Sunrise, Sunset
Knowing that Black is divorced from color, culture, and creed; where do I find myself? I was raised to know what I wasn't. I wasn't 'those negros over there'... but my youthful mind often wondered where my negros were at!? I found the answers in various youth groups: church, Jack and Jill, Co-Ettes. Everyone taught me how to be Black in their own specific way.
Co-Ettes taught me that a strong Black woman knows how to carry herself. She works twice as fast and three times as hard as her peers. And she works the second job of shattering glass ceilings.
I aspired to be this type of black. Affluent and unafraid to be educated and well-rounded. Some would say, unafraid to 'act like the white man.' Black like my mother. But I couldn’t reconcile why that felt like a, wholly different and exclusionary, sub-category of race.
Jack and Jill taught me that an educated Black person doesn’t pick a fight, doesn’t talk back, doesn’t talk “Black”. Stays safe. I grew up safe and perpetually in fear. Fear that I would be found out as the type of Black that went to private school, which apparently made me White. I forced myself into a mold I thought fitting, to be included in, what I considered to be, another type of “Black.” This was the type of Black that corrected you to ‘African-American’ but had no homeland to be renewed by; no diaspora to trace back to.
My church youth group taught me that love conquers all, but hate abounds us. And it is our responsibility to bring people out of confusion and mistrust and surround them in selfless love. Always with a wink to the phrase *especially those that look like us*.
On my quest to reconcile myself with my image presented to the world, I found profound discrepancies. I found dissonance in each group. While they were all toting a different message of how the right type of Black person acted, and often what they looked like, they were all saying different things. I wondered how messages of solidarity and separatism could coexist in the same structures. Isn’t it some great injustice that our people have gone through so much only to spend their freedom on trying to disqualify each others relation? Where was the blessing in defining your race as an ever-expanding category with no concrete qualifications?
It’s not that I had lost my road with faith, but simply, I have begun looking for faith in strange places. I heard recently that the sky is blue! It seems crazy to find significance in something so engrained. But think of all the blue vegetables in this world, there are almost none. Then of all the blue mammals, very few. It is almost as if the sky being blue is compensating for the lack of blue that surrounds us.
On that thread I began to contemplate how the sky changes and shifts, but is always blue. Even when the sun sets and the world above us refracts milky sherbet pinks, and dazzling fiery hues on one side of the globe, it takes on a deep aubergine somewhere else. And so why is it that it's the ‘blue sky’ that always comes to mind. Is the sky bothered, that for all its vast differences, it is only known for one facet? I think the sky would be too amazed by the beauty around it, the beauty of itself, to mind how others classified the way it illuminated the world.
I often wonder how Blacks, that aren't of African descent, feel about alignment with other peoples. If anyone is searching for a greater definition. Here's what I think: Being Black means being unbreakable and ever-changeable like the sky. It means you can adopt any hew and put your principals behind it so it is evidently recognized as itself. To me Black is anywhere, and everywhere. Blending innocuously into the scenery, and standing gloriously out to anyone who really looks.