speak of Russia or Israel or even White serial killers and pedophiles? And if you don't, what will that mean for you when all the accused are gone? Who will bare the burden of oppression since it ensures the devaluation of all? Who will be the new negative and negated? If it can happen to us, it can happen to anybody.
The oppressed are just as much people as anyone else. The oppressed are just as much people as their oppressors.
The systemic bias is that Black women should be dogs in everyone's fight but our own. Because those who want us to fight for them are still fundamentally unwilling to support us. So they never think we should come first. They presume our lives are beholden to them and exist solely for the purpose of being in service to them.
But I can never be a dog in your fight if I am the fight. And until the world can recognize this quality of Black womanhood and femininity IN ORDER TO REMEDY ITS NEGATION, nobody will be as free as they can be. Nor will anybody be as free as freedom is to itself.
Childhood conversations about liberation in my household never negated the liberation of other people in order to achieve the freedom and equanimity that we claimed we desired. The kind of freedom that great Masters of US-American History such as Toni Morrison, bell hooks, James Baldwin and Paul Robeson talked about.
In the households of other races, can this be said about their conversations of liberation? Do those kinds of conversations in your household even include Black people, let alone center them? Have they ever? And if so, how often? Could you count it on one hand?
By design of being the most oppressed class of person in society, my liberation cannot negate the liberation of anyone less oppressed than myself. Nor can the liberation of a Black trans woman or a fat Black woman or a disabled Black woman or a non-binary or two-spirit femme or a Black Indigenous woman.
Because I didn't grow up in a household or in lineages that had the luxury of believing that our liberation could (or should) exclude anybody. I have always known there are levels to liberation and that everyone is entitled to a level because it will never not be a spectrum of experience.
Those levels of liberation can be stacked exactly in the reverse of the levels of oppression, thereby creating a temporal and neutralizing hierarchy that actually gives way to equality through the vehicle of equanimity.
How does the pendulum come to the center if you won't swing it backwards? Unless it's never actually moved its position. But there is no center to be in relation to without relationship to other(s) outside of yourself. The spectrum is the reason the swinging must happen. The people and things along that spectrum are the directions the swinging must take place.
If the pendulum of grace (justice) has been kept from swinging along the spectrum and, thus, in the direction of ALL WITH EQUANIMITY, then it cannot foster the experience of equilibrium. Or the truest experience of liberation. Where the liber in Liberation comes from Latin for “free, unrestricted, unimpeded, unbridled, unchecked, licentious” and “is conjectured to be from the Proto-Indo-European *leudh-ergo-, which probably meant ‘belonging to the people,’ though the precise semantic development is obscure; but compare to frank” (from etymonline.com).
So let me be frank, again:
