I'm Not African
Seemed to only glorify the Europeans claiming Africans was only three fifths of human beings...
“I don’t like boys of your complexion.”
These words hit me like a ton of bricks as Skyler told me, in the locker room of our fifth-grade classroom, why I was not fit to be her boyfriend. In that moment, I tried to do mental gymnastics around the meaning of her words. I thought maybe it was because I’m light brown-skinned, or because of the pimples breaking out on my prepubescent face. At the same time, despite my best efforts, I ingested a condemnation of my skin color from someone I held dear and desperately wanted to be loved by.
To be a person of African descent on this planet is to spend a lifetime deflecting, ingesting, reflecting on, and enduring condemnations of your existence because of the color of your skin. One can only imagine that when children say these types of things, they’re regurgitating what they’ve been fed at home—that the child is simply a talking head for a parent, an uncle, or an aunt’s well-developed adult racism.
I had a conversation with one of my cousins on my mother’s side not so long ago about capitalism and my pure and utter distrust of it at its heart. My cousin, though very bright, has an entirely different experience of the world than I do, in that he is a white American.
For all of our shared experiences—our mothers being sisters, summers spent in his home in New York City and our grandmother’s home in upstate New York, playing Bloody Murder and fishing in the creek and pond—there is an obvious and quite significant difference in the way the world experiences us.
When the Pope signed the papal bulls giving Portugal and Spain the right to rape, pillage, and enslave separate sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it became functionally necessary to classify the human beings who would fuel this massive accumulation of capital as something other than the image of God.
The funny part about it is that it’s the enslavement of my ancestors by my other ancestors, which surely gives a window into my own long and storied internal struggle. But the fact remains: my experience as one of those classified as worthy of enslavement within the capitalist system, in conjunction with my studies of the foundations of capitalism through reading texts like Capitalism and Slavery as well as Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, makes me fundamentally incapable of viewing capitalism as a legitimate form of societal order.
Whether it’s Argentina’s infamous “Big Nigga Burgers” restaurant, Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes ranting about your criminality, or a man with Tourette’s syndrome at an award show calling you a nigger as an involuntary tic because that is the broader societal designation assigned to you, or being called an African booty scratcher in grammar school - three words with a devastating impact on the psychological wellness of the disjointed people that are the African diaspora — you are demeaned at every turn.
