Being Black Beyond Language

Black history month continues to feel more like a commodification of both time and blackness, all for the sake of performative visibility for black folks Existing in both African body and American imagination is exhausting to say the least. I walk into rooms with this skin attached to a crop top, and a masculinity that drags a history of objectification with it. Yet now, as we enter another black history month, I find myself yearning for an expansive imagination that gives humanity, possibility, and curiosity back to bodies such as my own; and with it, other marginalized humans who are still under the gaze of anglocentric imaginations.

I imagine a language that is no longer dependent on the reflections of one's gender, racial, or sexual identity. These languages already exist for those whose skin is far more fair than mine, and whose privilege grants limitless access to being human beyond a social or political vernacular. This black history month I imagine what blackness can mean beyond blackness. I imagine a reshaping of the world that grants us all access to a human curiosity builds a society based on merit and a common good beyond what our eyes can see. In doing so, we see each other as possibilities for expansive potential.

All that we know now are our identity politics inasmuch as those politics shape the political imagination of our world, and thus shape the ways in which we can potentially move. Proximity to wealth gives access to food and quality housing; proximity to whiteness grants a myriad of social inclusions; and proximity to masculinity grants access to spaces on the basis of gender performance. Being human, exhausted because our philosophical beingness, is further exhausted by being political subjects. This is without even mentioning the ever exhaling advancements of instagram, whose primary goal is seemingly to commodify including black history month. It now appears to me that as social media expands, the possibility of commodification expands. As Black Lives Matter becomes #blm in the bios of influencers and platform chasers, the collective identities of black people across the sexual, gendered, and social diaspora are further objectified for the consumption of those who seek nothing more than another like and follow. The lines that separate the political from the existential and personal are becoming ever more blurred. Commodified identities for public consumption, that inevitably impact the political imagination and subsequent legislative imaginations of those whose moods and financial motivation potentially impact our rights and protections. All of these things wrap so effortlessly together to render my skin a political conversation that’s up for debate and interrogation by those who continue to write me as politically invisible.

What I am calling for is not a mere political revolution. That would be too easy. Writing laws takes nothing more than reason, and maybe these reasons are rooted in capitalism and the maintenance of power, but still these written works require nothing of our humanity. What I am calling for is a revolution of the human spirit, that then produces a political world as consequence of a renewal of the heart. A world in which my body is not a political conversation for rights, but an assertion that critically interrogating being human gives us all we need—both socially and politically. This interrogation into what unites us gives access to healthcare on the basis of humanity, liberates people of color from racialized oppression, grants women and femmes access to the fullness of life, and redistributes wealth so none ever have to experience hunger. This black history month, I want us all to imagine a world that can be if only we become what we are—human.