08/16/2020
Good afternoon everybody I have sat down with one of my colleagues Jim Francek to share one of my writings titled “ The Opacity of Blackness “ share this with your friends and family and be sure to watch the full length video by going to this link: https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=295014698269537
THE OPACITY OF BLACKSNESS
*It all starts with a single overarching story weaved around and through a nation of people.
In the United States of America, we are now confronted with our history. Steeped in a story of triumph through ingenuity, and most pressingly, a revived history of conquer and looting, using the myth of inborn attributes as a rationale in its revisionist retelling. But a story is like a river, so you can find the beginning when you start.
To be sure, racism founded race--a superfluous creation layered over the skin of an already beautiful people. At the apex of its hierarchical ordering, is Whiteness, a lighter hue that carries all the power and authority, while the rest of the brown and dark bodies, deemed non-white, are packaged into a Black vault. So, at age 15, I emerged from a different country, without the context and language of Racism. When the Man called me Black, I staggered, like the ground under me had moved. I was hoisted into a new world where I had relinquished my individual identity in place of a group narrative imbued with humiliation and perennial poverty. When I steadied my gait, I knew then that I had to embrace my blackness with a determined pride. I wrapped my new identity around my body like a golden shawl, in the face of the dangers it invited.
Since then I have lived, had my own children, studied and worked in this racial chasm, with sharp and dangerous edges at every turn. It had been known, long before Dr. Maya Angelou reflected that a black man may never find a face more despicable than his own, or any ammunition deadlier than a black 12 yr. old boy brandishing a toy gun.
I wonder how we came so late and lonely to this place.
Tamir Rice, a boy 2 years younger than my son at the time, is seen as dangerous and a menace to his country.
The man who swore to protect us all, in a matter of seconds, subdued the menacing boy, with a squeeze of a trigger.
Yet, the Whiteman continues to ask how we remained alive.
The same as during the Middle Passage, I quipped.
So please do not ask me how to be human.
Do not ask me how to act righteously,
I did not build the machinery that separated people into inalterable spaces,
Casted in cement.
This is your country too.
I am the product of human engineering.
I am the Boogeyman!
The Boogeyman represents the collective evil associated with Blackness.
In this narrative, black faces are covered in tar beaming from the bottom of a well as a dwelling for the most vulnerable. Opacity is the true color of Blackness. We are looked at, but not seen. And the Boogeyman’s kryptonite is to deny him of air,
When I saw Floyd’s body under the crushing weight of that man,
I reimagined him with God, just before he took flight from the ethereal into his beautiful dark body,
I wondered how a new creation could claim to sublimate God’s beloved handiwork.
With an act of ultimate defiance, we can reject the privileges and dangers placed on our bodies.*
