by Debra White
I ‘m older now, looking back.
I came of age in a time when being Black from the diaspora in America meant something. It meant understanding very early that the story being told about our people was not always the story our people knew about themselves.
I look back toward the 1960s and remember a period when our people were demanding more than a place at somebody else’s table. Our people were demanding dignity, education, political power, economic power, cultural pride, community control, and the right to define themselves. The words Black Power became more than a political slogan. They represented a demand for our Brown skin people to recognize their own strength and their own ability to determine the direction of their communities.
As a brown-skinned woman and a daughter of Judah, I understand this question of cultural identity through more than books. I understand it through generations. I understand what it means for an older Brown woman to look at her own skin, her own hair, her own people, her own history, and ask why so much of that history has so often been explained through somebody else’s eyes that have no regard to our culture!
That is why the cultural theories of Molefi Kete Asante, Nikole Hannah-Jones, bell hooks, and Stuart Hall are important to contemporary writers.
When I think about the 1960s, I remember a time when our people were demanding more than permission to exist inside somebody else’s definition of who we were. The Black Power era brought a powerful awakening of pride, identity, self-determination, cultural expression, political organization, and community strength.
Our people were saying: “We have the right to define ourselves.”
Black is beautiful.
lack power.
Our history matters.
Our communities matter.
Our voices matter.
As a brown-skinned woman and a daughter of Judah, I look at that era through the eyes of a woman who has lived long enough to see generations come and go.
I am looking back now with the understanding that the struggle over identity was also a struggle over who gets to tell our story. Our true story!
I am looking back now with the understanding that a struggle over identity was also a struggle over who gets to tell our story.
