February Is Black History Month
An Offering and "Black People Are Not A Monolith!"
The Offering
February is Black History Month when we are to learn about Black history and celebrate it. Often, the month comes and goes and most of what we remember is Valentines Day. Let’s do it differently this year. Let us heal.
To hear, read about, and be educated on Black History, and take it in context, is to understand yourself first, regardless of your skin color, ethnicity, or nationality.
To understand yourself, you must heal from the damaging impact of racism on your identity.
To heal is to unpack and discard "whiteness" for your own true human identity to be revealed.
To heal is to be prepared to decenter the culture of whiteness and center compassion and a more humane approach to living in community with others.
I am going to do a daily series here with this newsletter for Black History Month called, "Writing for Racial Healing: Daily Writing Prompts for Reflection During Black History Month." Each day, I will share a teaching moment and a daily prompt which you can respond to by journaling. You can also choose to meditate on it, or share in conversation with another soul on this journey with you. If you do not want to receive the daily emails, just ignore them, or let me know, and I can send just the regular ones to you during the month of February.
I hope all of you subscribers will participate and share with us in the comments. It will start on February 1st. It is free. However, you can support this work by paying for a subscription. I promise, I will not mind! 😜
I also suggest that you find a source for a Black History fact for each day in February to bolster your learning.
Please share and tell others about this so you have company on this journey.
Black People Are Not A Monolith
A friend asked me to listen to a podcast called "Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay." She wanted me to share my thoughts about their interview with Nigerian American former football player, Emmanuel Acho who hosts a show called “Uncomfortable conversations with A Black Man.” If you want to understand the full scope of my comments below, I recommend that you listen from about minute 31 to 1:10 (about 40 minutes) to understand my take on it. It is well worth it.
I thought this video was particularly interesting given this particular moment in time. Many people are asking regarding the Tyre Nichols incident, "Is that not Black on Black crime? That is not an issue of racist police brutality."
Wrong! As I said in my previous video on Mr. Nichols, the brutality is about whiteness and not "Black on Black crime."
For this podcast though, I appreciated that there is a nuance to how we do this work, and the different ways people are called to do this tough work. Van and Emmanuel vehemently disagree as to approaches to doing this work. I think it is important that white people understand these distinctions as Black people are not a monolith. These are two Black men arguing about the merits of anti-racism work. Conflict like this is healthy and can be productive. I share it with you, dear reader, so you know that you must learn this work from difference sources. Not just one source.
My Response
I am a Yoruba woman born to a Yoruba father and an Irish American mother. I grew up in Nigeria and came to the US as a teenager and understood myself to be "mixed race" until I discovered that here in America, I am Black. And I love it.
It took me about 30 years to "really" get what racism is and how deep the stuff is. Often, when I was discriminated against, I thought it was because I was a woman, not because I am Black. Now I know different. Today, I work as a racial justice educator and consultant.
However, unlike @EmmanuelAcho, I refuse to work with people that I must convince that racism still exists. They must be invested in building anti-racism organizations and lives for me to work with them. Can you imagine a child of a Holocaust survivor working to prove that the Holocaust happened? No. Yet, who gets to talk to those that believe the Holocaust is a hoax? Somebody should.
For ease of clarification in this post, I am going to refer to Black people who live in America and descended from enslaved peoples as "African Americans" and "Africans" as immigrants, transplants, and children of very African (especially Nigerian) parents. I will use "Black" people to refer to all Black skinned folks regardless of whether we are African Americans, Africans, Caribbean, South Americans, or British Black. No insults meant.
Like @EmmanuelAcho, I also get a lot of push back from African Americans for the work that I do. Let us name something that was going on in the vibe of this podcast that I do not think anyone has mentioned. Africans who have a connection to the continent but live in the US often find ourselves at odds with African Americans. Because of our different experiences and upbringings, we see the issues different. We have different vibes.
We Africans also experience racism in this country, but we do not hold, in our bodies, the generational trauma that @EmmanuelAcho talked about which results from generations of enslaved elders and ancestors. It is as if we experience racism in a linear and direct way, but African/Black Americans experience it in a deeply compounded way. No matter how you cut it, it is different.
Yet, I find that when we Africans make this clarification, African Americans get offended. No. We (Africans) are not better. We are not saying we are better. We do not think we are better, and yet; it does not mean that we are exempt from suffering. I bet you the parents of @EmmanuelAcho saw and experienced civil war in Nigeria. As traumatic as that was, it is not the equivalent of 400 years of enslavement of Africans in the Americas. We are merely being respectful of the suffering that is unique, unacceptable, and deeply painful that African Americans have endured. Sometimes when you separate and isolate the experiences of another, you are honoring them. I find that the underlying history of animosity between Africans and African Americans and its unresolved tension creates a lot of misunderstanding.
At about minute 37, @EmmanuelAcho says, “I have the privilege of knowing where my parents came from. I go back to my village in Nigeria….. All the while, I have the privilege and luxury of not having generational trauma because my parents were born in Nigeria.” And then he goes on to talk about the “sting” out of uncomfortable racial conversations.
@VanLathan says on Twitter, "@EmmanuelAcho I’m not sure what you intended to convey by stating your Nigerian background frees you of “generational trauma” and takes the “sting” out of your convos with white people. But it feels like your purposefully othered yourself from the descendants of slaves. Why?"
My response is that we are different, but it is not othering in the way @VanLathan takes it. @Emmanuel Acho names his privilege. That is an act of respect. For instance, if reparations were doled out, I do not believe that I am entitled to one dime of it. It should be reserved for African Americans because it is about that history. That is why it is often necessary to separate yourself when it is time to explain, discuss or have a conversation. Our experiences are not the same. And we are not entitled to the same benefits that repair and reparations will bring.
Many Africans came to this country on the coattails of the civil rights movement that African Americans fought for so that other Black folks could come to this country. Unfortunately, many of us Africans do not recognize or acknowledge that. We also do not recognize that we watch too much damn TV and we have absorbed the whiteness stereotypes of African Americans and we are often demeaning and prejudiced towards African Americans.
About the "sting," I will confess that when I came to this country, I did not understand "Black Rage." I consider rage to be collective and ancestral. I consider anger to be what @VanLathan was expressing. Years ago, I saw a lot of "Black Rage." And it was scary to me. As a Yoruba woman, respect, and regard for other humans as sacred was drilled into my soul. We are taught to be respectful and mannerly as a reflection of our family, tribe, and culture. This, however, is not the equivalent of "nice" like white folks do. That "fake nice." No. I used to think of "the sting" and "excessive aggression" that @EmmanuelAcho mentioned as "rude" and "disrespectful." But that is a cultural difference that takes time to understand and appreciate.
What I do agree with that @EmmanuelAcho said is that if you want to create a learning environment, for people to deeply learn so that change can occur, you must be perceived by the learner as non-threatening. And we must understand the different forms of activism. The deep wound and anger of @VanLathan cannot educate white people. They will shut down and he does not want to educate white people. He is more of a frontline activist and that anger is beautiful and powerful and will create change. I totally understand it. It is valid and for where he is, and his form of activism, I hear him. And it does not mean that @EmmanuelAcho should not do what he is doing to contribute to the betterment of the world. My Yoruba folks have a proverb, "There are many entrances to the market: Not just one." It means that we must make room for our various approaches to solutions.
I also point out the beautiful work of our elder, Beverly Tatum Daniel, past president of Spelman College and author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" And Other Conversations About Race. She talks about white and Black Racial Identity Development. In this development continuum, African Americans get angry and stay angry for a long time as they work through the injustices of racism. This anger can create and propel change. It should never be quelled. Anger is healthy. Yet, I support non-violent expressions. You can be angry and non-violent. As African transplants or immigrants, we do not go through the same process in our racial identity development and we often misunderstand this collective rage and individual anger.
Finally, my work is white facing. I state it all the time. My clients tend to be white middle aged progressive women. I have seen incredible changes in their lives and their growth because of them working with me. I feel guilty, but I continue to do this work. Why? I feel called to it.
And I am not African American facing because who am I to tell African Americans how to heal from the generational trauma of the enslavement of their ancestors when I have lived out that experience? I am not a white person, but I have walked the shoes of learning how to live in a new culture, find my footing and stabilize into my identity.
We are asking white people for a culture change, and somebody must work to equip them to adapt to the new culture that we find necessary and mandatory.
I wonder if I understand Emmanuel because I am Nigerian? Yet, I totally understand where Van is coming from. What are your thoughts?