Water

"I am going to marry a white man and have caramel babies!"

This is a phrase I uttered proudly to my white friends as a teen. I didn't see anything wrong with that statement. I simply wanted beautiful children and a husband that treated me well. I didn't believe I was beautiful, I hated my black skin and I didn't wish it on my offspring. I figured if I couldn't take the blackness away from my children, at least I could make them less of it. Mixed children are beautiful, I told myself. Not like black babies. I hated being black, and even with that knowledge it took me a long time to internalize my own anti-blackness.

"I don't find black men attractive", I would say. I claimed they all reminded me of my dad, and that was why. Also, they all cheated. I didn't think I was anti-black, I thought I wanted a man that was true to me. White people sometimes get triggered by the things I say. It's interesting that someone would be personally offended by my story, my experiences and my conclusions because I am not talking about them. How could I personally attack you when I don't know you personally?

When I write, I'm expressing conversations I have had and revelations I have arrived at. Revelations about my own heart. White supremacy does not mean all white people think they are better than everyone else. It means we live in a society where whiteness is uplifted and blackness is rejected. We live in a society that was intentionally created that way. Anti-blackness is built into our systems and our stories and it affects every single one of us. Many black people also harbour anti-black sentiments.

I wasn't aware of my own internalized anti blackness for years and I am only recently coming to terms with it. That is why I write. And if my words resonate with you it is because you are coming to your own epiphanies. Lola Omolola once said to me "you can't change anyone's mind; people come to their own epiphanies".

If the phrase black lives matter offends you or you feel even slightly triggered by it, you may harbour your own anti-blackness that you have not yet confronted. The thing with anti-blackness, the thing with white supremacy is it is like the air we breathe. David Foster Wallace told a story that went like this:

Two young fish are swimming along when they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water? The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and says, "What the hell is water?"

Water supremacy is water. Anti-blackness is water. And we are all fish swimming in it.

This idea of white supremacy is not an ideology that appeared by chance. It was an intentional political strategy. The text regarding explorer trips to Africa before and after the 15th century differ vastly. In text before the 15th century African countries are described by the few Europeans that travelled there positively. After the 15th century they are described negatively. What is significant about the 15th century? It was the beginning of the slave trade. White supremacy was an intentional reteaching of reality to justify brutality; white supremacy justified slavery, just as today the criminalizing black folk justifies brutality against them.

We are today as a result of our history and sometimes things that seem normal have a much darker beginning and it's important we understand that and filter things through a mind frame of understanding, which involves context. The nursery rhyme, eenie, meenie, minie mo, is a small example of this. Eenie, meenie, minie mo is uttered innocently by young children who often mean no harm by it but has its roots in the slave trade. It was a rhyme created in reference to what slave traders would do when they caught a runaway slave. The original words were; “Eenie, meenie, minie mo. Catch an nigger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go. Eenie, meenie, minie mo." An alternate version is "Catch a negro by his toe. If he hollers make him pay twenty dollars every day." The third verse of The Star Spangled Banner, the very anthem of the United States reads; "No refuge could save the hireling and slave, from the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave".

Racism isn't new or made up, and white supremacy isn't an attack on white people. White supremacy is the very fabric our modern society was weaved out of. The message since the 15th century, when the salve trade began, was that black people were capable of much less and worth much less. It's a lesson we still get today, through the lack of representation of intelligent black people in mainstream movies, through the lack of black heroes, the lack of representation of black bodies in fitness, the lack of representation of black children in books, the lack of representation in political positions, the accepted brutality against black bodies by the police force. Did you know the infamous Nigerian prince scam, a scam accepted because of the apparent understood nature of black people as untrustworthy, originated in the United States, and guess what, the scammer was white!

My anti-blackness had very real repercussions in my life and the lives of others, and it is only in my recent years I am coming to understand this.

What are your thoughts on truths you've learned may not be as you thought were?