http://likedwbrother.blogspot.com/2010/03/lessons-learned-from-hadza-identity.html#comments
"Blackness, then, is a very local identity. As such, it can only be conferred or denied by the Black people in the area."--Wanda
Write a book on it. Maybe I can write the foreward if Duncan won't do it. lol
That is something I can definitely understand, and honestly, I'm just not sure how to deal with it. It also makes sense if you think about it in other terms. Morality: How can one be a good or bad person without doing good or bad to another person? Beauty: How can any aspect of life or art be beautiful or ugly without comparison to another aspect? Sex: How do you know if you're that good? lol, I digress...kind of.
Anyway, I guess what I'm kind of caught up on is whether I should let my identity be defined by others. This then makes me wonder if such a refusal comes at the risk of being considered "not black enough" by other 'local' blacks and if I even care. Right now I do, or at least I did when I left the States. Now, having experienced life being black but not blackened, this is something I'm willing to consider changing about my life. I mean, not identifying myself as a local black. Whether or not this is even possible, well, I guess we'll see, but there are a lot of things to take into account. What would that even look like? I'll still listen to hip hop, celebrate Black history, sing spirituals, get niggaitis, refuse to wear leggings without a skirt, etc. But what actually changes? Something on the inside. Something that refuses to let me get upset when a non-black person uses the words 'nigger' or 'nigga' or resolve not to use those terms myself? Something that propels me to refrain from using the terms 'oreo' or 'wannabe' in the racial sense? I don't know. I'm kind of rambling/thinking out loud...comments, criticisms accepted here.
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ReplyDeleteAnd Naia can do the cover art :-P
ReplyDelete[skipping the snarky sex comment because that can be a whole post unto itself...]
I mean, there's no "should I let..." about it: Your rambling/thinking aloud shows that your identity has been affected/redefined by an outside force in some way, shape, form or fashion (even if the effect isn't permanent). It's what you do with that force that matters.
But in direct response to your musings... I don’t think you can ever fully divorce yourself from your local Black identity as long as there's someone around who can say, "Hey! She's Black!" and you know roughly what that person means. The fuzziness that comes with that rough understanding of Blackness is the space you use to redefine what it means to you to be Black. When your redefinition shows up in your expression of Blackness, the outside world absorbs it and the outside-definer's, “Hey! She’s Black!” takes on a new meaning the next time s/he identifies you.
Of course, this means there’s interplay between Black as an outwardly imposed identity and Black as a self-imposed identity. This interplay means that Black is a constantly changing thing. If Black is always in flux, what changes is important because you should make informed decisions about your self because your self is being absorbed into a larger identity that will be imposed on others.
But if you care more about trying to come to terms w/ the flux than you do about the philosophy of Blackness, you might contemplate:
A) Is this change something you can grasp heart, mind, body, and soul (i.e., being spun on a merry-go-round) or something you can’t appreciate until you’re one w/ the Lord (i.e., the world spinning on its axis)?
B) Are you okay with not feeling the change if it means something greater is going to occur/is occurring?
C) What’s the best way to wear leggings without pants?