Anger, Ubuntu, upbringing
Intention of this writing: Grieving, release, relating to others w similar experiences, invoking my ancestors.
Ubuntu: "I am because we are." a shortened Xhosa & Zulu proverb about interconnectedness, community, witnessing the humanity of others as our own. Full proverb from Xhosa is “Zulu umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.”
I'm mid-grief period as I write this. Recently, I've been grieving the self that was stolen from me by being raised without the full Black experience I deserved; the full African experience. Of course I've known for many many years that I hated growing up the way I did: surrounded by white people and subsequently dehumanized everywhere I went, a bit isolated from the Black family I did have, and educated in white institutions. I always felt robbed of my Black experience since I was a kid, but I didn't know how deep it went for me until I realized I wasn't even safe in my own mind and body while trying to heal from all of that in a Western world. I am grieving the years I wasted by not knowing that the only accessible healing tool for my body and spirit is an African one.
Side note: How much healing can we get in the same environment that traumatized us? We must separate & escape.
So I’ve been attempting to re-culture myself a for little while now. The process really took off at an HBCU, although that was still an oppressive environment (also extremely euro-centric, violent, expensive, and useless, of course. Fuck academia). I eventually removed myself from that too, to be among other Black gender expansive people where I belonged. But my healing really slowed down in the past year because I'd entered survival mode like I never had before. All of my attention this year was on keeping myself alive and my life together, which was what led me to Buddhism and western psychology: a path that took a bloody bite out of my anger, nerve, fight (which I was already deficient in), and my natural Africanness.
I spent most of my life angry at my parents for having participated in the killing of the African child inside of me via raising me around whiteness, and I still have plenty of stuff toward them that I need to work out.
But as I detach from euro psychology and lean more into African belief systems that combine the mental, physical, and spiritual so perfectly, I notice how the anger that I have toward my upbringing-and my parents, changes into something else. The bigger picture has come into view.
I feel much less of a need to directly blame them for the ways colonialism and individualism seeped into them, all the way under their skin and into their nervous systems. As upset as I am...I understand that colonization was designed to work. That's just it. Shit wouldn't be like it is if the centuries-long flamboozle of whiteness wasn't effective.
Now, I really just mourn the loss of their Black lives, just like I mourn mine. Both of them were tricked into maintaining the illusion of comfort and ease that proximity whiteness gave them. & I understand why they were tricked. Neither of them were ever exposed to true freedom, or another way of doing things. They were vulnerable and afraid, and suddenly, there were kids to care for, and then there was the constant, overwhelming feeling of being less than, and wanting to somehow defeat that feeling. I wish my father would have known he had nothing to prove to the white world, and that money and power are not measures of success and safety. I wish my mother had known that my brother and I would have been much safer in so many ways, but especially in our identities and emotions, if we could have grown up around other Black kids. I wish either of them had known true, holistic community.
So my anger isn't really for them anymore, at least not as I write this. They were robbed too.
My light, silky-haired grandfather abused the hell out of my father and instilled a deep self-hatred in him, alongside an inferiority complex about his "intelligence", as he was constantly compared to others. I experienced the many ways he became his father. My mother was supplied with a fierce superiority complex about her "intelligence", which allowed her to survive and escape punishment in ways that other people around her couldn’t access. She kept relying on those same things to survive, which led her further away from herself. Match made in heaven, ya know?
So yes, to stop at, "I'm mad at my parents for raising me in suburbia." would be a really incomplete view.
It's more like, "I'm mad that the Black childhood I needed didn't exist because whiteness tricked my parents into thinking academia was more important than the wholeness of my identity. I'm mad that capitalists and individualists forced them into perfectionism, and that that perfectionism leaked into parts of my personality. I'm mad at the elitism and ableism that they both learned from the second they were born and how it colored my worldview as a kid. I'm mad that my father learned domination, passed down from a long line of people who only learned how to take out their anger on their community members; who desired the oppressors’ power, whether or not it came with evil. I'm mad that my mother didn't really get to learn how to fight either, or that she stopped fighting at some point. I'm so upset that they didn't get to live in reality most of the time, and how that affected the realities my brother and I have to sift through now."
I think my Mom tried to create a safe bubble to shelter me from the pain of the world that she actually DID know was a disaster, and she knew why too. She just didn't want an active role in the fight. She didn’t want me to have to fight either, so I didn’t get the skills in childhood. If I never was going to fight, why did I need to know what was going on, and why did I need to have the tools to resist?
She didn't know where I was going, I guess. Or that there was no real way to shield me, that I would eventually get out here without any “weapons” or “armor” or seriousness, and that that would leave me open to all kinds of attacks and stunt my radicality. She wasn't raising me to be a radical or to conflict at all, really. She never imagined my path would be one of resistance.
Some of my ancestors had the sharp, serrated tools that I need, and I've been praying to them to hand down what I was robbed of. They’ve lent me a lot so far, but I want even more, and I hope they understand my desperation. Maybe I can lend the tools to my mother and restore what was taken from her too. “I am because we are.” Maybe my Ubuntu will be “I am [unshackling, arming you] because we need to [be healed, be free].” & Of course, I can do that for the ones in my ancestral line who didn’t have any weapons either.
Y’all will [be free] because I am [free].
On the other side of things: I was fragmented, lost, afraid, etc. because y'all had learned to be avoidant, asleep, in denial, etc. Y'all were avoidant, asleep, in denial, because they were docile, compliant, proving their worth, etc. They were docile, compliant, proving their worth, etc. because they were enslaved…and so on.
And it is an extended function of anti-Blackness that I: an African, a negro, a descendant of slaves, & a globally hated thing, was tricked, by irrelevant psychologies, to solely blame my parents and upbringing for my missing pieces, as opposed to blaming the wider network of generational violence and armed robbery (of self). I woulda been closer to whole a lot sooner if I had realized that. So sure, I can blame my parents on the micro for some things when I choose to-
But what I’m really angry about; what I’ll die angry about, is how I (and so many in my lineage) was stolen from our land, because that is the seed from which the true evils in my life have come. At least I can do something about that now. I will hate, and kill and uproot that.
deep river cross over|2025