By DJ Ferguson
Most Black people I know understand in our bones that Blackness isn’t merely something imposed on us by whiteness. So much of our culture, literature, music, and poetry screams this reality even though it’s an accepted fiction that Europeans and whiteness created “race” and by extension, Blackness. And, if they created Blackness, then they created “Black people.”
Intuitively, many of us know this isn’t so. This is why we demand to be called “Black.” This is why it feels laughable to hear other Black people call themselves “African American” or just “American” as opposed to “Black.” We’ve known this even when we didn’t necessarily have the tools to give this fact the appropriate theoretical, rhetorical or epistemic weight, or when we didn’t feel the need to.
But as myriad forces continue trying to separate us from our most potent sword and shield—our connection to Blackness—it’s important to clarify our claim to it. Black love, Black culture, Black music and religion all hinge on what we’ve created in “Blackness.” Blackness is the fulcrum of our resistance and everything we are.
The realities of Anti-Blackness drove us to socially, culturally and Spiritually cultivate what connected the Mandinka people with the Fula people with the Akan people with the Igbo people with the Kongo people, as we knew Black people globally were being subject to attempts to strip us of our specific ethnic identities, oral histories, and Indigenous ways of being. We similarly had the incentive discover what separated us from the people who were doing these things to us. Our very survival depended on us observing more about them than they observed about themselves.
We had to do all of this and more not just to physically survive, but to keep our Souls intact. What we found, what we’re still finding, what we discovered about ourselves and each other, what we learned to love despite being taught to hate it, what we’re still cultivating, what’s still cultivating us—has always been real, and we call that Blackness.
Whiteness invented the Negroid, the Negro, the Nigger, the Nigga, and they may even use the word “black,” but their “black” isn’t the same as my “Black.” That’s why they stutter and hesitate to call us that. Ours is the best of Blackness, theirs is the worst of “blackness.” They see with their white eyes while we’ve been giving ourselves Black eyes.
The essence of our Blackness and how we’ve determined our race isn’t and couldn’t have been the same as what they see. European “blackness” came from a place of hate. Our self-generated Blackness comes from a place of love. A Black love—of our features and all they can mean and represent, of what our mama’s gave us. Of what our shared ancestors gave us—the ancestors still alive in our features and bodies and on our ancestral shrines. It came from a love that’s becoming deeper and more nuanced, particularly as we ditch and edit out all the hand-me-down, corrosive colonial ideas we inherited in the process.
MLK said “don’t let anybody take your manhood,” but I say “Fuck that noise.” I’m non-binary. My humanity is not localized onto my manhood. What’s more important is to let no one take away your Blackness. No colorblind racist, no Marxist, no academic, no Indigenous studies major, no “race isn’t real” expert on science, no Spiritual bypasser, fake-deep spoken word poet, nobody. There are so many forces diligently undermining our confidence in Blackness, and it is important to counter them because it might be the most important tool in our decolonial, re-Indigenization toolbox.
We are agents and shapers of history, culture and discourse, not mere passive, thoughtless victims. We were sizing them up the same time they were sizing us up. And we were sizing ourselves up as well. From the beginning and ‘till this day, we’re getting our thoughts and our feelings in order about who and what we are, where we’ve been and where we want to go. Where we want to go free and independently from whiteness, and shaping our Blackness accordingly.
Blackness does not need whiteness to exist. Even if whiteness never existed and we never had the need to come up with think-pieces like the one I’m writing. Blackness would exist just like left-handedness would exist even if there were never any right-handed people. It would just be.
Blackness is our racial Being. Our racial ontology. Our racial epistemology. Not merely our foundation, but our primordial Black ocean. Our Black space, from which all the stars hang and shine. This is how we’re embodied. This is how we belong. This is how we’re outsiders, outside to freedom from the plantation. Our Blackness is that which white “democracy” dies in, opening the only possibility of a more glorious, true democracy.
Our Blackness isn’t the property of whiteness. It’s as free as we construct it to be—as we construct ourselves to be. It can exist independently of resisting whiteness, competing with whiteness, or even of destroying whiteness. Darkness was upon the face of the deep long before “let there be light.” This isn’t just theoretically foundational, it’s pre-theoretical.
Our Blackness is the starting point of our own racial Anthropology. Black Anthropology is our jokes about their unseasoned chicken, their lack of rhythm, their wet dog smell. It’s not bound to white colonial academic structures and never should be. This is why we stay calling them “white” even if it hurts their feelings, even if they wanna be just “American” or “Human” or their own names. They want their dominance to go unnamed, their membership in a dominant racial caste rendered invisible, but we refuse.
Not only did we invented Blackness, but that invention is ongoing. And Blackness, in turn, invents us. We’re not done inventing Blackness. Blackness isn’t done inventing us.
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“DJ Ferguson” is a Black American (Akata), freelance writer who studied Philosophy at Ball State University. Would love to produce content like this for a living , so please help fund RaceBaitr!
