Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.
My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.
I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.
If our culture is so often readily and easily appropriated, imagine what happens when we embrace our full blackness and know that our contributions are just as important to the shaping of the country and, more broadly, the world.
I never had a moment of realization about my blackness - I just was. Blackness was a central thread of my experience as a child and as an adolescent, as it is now that I'm an adult.
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.
Somehow, whenever we think about race or blackness in relationship to art, we always come in kind of nervous. We always think someone's about to be punished or accused of something.
If you are born black, and you don't accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.
Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.
