For Audre and Toni
She gave me anger, glory, goodness, resistance, and love in the tragedies she surmounted. She unfolded my girlhood so that I could be woman today.
“What does it mean to defend the dead?”
Social death is the condition of not being accepted as human. It is the condition of being Black. But I am here, aren’t I?
On Black Optimism and Other Forms of Magic
Black Optimism that offers an even brighter stain of hope on this grueling exploration of Black/Human. Blackness is “walking in another world while passing through this one.” It is a state of disorientation, of being and unbeing at once.
Black Girl in Berlin
I’ve been in Berlin for 6 weeks, living and working as a part of my master’s fellowship. There aren’t many Black women, let alone Black Germans.
Origins of Blackness
My summers on Staunton Avenue with my family and Paul Laurence Dunbar socialized attitudes about Blackness that continue to be a source of pride. The performance of Blackness was inextricably linked with intellect, beauty, humor, and (historic and immediate) community. These would be the initial influences of not only the way I viewed myself as Black but also how I viewed other Black people. Eventually, this notion of self would be challenged by encounters with the outside, non-Black world.
