Black in America

To be Black in America is to live in trauma.

I have started and stopped, and started again, to write this post. But every time I catch my breathe long enough to gather my thoughts and my words, the air is snatched right from me again. I feel nothing and everything at the same time, and still, I can’t quite wrap my head around it all.

To be Black in America is to be born into a life where no amount of achievement or assimilation, or respectability is going to escape us from the trauma of being, or seeing people that look like you, regularly assassinated simply for being Black. I love the fact that I am Black, but there are so many others that don’t. They are threatened. They are intimidated. It’s hard not to dream of a world untainted by their envy and hate. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that is something I will ever experience in my lifetime.

In December I traveled to the Slave Castles in Ghana to see where this long line of intergenerational trauma all begin. The stories shared with our group were gut-wrenching. It was quite chilling to witness that juxtaposition of such a beautiful place being home to such heinous crimes. How a race of people could have such a false sense of superiority, that they would enslave, torture, and murder a people, even before making it across the trans-Atlantic, to put them through further psychological warfare. They tried to break us then, but we were resilient. Mentally, physically, and psychologically, they tried to humiliate and dehumanize us. But what they didn’t realize is that the ones who made it over, the ones who survived slavery, the ones who endured Jim Crow, the ones whose blood runs through our veins— Those were the best of the best. We are a resilient people. We survived then, and we will survive again.