In case you missed it, this is a repost from last year!
By J. McKinley
At times the Black community seems so disparate it’s a wonder to me that we identify ourselves as a community at all. We were separated from our origins (African ancestry) as a whole, and that brings its’ own loss. But, furthermore, our community was ravaged by the very systems that brought it into being. White supremacy was about subjugating one “group” of people (Black people) to placate and control another (poor white people). The construction of race as a social category was about power, money, and control.
It was never meant to allow us the space to build a collective identity. And yet, here we are, left to pick up the pieces and sew them all together to form one as yet unrecognizable patchwork quilt.
Race is a social construct, which means our community has no biological basis to tie it together. The history of the African-American community is young, and inevitably tied to marginalization. This means our community has very little positive historical basis of connectivity. We’ve had to build a culture from the ground up. It makes so much sense to me that in trying to do this we’ve neglected to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of backgrounds and experiences that the Black American community encompasses.
We’ve forgotten how different we really are.
We’ve forgotten the beauty in that difference.
I understand survival, but I don’t think it’s healthy or productive to paint ourselves in broad strokes to seem more cohesive. Mosaics make beautiful murals.
So, you might ask now: what does recognizing and accepting difference entail? At the most basic level I believe it means being willing to listen, to see your own experience as just one of many valid experiences, to use inclusive language, to disregard generalizations, and to acknowledge your own privilege.
I myself have had to do some unpacking of my own identity to really parse out how I relate to the world, and how very individual my lens is.
I am:
- Middle-class
- cisgender
- Able-bodied and nuerotypical
- Born in America
And these are only a few ways that I embody privilege. Few people consider the circumstances of their birth to be a privilege, but these are things to consider when analyzing how my experience as a Black woman in America may not be the same as someone else’s.
Too often we hone in on race as the defining factor of our identity. Maybe it’s because it is a very visible marker of difference (both in an everyday sense, and in a wider societal sense, race has been so visible). There is so much more to people, though, and one aspect of identity does not disappear just because the group of people we’re with can only identify and identify with another.
There’s this idea that only one identity can be important, recognized, or prioritized at any one moment. I think this happens naturally in in-groups. Intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, addresses this misconception and unpacks it.
“Intersectionality is a term coined by American civil rights advocate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to describe overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from the component identities. These identities that can intersect include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, and physical illness as well as other forms of identity.[1] These aspects of identity are not “unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather…reciprocally constructing phenomena.”
In simpler terms, we’re all complex beings. None of us are one dimensional, and there should be space made for the fullness of that. We don’t have to restrict ourselves to the narratives we’ve been told about who we are as Black people.
Black people are queer. Black people are Muslim. Black people are autistic. Black people are bipolar. Black people are trans*. Black people are deaf. Black people are of Puerto Rican, Haitian, and Caribbean descent.
The time has come to open ourselves up to the conceptualization of Black people, Black Americans, as relating to one another in all of these ways, because we cannot create safe spaces within our community if we disregard our whole selves.
Read more on Intersectionality: Article__Mapping_the_Margins_by_Kimblere_Crenshaw
Sometimes, it would just be easier to send over the Cliff notes. Make it short; make it simple; make it easy. After all, there’s other work to do (like discrimination investigations, updated policies and strategic plans, training plans to prepare, and employee groups to coordinate, etc.). And despite all this work, you have to keep continual D&I momentum for your organization. You have to keep the intent of equity and inclusion at the forefront to challenge those who are emboldened to challenge the philosophies of the work. This challenge can be very uncomfortable, and it would be nice to just be able to create a short-cut, full of light and simple language and designed to make people feel comfortable so as to not face these challenges. And while there are small opportunities to tone down rhetoric and dispel myths regarding this work, if you are committed to doing D&I work in a way that truly reaches the heart of an organization without compromising your values, you have to constantly challenge yourself and others. You have to ask yourself: who are you comfortably working for? Are you working for everyone? Has it been too long since you have been uncomfortable?
My voice, filled with determination, courage and purpose came back as I chose to become an adult learner attending Peirce College where I found safety in the classrooms to talk and be heard. I was heard by my academic advisor when she announced at the ceremony how the student they were about to award said “All she wanted to do is walk in her purpose and succeed.” She then awarded me with the Peirce College Walker Center for Academic Excellence Full Time Student of the Year Award!
disagree. Students, must retain their autonomy. That’s just part of what makes these relationships difficult to manage. No one can make them happen in the first place. That’s why Mr. Bell talks about the effort in terms of increasing the odds that students find a mentor. “Mentorship can’t be forced,” he says, “but it can be encouraged. And when it happens, research suggests, college becomes a richer experience for students – both during and after their time on campus.” Mentoring is a term generally used to describe a relationship between a less experienced individual, called a mentee or protégé, and a more experienced individual known as a mentor.
more misunderstanding than understanding, and more finger pointing than hand holding, it is important for us to be clear about what peace is, and how will we know when we have it. 
In some cases, our striving to prove our merit on our respective campuses and to our colleagues may result in “cultural taxation” (Joseph & Hirshfield, 2011), leaving us overburdened and unable to connect with and mentor our sisters, resulting in a benign neglect that can deprive us all of opportunities to forge much-needed connections and develop avenues of camaraderie and advocacy. A much more detrimental result of such “gatekeeping” lies on the other side of the “gate”: our sisters seeking mentors and advocates may develop bitterness and other antipathies toward those sister-academics and sister-administrators from whom they might have expected assistance, guidance, and “safe harbor” in the midst of academia’s epic political and professional storms (Agosto & Karanxha, 2011-2012).
When people of color rise to positions of notoriety, they become beacons of the culture. This engagement sets a beacon of African-American culture at the forefront of British society, bringing us one step (though it may be a small one) closer to our vision of total racial acceptance.
Lift As We Climb 