Growing up, I was a theater kid. I loved movies, the stage, and stories of every kind. I lived down the street from a theater, and I spent my childhood enchanted by art. I loved cartoons as much as Shakespeare, Greek tragedies as much as mythology. Old films have always fascinated me, and I can remember watching old movies like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “12 Angry Men” at a young age. Books filled the rest of my world. Even now, I am an avid reader. I try to read at least one book a week. I read everything. From Toni Morrison to Joyce Carol Oates. I have always loved all genres, but above all, I love romance.
Of all the themes that have appeared across art — paintings, films, theater, novels — the most enduring is love. I love the gentleness of it, and the hope it promises. Romance novels are sacred to me. I read one after another, and there was a time where I was able to devour one a day. And because I love that feeling so much, of reading stories of untainted love, I have often found myself avoiding Black stories.
There is nothing I love more than Black creativity. No one creates like we do. From visionaries like Virgil Abloh and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to geniuses like Toni Morrison and Nina Simone, I know that nothing in the world compares to Black art. From the bottom of my heart, nothing garners my appreciation more than Black history, Black art, and Black pioneers.
I was raised by a Black mother, the first in her family to go to college, who majored in African American Studies. Because of her, I know so much about my history, and through her love and guidance, I developed a deep pride in who I am as a Black woman. As much as I love art, I love history just as much, and I have always taken pride in knowing every part of our history. And throughout all of my reading and research, one truth remains the same: the deeper I studied, the uglier it became.
Each time I thought I had discovered the worst of Black enslavement, I proved myself wrong. There was always another story, more horrifying than the last, and more painful than the one I had read the month before. I spent my teenage years in rural Mississippi, where my mother was born, and the atmosphere there still carries the same shadows it did when my grandmother was a child. Confederate flags hang in driveways, a hanging bridge down the road, and the stories my great-aunt would tell had the power to make the hair rise on my arms and bring tears to my eyes.
I have read countless books comparing the Transatlantic slave trade to other systems of slavery throughout world history, and as much as America has tried to bury it, nothing in the history in the world has been more brutal.
Now, decades later, we still walk with those open wounds. And I, as selfish as it sounds, sometimes wish I did not have them. Sometimes I wish I did not have to carry the battle scars. Holding my head high feels heavy when I think of my grandparents and their parents, whose labor bore no reward and whose humanity was denied. I often find myself lost in somber when I think about them, almost feeling survivor’s guilt. However, nothing makes me feel more guilty than going into a bookstore and choosing a romance novel full of characters who do not look like me over the ones who do. I hear my mother’s voice in my head admonishing me for supporting the colonizers, and I imagine my ancestors looking down on me. Yet, for some reason, I cannot stop myself from picking up another.
Black art brings me to my knees. It has beauty that feels too bright to behold, and its history so painful that only something that beautiful could have come from it. When I read Black romance novels, it reminds me that love, the most powerful thing in the universe, is not safe from racism. It is a truth I wish were not true.
It reminds me of everything my people have faced and all the struggles we will continue to endure. But sometimes, I would like to be a human first, and not a revolutionary. I would like to be just a girl, something I know I will never be able to experience.
I wish I knew what it was like to not worry about getting pulled over by the police, to not have to learn my history on my own because it is not taught in schools, and to not have to attend HBCUs because my people’s education was once illegal. To have generational wealth, and parents who were able to build centuries of economic advancement that could sustain my children’s children.
Being Black is a feeling, and there are no words on Earth that can capture it. It is a sense of impending doom watching over you in everything you do, yet still, you survive, you prosper, you persist. It is doing the impossible. It is knowing that this country will never see you the way it sees others. And yet, you continue anyway.
I wish the world could understand that we are humans first, something so simple and yet so unattainable. I wish they understood what our grandparents endured, and how everything around us, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear, is rooted in racism.
Before I am a person, before I am a woman, before anyone learns that I love avocados or can play three instruments, my Blackness is what the world recognizes first. But sometimes I simply want the privilege of being ordinary. Just long enough, for once, to be what so many others are allowed to be without question:
Human.
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Featured image/photo by Andra C Taylor on Unsplash.