I don't believe in reverse racism. I really don't.
Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.
My life is not a sound bite.
Hopefully, even if I am judged or there's confusion, anger, about how I identify, I hope that people can understand that family is fluid.
I was not born in a teepee - that I know of. I actually don't know where I was born.
Everybody's life matters. But that's why we have to say black lives matter, because the highest disproportionality, police brutality, disenfranchisement, education disproportionality in school discipline, curriculum, misrepresentation, all of this.
I definitely am not white.
Any man can be a father; not any man can be a dad.
From a very young age, I felt a spiritual, visceral, instinctual connection with 'black is beautiful.' Just the black experience and wanting to celebrate that. And I didn't know how to articulate that as a young child.
In order to really move toward what people really think of as some sort of Utopian post-racial society or somehow to really challenge the racial hierarchy, we're going to have to allow some fluidity.
I definitely feel like, in America, even though race is a social construct... there's still a line drawn in the sand; there still are sides. Politically, there's a black side and a white side, and I stand unapologetically on the black side.
I'm this generic, ambiguous scapegoat for white people to call me a race traitor and take out their hostility on. And I'm a target for anger and pain about white people from the black community. It's like I am the worst of all these worlds.
I'm more black than I am white. That's the accurate answer from my truth.
Nothing about being white describes who I am.
I identify as black.
If somebody has hope, don't take that away from them, because maybe that's all they have.
I am part of the pan-African diaspora.
I really just prefer to be exactly who I am, and black is really the closest race and cultural category that represents the essence of who I am.
I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo... imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways... that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.
The system of racial classification is fiction, and we need to thoughtfully evaluate whether perpetuating it rigidly or allowing fluidity across the spectrum best supports human rights and social justice.
