Over 100 voices challenging monolithic narratives of Blackness
Blackness has different languages, different textures, and my Black experience is not universal and that’s OK. There’s space for many different Black experiences.”
“If we have survived the countless malicious and clamant snares set up for us over hundreds of years, it is thanks to our ability to exist as multiple beings. To constantly morph from one being to the other, constantly contorting. And if the world is to survive the dire moment in which we all currently find ourselves – a pandemic highly informed and fashioned by the infirmities of the neoliberal capitalist enterprise – then we must embrace the passage from unity to multiplicity and consent not to be single beings so much as to learn how to accept our dynamism and navigate the multiple, concentric or superimposed physical, psychic and spiritual planes of our existences. Not only as diasporic citizens, but as citizens of the world.”
— Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Part of the problem is related to widespread presence of cis, heterosexual men as leaders of the main organisations that fight for the rights of the black population. Their demands are connected to their lives and realities, which reinforces some stereotypes. These include the naturalisation of the idea that ‘blackness is constituted through the normalisation of the heterosexual black man, represented by the emblematic virility of his physical force, aggressive nature, violence, hearty apetite for sex and powerful penis.’ Within this logic, travesti or trans identity is something completely disconnected from blackness. Trans bodies, identities and subjectivities will not have a place within the Black Social Movement, as their ‘lives are not considered lives and materiality is understood as not important.’”
— Megg Rayara Gomes De Oliveira
“Thinking of writing, it’s also very important to me to archive myself; my Blackness, my Queerness or my joy. I am also at a point where this form of archiving doesn’t need to be exceptional. Ocean Vuong says that his job is to write Queerness as mythology and I agree. But then, I am trying to explore this idea of Queer lives as ‘boring’. As mundane; waking up, going to work, going grocery shopping, crying or burning the rice on the stove, etc. The banality of queer lives. Where there are no closet crises, no exceptional pains; where it’s literally a life story, as normal as the next story. I think there’s a lot of pressure on minority identities to continually be exceptional, even in their pain. That narrative is tiresome because it’s dilapidating to always pour from that pain chalice when we create.”
An obvious problem here is that we blacks fell into a group identity that has absolutely no other purpose than to collect the fruits of white guilt. And so the themes of protest–a sense of grievance and victimization–evolved into a sensibility, an attitude toward the larger world that enabled us always and easily to feel the grievance whether it was there or not. Protest became the mask of identity, because it defined us in a way that kept whites 'on the hook.' Today the angry rap singer and Jesse Jackson and the black-studies professor are all joined by an unexamined devotion to white guilt.”
— Shelby Steele