"Fuck the man, Uncle Sam, I won't sell your crack, I won't fight your wars, I won't wear your hat I'ma pass your classes, I'ma learn your craft I'ma fuck your daughters, I'ma burn your flag” – “Miss America” by J. Cole
Aligning myself with an identity has grown to be increasingly difficult. I can’t place myself in one framework, as I am eager to embody the multiple forms of existence. I embody the theoretical scholar that can conform and exist within the boxes of western knowledge. I embody the post structuralist that aims to critique these very modes of thinking. At the same time, I seek to be free of all forms of thinking and be guided by my own lived experiences and desires. To be a global citizen. To be a product of New York City multiculturalism. To be so transcultural that I aspire for it to be uniform across the board. I seek this multiplicity of existence because I’ve always internally combatted the looming structures that aimed to minimize me, to see me as a problematic person of color that’s welfare hogging, psychologically unstable, low income and unmotivated. Without my fully being able to understand where these fears came from, or how to contextualize them, I’ve reacted against them. This traction has been my mode of thinking and reacting since my ability to form comprehensible thoughts. It has always been the structures of class differences, racial imaginaries and academic hierarchies that have influenced me to react against the social order, and define myself as the complete opposite of what is expected of me. But where does that leave room to define myself in relation to myself?
How do I imagine myself for myself? This is where my determinate answer is muddled. America tells me I’m Latina, Dominicans call me morena or negra, South Africans tell me I’m colored, the French tell me I’m metisse and black people tell me I’m light skin black. In other words, I’ve only ever adopted the structures of racial categorization from how the other sees me. I know how I do not imagine myself, for I know what I am not. Black, brown, metisse, creole, colored, mixed race; by definition I can claim these all, but to know who I am is difficult. I know what I want to be, what I like and what I emulate. But who am I really, if not fragmentations of other things? A composition of everything I wish to be and not to be. An embodiment of code switching and adapting in order to survive.
Why it is that I have chosen to adopt blackness as my transcultural understanding of the world? This is a long overdue conversation that I’ve needed to have with myself, for even black identifying people have asked me. The answer lies in the fact that my reactions have always been Newton’s third law, equal and opposite to the systems of power. Logically the polar opposite of whiteness is blackness. I have defined and redefined myself always in relation to the contested systems that don’t integrate me despite my being included in them. As the only brown-skinned person in the Columbia University History & Literature program and in my classes at L’ École Normale Supérieure, I often silence myself, hoping to remove my urban lexicon out of the discourse so as to not be seen as predictable. We postulate theories of race, culture and ethnicity, all the while these are all categories that have led me to battle the systems that compartmentalize me.
Nonetheless, blackness has allowed me to understand myself outside of the confinements of academia. By allowing myself to become familiar with the narratives of black Americans I realized that their form of articulating their contested relationship with the social order resonated with me. It is through black artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals I began to find ways to articulate my disdain, pains and griefs.
Hauled over a desk with a hunched back and askew hair, the literary perspectives I’ve gathered have been some of the primary ways I’ve tried to read the societies that I have lived in. Malcom X, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ta Nehisi Coates, W. E. B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks Nella Larsen, and Angela Davis to name some Americans. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Trevor Noah, Ousmane Sembène, Leopold Senghor, and Yambo Ouologuem to name some Africans. Frantz Fanon, Aimé Cesairé, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Junot Diaz, Elizabeth Acevedo to name some Caribbeans. These have all been some of the intellectuals from whom I came to understand the power structures that shaped our racialized experiences transnationally. My colonial and postcolonial understandings have allowed me to grapple with the constructs of Black Consciousness, Negritude, Black Romanticism and Creolization.
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