Black Unicorn
A Cartograph of Escape from the Sunken Places of Activism
“The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.” — Leonardo Da Vinci
My life thus far: a Black transwoman born in the third-world Waitikubili, surviving on minimum wage 25 years later in New York. My parents have climbed into the Middle Class and I am somehow stuck where they had been 20 years ago— not in a South Bronx ghetto but carrying the ghetto in my soul, in my pocket.
As a child I spent most of my downtime indoors, eventually having a television and then watching a lot of Disney channel. Not only would I watch, but I would repeat lines over and over again until I could get the inflection right; how fast and clearly could I say “What’s the sitch,” while doing a roll down the hallway, both without stuttering? Faster, clearer, more confidently, I improved my ontological positioning to Kim Possible until I was forced to admit that this was a dream world. This is how I learned to speak like a Proud Amerikan, and not like a “Jamaican [Dominican]” or a “Caribbean”. I miss my accent more than I miss my gap teeth- if you would have me admit it…
Nevertheless, I would often find myself re-inspired by any non-Black story. I would constantly daydream that I was related to Professor Xavier because of my last name. I also always wondered if I had a white saint’s blood in my body (again, the surname). All this while consciously repressing the idea that my name came from slavery. Either way, I would begin my practice in fantasy again— rolling down the hallway, reciting magical spells, reading up on English folklore, falling in love with Luna Lovegood, or Violet Klaus: wanting her, wanting to be her, being afraid that I was a gay man for having these thoughts, reminded and only to be hounded by the truth that was my Blackness in the mirror. Reminded that I am weird as fuck.
I pinched my nose in the mirror, holding it for as long as I could while I did chores, hoping it would stick like the platitudes my mother and grandmother before would give me: “Don’t be like the Black children down the street… Stay away from gangs!” Unbeknownst to her, I already had friends AND family in DDP- now an internationalized gang.
Before I went out, holding my nose for 15 minutes at a time, I’d put on clothes that would make my skin look lighter. Sometimes it worked when people would ask me if I was Puerto Rican. It was ironic because the bridge of my nose looks white, and the tip is rounded and “neotenous”. My mom would ask me where my nose was going growing up, but I didn’t know myself enough to answer.
If my nose were going anywhere, maybe it would be going to Puerto Rico where it apparently comes from. Maybe it would be going back to Ireland or Sweden, as I would find out years later thay the 8% in my DNA “belonged” to these foreign places, as if DNA results have more of a history than I do.
Who knows.
This is one way in which I can find myself with thoughts in the past, and my immediate surroundings somewhere I will never know — a đerealization of my sense of self. I guess I was always radically opposed to the present, refusing to live in this world and instead always opting for the world in my head — the one I would create for my self.
Like a dream, I wandered loud, colorful streets dressed in graffiti, grease, brick, and pillars of rust upon which the shimmering screeches of subway cars making their way overhead could only compete in awfulness against the sounds of gun shots, sirens, and the voices of men shouting at women screaming late at night. With nothing in mind, I could and would escape to whatever fiction I was interested in, whether that be the life of Amelia Earhardt that would never be accessible to me, or that of Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter , the spacey girl who no one loves for who she is, but what she does for others.
I often met my mothers’ friends in a daydreamt state, soaring through ruminations streaming in my mind. It was all very misty in regards to my senses: a handshake or hug, hello or first kiss — and hardly one at that. I remember meeting a woman who had a daughter. At the time, my sibling had a play pen, and I was still in public school. I must have been 7. Me and that woman’s daughter, who I had never met before played Red Light Green Light One Two Three all night while the big folks talked in the living room with a Fisherprice flashlight that could switch between the three colors. On green we walked across the hallway, yellow was a warning that red would eventually come, which would signal us to stop. The goal was to get to the end of the hallway, where my bedroom was, complete with a bunk bed and an infant bed. I guess one of us had won at least once, because we ended up on that bunk bed and me, underneath what I remember was the great weight of her body. I didn’t really understand what was happening, but I remember avoiding looking at her on my way to school a couple of times.
Over a decade later, I dreamt of my college abuser in slow-motion. I was in my shared room. It was empty except for a tall stack of mattresses, to which I was tethered to by nothing — spread eagle and arms outstretched. My point of view switched from behind her, slowly opening up my bedroom door in silence, slowly and deliberately rotating around a room I could barely recognize without my clothes all over the floor and futon, and into first person. I could no longer see her until moments later. Her fingers slowly crawled up to the top of the mattresses like a tired, white spider, and her head full of black peeked over, staring me dead in the eyes. I stared back, my heart picking up pace. A smile followed her small, brown eyes. Red lips and that black outfit she always donned: black peacoat, black sweater, black tights crawling over me until I could feel the warmth on my legs, on my chest that was ready to explode. I wanted to ask her what she was doing, because we had promised to never do this, but I could not breathe. She closed in on me, competing with the ceiling for space over my unmoving body. My legs began to vibrate, my face swelled. I was choking. She held her fingers to her lips and giggled. Her face approached mine and I woke up screaming. It was my first kiss, except with long forgotten detail, and replaced with a Columbian girl and for some reason, much more terrifying.
It was easier being a quiet child who could find comfort in pretending to be something I was not. It was easier pretending that the person who kicked the entrance to our fire escape inwards, the one attached to the window that looked out from my parents’ bedroom and onto a cement garden, was a Robin Hood trying to escape the police. It was try-hard, but my magical thinking worked. Coincidentally, as a young adult, a psychiatrist would diagnose me with schizotypal personality disorder, which occurs most commonly in Black women. I was upset at first because my psychiatrist kept this diagnosis a secret from me, but on my way home, after watching videos on YouTube, I learned that Luna Lovegood did a good portrayal of it. I became proud. I became ashamed. I was Black. I still am proud, only for half the reason— I was one step closer to knowing and accepting myself as a Black woman.
On being schizotypal, I still like to use the analogy of Luna Lovegood’s air of otherwordliness because I don’t have to remember all the rituals I did and still sometimes do… I can just hand you the picture, and frame, and not have to paint it for you all over again. I also need to be proud because I have trouble imagining a life without always seeing these “self-references” in every text, in every movie, in every song. Perhaps it was this “magical thinking”, this symptom of a personality disorder, that protected me this long from reading up on why “the hood” was so… awful (apart from the food and beautiful people, I mean). I imagine I would’ve bought into what hoteps on makeshift podiums shouted, giving us passers-by lessons on pyramids and ancient monarchies we may or may not have been related to — seeing that a lot of our histories are permanently lost. They stood on the same spot the rare white preacher sometimes stood, disparaging abortion and advocating apocalypse. Sometimes I wondered if they had a written schedule somewhere…
For me, knowing my self, and developing my underdeveloped sense of self are life accomplishments. My mother had always told me she wanted me to do something “great”. I would be an actress/vet/auto-racer one day, one who knows himself and knows the world and has made The Right Decisions. This is the pressure I was surrounded by that would turn me into the gem I am today, and not the gem I sought to be as a child.
I was made fun of by many of my peers for my Dominican accent, and I also wanted to be an actress. My parents could not afford to audition me. These were simple times: averting my eyes from the gaze of armed police on the corners of virtually every block on Westchester Avenue, and only having to wonder why Amadou Diallo was shot 19 times for pulling out his wallet. His mural and deathbed were a block and a half away from the dwellings of my 8-year-old self. Regardless I miss my childhood. Thrre are days where it is still too quiet for me to sleep. I still remember the days my sibling and I would wait for the man in the basement to make those funky sounds like he did every other night at 9ish: “Soowoooo!!!” We’d answer right back each time to joke with him.
I was 9 when I had left school with my babysitter (my cousin, who had just arrived in the US that year from Dominica). I had forgotten my orange school-funded Metrocard, but had gotten the okay from the bus driver. I made it halfway down the aisle when I heard a voice tell me to stop and turn around. A white man in a trench coat with black, slicked-back hair approached me and pulled out a silver badge from his coat. I felt a wave of cold fear wash over my body, and I lost all capability to think. He walked me back to the front of the bus. Looking over my shoulder, I saw my cousin sitting with her hands over her mouth, eyes wide and darting between the man in the trench coat and I. At the front of the bus, he told me to pay or get off the bus. The bust driver, a Black man in his 40’s, told the man in the trench coat that he had already spoken to me and had begun to speak to me once again: “Look, next time ju-” “Listen man, go back to your sister at the back of the bus. I’ll pay for you.” A very large Black man in a Black vest and fitted cap had been standing behind us. He patted my shoulder with surprising tenderness, gesturing backwards to my cousin who still hid her open mouth behind palms, and under tearing eyes. On my way back to the seat, the man had begun to argue loudly with the man with the badge, asking him for his registration number and precinct, to which the man could not answer. Eventually both the man in the trenchcoat and the man in the vest took a seat, the man in the vest still asking the man in the trenchcoat for his badge, telling him that he needs to leave Black children alone, calling him a bully. The man in the trenchcoat revealed he was not a real policeman, to which the man in the vest threatened to “beat his ass”. The pretend policeman left the bus at the soonest stop, and the Black man in the Black vest got up sat down next to my cousin and I. He asked us if we were okay, and told me to always remember three things: always stand up for myself, always question authority, and to never trust white people.
When I was 9, My cousin burned me a copy of my first hip hop album: G-Unit’s Beg for Money. I was accustomed to listening to calypso, soca, Smooth Jazz CD101.9, R&B, and the music on Radio Disney because my parents did not allow me to listen to rap. But, I lived in the South Bronx, and I had always craved belonging. Being the strange child I was, not knowing a single Tupac song took my oddness to a new level of “unique”. Nevertheless, I memorized the lyrics to every song. I wanted a fitted cap. I wanted name-brands. I wanted a golden chain. I wanted to rock an Amerikan flag around my neck like the Flobots did , the band who spoke to my envy of the rich “Manhattan people”; it took me years to realize that my envy was more a thorough distrust, for I never had any imaginations of what I would spend a million dollars on other than a gold chain. From school notes I’ve read from when I was a child of about 7, apparently I wantes to “clean the streets”, though. 7 years old, and this is the deepest depth of posh I’ve ever achieved 18 years later…
I have never owned a golden chain. No amount of staring at the storefronts of golden everything on Fordham Road could land a chain on my neck, or a watch on my wrist. I was broke, sometimes poor. I still am broke, sometimes homeless. Always broke. I went to a prestigious high school in The Village on a scholarship, but still couldn’t afford any of my favorite things. I turned to books, music. It took me 8 months of turning in 3/4 of my allowance to a musical instrument store to purchase my first drum set on layaway. I lost 30 pounds. I am a great, versatile drummer, but it still wouldn’t pay me when I was studying mechanical engineering in college, not matter how many bands I played for or recorded EPs with. It wouldn’t support my meals when I switched from mechanical engineering to biology courseload and had that much more time on my hands. It wouldn’t support my soul when my boss’ 8 year old daughter at the cafe asked me why my hair was ugly. Her mom said it wasn’t ugly, “… it’s stronger than yours.”
I graduated twice from college. The first time, I hadn’t done a single internship. Why? I was a first generation college student and I had no idea how to secure myself a career in the field of ecology. All I knew was that I needed a degree. I worked hard for that degree, literal sweat between classes and black ice on sidewalks, and tears throughout the academic year for that degree. Sweat, tears and dreams amounting to zilch.
Months after walking, my counselor informed me via email that he had forgotten to add one more class to my course-load in order for me to receive my degree at home. He apologized over and over again. I wanted to sue him but I repressed that reactive anger because we all know I couldn’t beat Syracuse University. I had to go back for one more class. Another $5000 added to my student loans that would prove useless because I needed an internship to be qualified, and sustenance to work for free. I was trapped.
After I graduated for the second time I found full time work for the state at a forensic psychiatric center for the “criminal and mentally ill”. I got diagnosed with ADD that had apparently onset from the stress at college, and Chronic Major Depression Type II, and has still somehow managed acquiring a job counseling people who were unfit for trial due to either diagnosed or “suspected” mental illness or disability. Some had been therefor decades, others for ays at a time. I spent 8–16 hours a day, counseling and escorting gang members I still miss today, and others I did not so much: rapists, cannibals of small children, and racists. During this period of time, I had attempted suicide and survived.
The things I had seen were too shocking for me. I had seen staff pay off patients to fight each other, staff lying to psychiatrists about patients to make them stay another 3 years our of spite…. 3 years farther from going to court, for a chance to see the outside, beyond 30 foot tall double-fences decked with barbed wire throughout. I’ve been told to slow down when someone got stuck in those, if my senior didn’t like them, so that they could feel the pain of steel piercing their flesh in the hot summer sun. I had been told that I must be “criminally insane” too for empathizing with so many of the “patients”, read prisoners, by staff who had punched and kicked and jumped patients wherever there was no camera to record it, and bullied by senior assistants who would tease me for caring, going as far as to ask me to put bass in my voice. I left early the day I was told that my voice is too soft (not quiet, but soft, as we clarified), even though I was a favorite among patients on my ward. Cell phones were not allowed, but staff brought their own anyway because other staff feared snitching, especially under the threat of being jumped outside of work by those same staff.
One time I had been required to attend a conference between psychiatrist, senior, and other treatment assistants to discuss what a patient had done. I had spent much time with the patient, counseling and getting to know them, because we had the same diagnosis, chronic major depression, and much of the same symptoms. I can not reveal specific information about the patient beyond that for fear of violating HIPPA, but I will say there was an altercation that lead one staff member to flex their machismo and decide that this patient was a threat to this ward. They wanted the patient moved to a ward where all their enemies stayed in concentration: people who hated weak patients, and needed to constantly beat on them or even try to kill them. Of course, being the bold type I had already made clear since day one on the ward, I spoke up to my seniors and told them that this was bullshit. I told them that this staff is grandstanding and that they haven’t hurt a single person since being here. I told them that if they were a threat, then so am I. I started spouting nonsense like that. I raised my voice. The meeting was over and the staff I accused of grandstanding pulled me aside and told me he wasn’t sure whose side I was on. I asked him why I needed to take sides at all. I quit the day the chief decided that I was lying when I was late for training when my brother lost his ride home and I needed to tell him I couldn’t make it. 5 minutes late and I was asked to retire because I had caused too much of a disruption in the traditions of this place. One year in, one year out.
During that year, I had decided to prepare for graduate school and was close to attending Coventry for a conversion course in research psychology. I was prepared to quit the job I had for one with more authority, one in which I would be dictating the rules that decided who was “criminally insane” or “unfit for trial”, but alas I could not afford it because Coventry had just fallen off FAFSA for the year. Oh well. I had found a job at Le Scandal. Jazz drumming, white crowds coming to see the Longest Running Burlesque Show in New York. I was broke, but my parents could afford to pay for my car, a Kia Sorento. I carried my instruments back and forth, from Middletown to Times Square, every Saturday. I did it because it helped me feel like I had not only a purpose, but an identity. College may have failed me in securing a position within the field of ecology, but I could be that Black drummer man who secretly wanted to be a woman. I was a woman. I admired the outfits those women wore on stage more than the flashes and performative flirtation I got to play with while on stage because those were concepts I never got to adopt into my psyche… Femininity.
Good times, okay paying gig. For what it’s worth, my life became that much more interesting. I would blast Death Grips and listen to audiobooks on orthodox Anarchism, philosophy, sci-fi fiction novels, and various theories of melancholy in psychology and art. I was reading a lot, thanks to my new prescriptions of Vyvanse and Zoloft; things were back to normal in my head all without “the help of God” I needed, according to my parents. I still hadn’t owned a gold chain, but my work at the psychiatric center had afforded me a brand new drum set. Some dreams we give up on, other we place on the backburner, others find us somewhere, and some place us elsewhere. New dreams took me to places I could never imagine.
When I reached the second to last chapter of Nevada (a book recommended to me by a transwoman on “Weird Facebook” when I was just a wee egg) I was in a Starbucks on Vyvanse (I had been diagnosed with ADD and Adderall was making me manic), sipping on some type of chocolate flavored coffee. And I was almost in tears. I went home to finish it, and I remember standing up and saying to myself “That’s it, I need to do this. I need to at least try it. I need to do it now or I will be dead.”
Thousands of days have gone by, between partners and toxicity, either on my part or theirs, in which I experienced dissociation from my body, which eventually became derealization and inability to comprehend social cues or read between the lines. It was debilitating.
Most painful of all, I could not read a page of a book without forgetting what the last page said. I was an early reader, and only got better at reading and absorbing material. Senior year of college, this had all gone away. My grades dropped. I told myself over and over again that I just needed to graduate, get a job, and keep drumming. This mantra was all that kept me alive. I could not pinpoint why this was happening— though two years of therapy and recovering from a codependent friendship helped somewhat, even through my first suicide attempt after graduating. I would pick my mother up from work, and the leafeless trees would hover above my headlights, looking like claws stretching out of a pop-up book. I would blame it on the lead paint of our apartments in the Bronx perhaps, because my sibling had ADD and I could see it affecting me in this way as well. Then again, I’d also say the person I was codependent with a year ago was casting spells on me… Amazing. It felt like a dream. An awful fucking dream I would never escape. A nihilist of a dream that had no point to itself. It felt like I was elsewhere years before, too, when I faked orgasms for my first long-term relationship. Out of body, out of mind, elsewhere. Oh well no regrets with that one, seeing as she would tell me she’d never have kids with me because she wants her children to have blue eyes…
I’ve lived through worse abuse, always trying to suck up to my abuser. Always believing every word they said, but being confused by their actions. My worst relationship involved someone hiding their ex from me for no apparent reason, turning up with a Black eye, telling me they had feelings for me, telling me they don’t want to date me, then telling me I should have asked them out the day before. I ate it all up like it was my lifeseed.
My sense of self was already extremely poor, and it still is. But I learned how to set boundaries. Ever since healing from codependency, and becoming more self-aware and self-actualizing (learning to ask myself what I want whenever I began to derealize), more mindful, the thought of me being a woman kept coming up. Every time I imagined myself, my ideal self, it was a woman, in whatever way a woman could be. I did this when I hid in the bathroom during a stressful day at work, or when I was on the verge of crying in public, or when my parents would fight or try to cheat on one another, just to escape my reality… My favorite was fantasizing behind the drum set. I felt like I was every burlesque dancers’ sister. But I, was a man?
What was happening? Was I gay? Did I mention that my mother has asked me if I was gay since I was 9 or so, because I kept telling her to leave me alone when she asked if I had a girlfriend? What about when I would come home and her stories about that girl cursing me out on the 4 train at the 4:00 rush uptown because I ignored her advances — did she ask if I was gay then? Yes. Oh yes, and many more times my “friends”asked if I was gay too — each time I walked away from a girl who tried to dance with me at a party, hands cuffed at crotch and feet scuttling away like two black beetles from the sun.
Senior year, I had begun to wonder if I was gay so much that I’d go out and make out with women, just to see if I enjoyed it. I did not. I was not interested. It was boring. It felt fake. Even women I was attracted to. I would leave the party wondering why I wasted time when I could have been reading. Jesus Christ.
I watched cis man on cis man, lots of gay porn, to understand why I was so afraid of being gay. I tried to figure out what was attractive about a cis man. I tried to stroke it too. The shit made no goddamn sense to me. So I followed up with cis hetero porn… Hot but kinda gross to me. It felt like it did when I accidentally discovered that B-movie Guinea Pig after my bio teacher gave me the class pet as a present… The strangling, the incessant pounding, the fake moans… No. Not after I read Wollstonecraft and Feminine Mystique during my codependent phase. Not after I felt empowered for reading those books? Y’all see where this is going…
I remember the warm smile my long-term therapist Kerry gave me when I came to her after reading Nevada. She was the first person I came out to. I told her about the recurring thoughts I had.
She confirmed that I don’t have to be attracted to men if I don’t find them attractive, as if that wasn’t fucking obvious. And then, with the biggest grin, the room was filled with a sort of silhouette of excitement. She looked me in the eyes and said “But maybe… You’re transgender. Ya know, a lot of people are still attracted to the same people after transitioning. But if you do call yourself a woman, that means you’d be gay.” I told her to slow down, explain that word, and that was that. I was gay, but in a different way.
I was gay.
And I could be a woman.
I cried for joy each day for a week since then. I’m crying as I edit this now.
I only found out what the word transgender meant when I was 22. I only heard the word for the first time when I was a teen— hanging with a best friend of mine, his mom telling us to watch Oprah talk to Cher’s transgender son. I was confused and didn’t try to understand. I would never meet a transgender person anyway, right? Obscurification, social death, and colonialism have surely done their part.
After my Enlightenment, I did research for a few days, saved up for my first electrolysis appointments, and ended up at a Planned Parenthood with a fresh prescription of estradiol and spironolactone. At the time I had also been into Ursula Le Guin. The Dispossessed changed my life. The Left Hand of Darkness changed it further. I was a new person. This was a beginning, and I hadn’t contemplated suicide for long afterwards.
I was wearing makeup in secret, behind a locked bedroom door, had just left a forensic psychiatric center, was drumming at a burlesque club. Life could have felt great. I was being great, doing great things, for myself. But I was also upset and still confused with the world. The world that had introduced my mother and my father’s ancestors to Christianity, the same kind that would have me abandoned. The world that decided I couldn’t find work with a degree in biology because I had no way of finding out the steps I needed to take to find a position in the field of ecology. The same world that decided I could not empathize with “criminals”, the majority of those Black and the rest who spent their time in the Privileged Upper Wards, with extra food and service even if they ate the children they raped. I knew Kropotkin, I knew Goldman, I knew the evils of capitalism and authority, but what I didn’t understand was what this meant for me. I had two questions I could not ignore: What can I do to have the poor and homeless feed themselves? Who taught my parents be so cruel to me when I did the best I could to do great things?
I was seeing a new therapist by now — a Black gay woman. She told it like it is, and told me I could never be a woman. By then I had found all the confidence in me to decide I didn’t have to respect my elders. I asked her why it was that she only decided to be lesbian after her husband died, but I couldn’t find out I’m a woman? Oh well. It was fun for both of us. She would tell me after that specific session that these are questions some gatekeepers might ask me, and that she was preparing me for it. I’m not sure how true that was, but I did have one transgender therapist, a second wave feminist, at the recommendation of the gay therapist. She told told me that I need to have an operation to be a woman… That was around the time I read Whipping Girl. I could handle it.
I bought my first dress, a black lingerie piece, and my mother kicked me out the same month. My first time being kicked out, other than that time my mother wouldn’t let me in because she thought I was buying drugs at a bodega when I was 13. I moved back to Syracuse to live with friends, if living means sleeping on their couch. It was a place to stay. I could also continue transitioning before my insurance was gone, so I did. I couldn’t believe my life had been this strange.
Hypervisible, transgender, and Black were a combination of identities that made life dangerous but I often crave danger at every step I take in life, from flatland BMX to publicly transitioning. To be frank, I enjoyed indulging in my suicidal fantasies and sometimes I enjoyed being able to survive to do it again. Bad LSD trips, tagging the streets, and doxxing Nazis were just a few of the things I did for fun while I went from part-time to to temp to part-time job. I wanted to form a girl gang with whomever was interested to get involved in petty crime, to scare frat boys, or punish racists. A year into my time away from home, and many angry Facebook posts about capitalism and misogyny later, I linked up with an old friend who was forming an anti-fascist chapter. I had just finished reading Lucy Parsons’ biography, along with her collection of speeches and essays, and was ready to take on public life as a full-on activist.
Upon arriving at the meeting spot, I had gone to the wrong room and ended up in a meeting for local Black activists. I knew that was the wrong place, but I was desperate to meet like-minded individuals like myself outside of Facebook, so I decided to stay. After most of the Left had already decided that Trump was a fascist, it was inspiring to see people who had come from similar background, experiencing the violence of systemic racism, speak on this, where I thought the only people using this were white. For me, fascism was a secondary, or even tertiary, characteristic to the threat that is white supremacy. To many of the younger people there, it was as well. Nevertheless, it was closing in on election time and it was a hot topic. New Black Panthers joined us, recruiting to arm Black folk in the community and train them on firearm usage, Black capitalists prepared meeting members for the sale of Black-owned purchases.
One transgender person, like myself, spoke on how they stopped attending two separate anarchist groups due to anti-Blackness bro-anarchism… What the heck was anti-Blackness??? I sat and stared in shock, for I had just e-mailed Black Rose about joining them. I told myself to take it for what it is, because you know yourself. “Merrikat, these are just hypersensitive Blacks. You hate capitalists, and here they are. You hate the hoteps in the New Black Panthers, yet here they are. You are only here for the experience. Dissociate from this herd of Blacks, you ought to be downstairs, anyway.” I stayed for one more talk from a man who was the same age as I, speaking on Trump and how Obama failed us. Good leaving point.
I walked downstairs into a room full of white middle-aged and young adults, all women or non-binary. My initial thoughts were “So this is it, I am finally on the road to making some real changes to this bourgeoise facade of a country.” My sisters. My siblings. Though I had been late, my friend had taken notes more me. I jotted my email down in a sign up sheet someone passed to me (oh, the excitement…). I had not seen my friend in so long, and yet here she is. How I loved her for reaching out to me. She had seen my desperate cries on social media for so long, for a group to join to really go after capitalism. So mindful of her. I was mindful as well, fully in tune with my overexcitement and anticipation to begin organizing. I was completely absorbed in the current and final speakers words, questions, and suggestions. However bothered I was by her nervous(?) decisiveness to never look me in the eye, I was determined to view everyone in the room as my equal. This was my new family.
The meeting was over, basic planning stuff that was required to go on until a sturdy foundation was built for us to move off of. I met with my friend on the couch and we hugged once more. We immediately started talking about the who’s-who of the room, since she knew most people there. One woman was a Buddhist and opposed violence. I winced. That was the Anarchist™ in me. Some others, long-time veterans of the anti-fascist community. Again, validated.
The last speaker came up to me and asked for my name after introducing myself. We gossiped some more, discussed what we wanted to see from the group. I spoke out first, almost shouting “I wanna infiltrate a Nazi meeting!”
The final speaker reminded me that I was Black. We giggled nervously. Somewhat ashamed, I dissociated and had a flashback to the meeting upstairs I had just left about 20 minutes before. I asked my long time friend about them, and what they are about. She told me they’re cool, and that she’d been to a few meetings, but that they have competing time schedules with us, and that they invite capitalists, which she is not too fond of. “Me either!” *mental high five*.
Time went on. Every week or so, we met. We worked on zine material. We organized. I made sure to work overtime so I could make it up there. There was no one else doing this stuff anywhere near me, so I was not only desperate, but dedicated.
At the same time, I participated in social media activism. Heavily inspired by the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, catalyzed by communities on Facebook, I sought to further enmesh myself among young radicals in the homogenizing of theory. Having read history of the USSR and pre-revolution atmospheres, I did this wholeheartedly and without any restraint. I was being the hyper-visible self I always saw internally— unflinching, unapologetic Me.
I saw virtual coups, take-overs of the largest online spaces for activists, theoreticians, and what you can generally call an “agitator” for the sake of Leftism of sorts and kinds. In the process, I further developed my debating skills and awareness of ableism, sexism, and economics. I learned a lot about things that I never questioned unless it was not anarchist enough. I believed if my chauvinism was righteous, it was all worth it, down to deciding far-left groups for “people of color” were useless because they were divisive.
When I say these were probably the happiest moments of my life, apart from being kicked out from my home and my parents simultaneously being upset that they had kicked Their Son (a daughter) out, I am being as genuine as can be. I felt a sense of self, a sense of belonging like I had never felt. I had even forgotten the codependent abuse I survived, as well as the abandonment I experienced from my family. I made friends, and disrupted far-right communities. And not only was this talk, it was mostly praxis.
Fast forward to Trump’s election— there were tears, there was crying, and an immense panic attack hours before work. I walked it off. And besides, I felt safe in Antifa. I felt safe on this day because although a cryptofascist president was elected, and though two pickup trucks circled a nearby school campus, blocking off streets, waving confederate flags… I had begun preparing for battle. I bet many of you reading this are surprised this happened all the way upstate New York. But I assure you: ALL white people are susceptible to this behavior.
Regardless of external troubles, there were some issues brewing. The same last speaker of our first meeting was accused of being discriminatory against an ally of ours by that ally’s loved one, and there was a slight mess. There were breaks taken. I comforted her as much as I could. I would never let my comrade get hurt in this way. But it didn’t take to long for more intra-community conflict to occur.
A black queer man from the group above out Antifa space had issues with my peer above. Apparently he had shown a disdain for white women, which I myself found unworthy of forgiveness. He posted something on Facebook alluding to his belief that white Jews were racist. The thread became a mess that eventually lead down a Socratic path of questioning whether Jews controlled most of the wealth on Earth, an unfounded idea I did not agree with, yet was well aware of existing within many communities. Before I had anything to say on the matter, being the only Black person in my anti-fascist chapter at the time, there was an onslaught of dragging and attacks on this person’s credibility. The Black man in question was a prominent-enough member of the Black community to render this dragging as not only attention-worthy, but also threatening to the space we shared. Before I had known what was going on, I had seen a lot of peers from the anti-fascist community belonged to writing posts about this person, exposing and placing them in an isolating position of shame. Not one word was shared to me about this person, whom I could have spoken to in private.
I immediately felt a sense of duty that I can’t explain to this day. Since joining this chapter, I had felt a sense of belonging and purposefulness I had never felt before. And all of this suddenly felt weightless, fruitless, in the midst of this controversy. I became manic, suicidal at the thought of my own vulnerability— the fact that this could happen to any Black person, including myself. Ignorant as these comments on Jewish wealth were, there is an entire history to unfold behind anti-semitic comments in the Black community, most created by White people. I engaged, acting upon my trauma as a survivor of codependency and assuming every White person was ready to gaslight me. I distanced myself, and quit Antifa.
There was no use in explaining to people that this Black person was not their enemy, and that there was no practical use in calling this person out, as opposed to calling in. Each time I tried, every example and article and essay I sent my friends in Antifa was received with disdain, and rightfully yet unjustifyingly intolerant. I even contacted the original poster and sent the IWW pamphlet on “How to overthrow the Illuminati”, meant for Black eyes, and written by Black people who had not fallen into this trap of misbelief. And so, all-in-all, the group technically fortified its Eurocentric composition while in the process isolating a Black person from activist circles, compromising the meeting spaces even more.
Responses I received from two Jewish members, including the last speaker of our first meeting, and another member included: Are we not allowed to call out anti-semitism? Are you saying Jewish people can not be oppressed?
My past, and all the history I experienced in the ghettoes of the South Bronx came into question as I searched for a string of logic that would hold this narrative together. .I had lost both my families in one year, Black men were being killed by Nazis with swords in the street, and we lived under a cryptofascist presidency. Was I to abandon my past and the inter-community knowledge I had gained first-hand?
For the first time in my pseudo-revolutionary career, I was forced to look myself, not in the mirror to pinch my nose, but out of body— from a 360 degree angle of direct observation of my actions leading up to these moments. Who was I as a Black person? Is any of the relationship I feel with the Black community, including our ignorance, invalid? No, not all Black people are this ignorant. Yet we all knew who Tupac was. We all know his, and even white musical artists’ references to the Illuminati as an ambiguous, omnipresent and omnipotent force in the world. And many of us new of the connections some made to this. I straddled between considering whether the Black person who made these comments was a hotep, or if I was being completely condescending, for days on end, constantly messaging my long term friend for help. It was a traumatic experience, to say the least.
Many conversations later, we decided to hold a Restorative Circle that would bring the closure not even I realized we needed. We all met up, one Jewish member who had taken extreme offense at the post, my long-time friend, two counselors, and the Black man I mentioned earlier. Arriving late in my favorite dress for supreme comfort and prepared to be gaslit again, we discussed the situation.
It turns out they were truly ignorant of their words, and didn’t even consider that there were Black Jews as well. For me, I had a hard time expressing other than my feelings of immense pain and disillusionment. The meeting was over sooner than I thought, and we all hugged it out. Everyone apologized, including myself for assuming he was a hotep. No. From white people inventing anti-semitic tropes, to Blacks being most threatened in out current political atmosphere (we also discussed the JCC bomb threats, as they were enacted by an Israeli Jewish boy), to my condescending assumptions— it was only the gossip invented by our oppressors that had led to this mess, mine being that of the anarchist orthodoxy I so adhered to. I lost one of my friends in the process, the Jewish woman who was afraid to look me in the eyes during our first Antifa meeting. But all in all, I learned so much, and was proud at our efforts to keep the intra-communities we belonged to at least somewhat civil. Since then, I have forgiven all but myself for all that has happened in my short career as an Anti-Fascist, and what was to happen next.
But first, I had to answer those ruminative questions that still haunted me at almost every waking moment, being the obsessive activist I am: Who am I? What is my purpose in activism? What is a Black body in this reality?
By now, I had gotten kicked out of a large Marxist-Leninist reading group for “appropriating womanhood” as a transgender woman, and the largest Leftist group on social media, Political Aesthetics Escape Pod (PAEP), for claiming that the Nazis would come for Black people first, like they had, after Trump’s election. I exclaimed this as a warning, not for self-pity. Knowing the administrator of this group in person was comforting, nonetheless. We spoke about it over some Five Guys. I told them about how I felt out of body since then, because it was so obviously true. They agreed with me, but assured me there was nothing they could do, because the moderators had banned me, not him. And because I ought to see it from his point of view— that he doesn’t know what to tell the Jewish people in the group who thought that my claim was offensive.
Days following this, a rumored coup of Political Aesthetics Escape Pod had become news in our communities. I’m not too familiar with why, but there was supposed racism occurring in the group, to which one Black member had joked about a coup of PAEP, which led to the banning of hundreds of Black communists, anarchists, Leninists, Marxists etc. from PAEP. A mole of sorts had told a moderator, or the administrator, that a coup was a possibility, which led to the banning of 100s of members of the Comrades of Color group on Facebook. There was retaliation, memes made against my friend, and more. More drama I was used to but was jaded by. So I did what I was leaning towards in terms of ontology— activism in the flesh world.
I took to messaging my friend about the meaning of this banning to no avail. They refused to admit any members in, for fear of angering the white members of the group. They told me that a few Black members agreed with the decision, defining it thus as righteous— the typical “I have Black friends,” response stemming from white fragility. They told me that PAEP was “a vehicle” to which they were only steering it (don’t ask me what this means I’m as a loss too). What hurt most was them telling me “It’s just a Facebook group.” There was no empathy evident in his words, which was surprising for all the time they have spent consoling me through my major-depressive episodes. Therefore, it is appropriate to assume that this was bigger than me. It was the group over friendship, the group over Comrades of Color. I began to ruminate out of regret…. Regret for having let racist things he said slide, like saying he had the bladder of a young black child… I had even let transphobic things slide, such as referring to transwomen saying hello to us in a parking lot one day “it”. All of this ocurred before I knew I could transition… All of it ocurred before I would have to begin admitting to myself that racists could be communists as well as centrists and nazis.
What hurt most about this was not only the hypocrisy born of their simultaneous protection of the group while calling it valueless, but also their disregard for Black and Brown peoples’ autonomy. These are not just groups for us. Most of us had felt a sense of relief in finding what we called “Leftbook”. Not only because we found like-minded people who we expected to not be racists on the far-Left— the same Left that our beloved Black Panthers had joined arms with during their revolution— but also because we had found a space where most of us believed we could have a voice beyond intersectionality. In a world where the government doesn’t appreciate our critiques, and form a historically material standpoint in which we have been fighting oppression for millennia before White people had their own liberation movements, we thought we had found a place to breathe.
Again, I was facing an oncoming, infinitely dense mass of disillusionment in the same year I had lost two families I thought were at my side because we loved each other. How foolish it was to believe that a white supremacist governance, and those who benefitted from it, would not reproduce its systemic violence everywhere we turn.
I decided to end the conversation, and end the friendship. My friend, whom I had known for years, outed themselves as a cultivator of masochists lost to their plans on creating a social media app in which people were rewarded for their political correctness (which went beyond general respect and became akin to that of respectability politics), and was lost too. The same person who had introduced me to Kropotkin. I ruminated on their comments about “having the bladder of an 11 year old Black child”, calling transwomen “things” before I came out as transgender, and their insistence that although they agreed that Black people were mot vulnerable in today’s Amerikan society, they would take the side of non-whites in protecting their space. To me, it was as simple as giving Comrades of Color the group as an apology, as a show of respect and a change of political theorizing towards now only white liberation, but Black, Brown, Native, and Asian liberations. I ruminated on our conversation at Five Guys, them asking me how it felt, if I was dissociating, when I thought about getting kicked out of PAEP. How patronizing. How codependent of me.
As time went on, increasing tensions between the white and non-white communities of Leftbook developed. I took a semi-passive backseat, observing and making hot takes on it all, smugly sipping on my proverbial tea. I warned the lot through my constant whining about Antifa, and PAEP banning me. I was bitter that this was only noticed when it happened to Blacks who had clout. I compartmentalized all of this, and it had suddenly become clearer. After going back on essays I had read by Lenin, Mao, and Goldman, I made conclusion after conclusion that lined up with what was happening. Somehow, I would become further radicalized. I ruminated on how my old friend told me that no one would ever listen to my “extremist politics” because I was “too threatening”. Luckily, I had the history of my (fiery) heroes at my side. And luckily, I discovered postcolonial anarchism, and then afro-pessimism/optimism (AP/O).
There is a long, long history of racial tensions on the Left in America. This is a recurrent trend built on the foundation of America’s racialized history of both economic and ontological oppressions. Looking up to the Black Panthers, I found myself in a predicament. Bobby Seale, once a man who grabbed bricks from his mother’s back yard to throw at white passers-by on the day that Martin Luther King Jr died eventually formed a Rainbow Coalition, and NCCF’s for non-Black members to join. Why not from the start? Why Black nationalism?
Often argued between opposing views based on school of study, whether that be sociology, anthropology, history, or political science, the effects of colonialism on Black and Native ontologies are, no matter how controversial, synonymous with social death in Black and Native communities. That is the common string. It doesn’t matter whether you are J. Sakai or Fanon. Simply put, the right to define ourselves apart from slavery past, as “Black” peoples, is directly tied into not only our bodily and metaphysical autonomy, geographically (since speciation, the European predecessor to racism, was defined by geography). Therefore the destruction of imperialist and neocolonial powers everywhere is a necessary measure to take.
I still have not finished J. Sakai’s Marxist history book “Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat” because it is so excruciatingly painful to my existence. Not only am I observing my body in a 360 degree motion, but I can somehow feel from a fourth dimension, the conception of my body and being through out time. Worse than being pulled through a black hole, my body is enslaved, genocided with allostatic load, raped, pillaged, destroyed beyond recognition and built into the antithesis of life itself: a Black body. This was the history book all non-white people needed to read to understand when and where they are in the world. And so, I took to defending it at all costs. (please read hyperlink before continuing for the full story)
This resulted in me being banned from Facebook for life. I have used accounts my friends had, with their real names, from proxies and got banned. I have made 8 new accounts, while in the United States, and when I visited Vietnam. Evert time I made one, even with my dead name, I was banned— but only after Facebook asked for an image of my face. I cried, I got suicidal, I tried looking for pure hydrogen for my second attempt… Yup, a real revolutionary alright, losing sleep over getting banned from a social media platform… Why? Was this so immature, so vain all along? How deluded could I be? I broke down further than I had since my first suicide attempt.
And with this thought replaying over and over again, here I was, losing sight of who I was.
I am a Black transwoman, an immigrant from a third world country who was radicalized and somehow continue to be radicalized. I lived with my family through poverty into the Middle-Class. I carry poverty in my pocket. I will have no intergenerational wealth: no ethnicity, no heritage to pass on other than that I choose to discover. I am the antithesis of Humanity, the Slave, the non-Human. And regardless of how much damage I suffer by the hands of white Leftists, their coons and house Slaves, and the entire Right alike, I will persevere. I have made so many friends in the process, inviting me to live in Vietnam, and inviting me to help them organize elsewhere. It reads almost like a Neo-Zapatismo cyberdream. All this due to cyber-activism, which have always lead to flesh-world activism. Like a black unicorn, inhuman yet the body of which is highly sought after for liberatory inspiration, the existence of my humanity is non-existent in the eyes of white people, whether centrist, left, or right.
I walk the rustling fields of lavender and cotton, a valley in my desire. I take note of its beauty with open ears and spongy heart. I know my self, my muscle, my gaze, my neigh. My spirit awakens with haste to the excited shouts from beyond the field. This is not the first time they’ve come, operating so coherently — stampeding each other in equal parts, like a wave enveloping itself over and over again. An eternal return, come to make me an ebb in its tide. What is most interesting is their ability to join together to do so. A choir of desperation, a history of anger, they strike chords in unisom; some shout for my horn to my Left, others beg for my tongue to my Right, and directly behind I can smell the familiar scent of black unicorns like myself. Except for the fact that the nuance of this aroma is covered by leather, steel, and domestication, I smell nostalgia, sovereignty, and freedom hiding beneath layers of pain; my family… I miss my family. I pity their demise. I pity mine as well; this is the third time they have discovered my survival today. I run West, always longing to turn East, to turn my back on the sun and chase tomorrow. But for now, I must survive, even if that means running to my death, my past.
This entire time, I, constituent of the non-White community, have been chased down for “trauma porn” to support white liberation: from Right-winged folks who fetishize conservative Black women, to centrists, moderates, and liberals who support their cause on the backs of right-wingers to Leftists who only want non-whites to legitimize their cause. Why should I make unity the prize, if the true prize for all is non-white liberation?
Through all the pain and suffering, I have dedicated the rest of my activism to decolonizing theory in a safe, conversatory way in which it will not be co-opted for a white-exclusive liberation ever again, for Non-Human theorists, where “non-Human” is the antithesis to the Human (otherwise known as White, according to the racist aspects of Humanism), deserve attention too — moreso in America. And because those tactics and strategies will only widen our repertoire of anti-colonialist activities in the Fourth World (which ought to include African-Americans as well).
Why? Because in America, our communities are much more heterogenous than any other place in which a successful anti-capitalist, decolonial movement has occurred. Yes, this is where I stand, within an anti-capitalist framework, heavily influenced by NeoZapatismo, the Maroons, The Black Panthers, Ocallan, and Ho Chi-Minh. All of the above are nationalists who believe in freedom from the very bottom, up. All listed movements were and are horizontally led by of people of color. The Zapatistas reject eurocentric thought, as well as The Black Panthers. Ho Chi Minh was the first to decolonize within the Marxist string. The Black Panthers, because they knew where to find and how to build Black radicals. Bolo’bolo because it is the modern day take on post-revolutionary praxis. Ocalan because, no Black or Brown community is exactly the same, and in admitting so, we need to admit the necessity of learning how to operate as islands of thought that can form consensuses locally. We need to learn how to build this movement for all of us.
I plan on discovering the multifaceted solutions to eradicating racism on the Left as well with the following question: why is the well-hidden racism on the Left important to recognize if The Right is already so blatantly racist and obviously an enemy?
From an early age, all of us, around the globe, are imbued with varying levels of racism being brought across borders directly through America’s insistence on neoliberal imperialism. Without dealing with our racism, and our preference towards white scholars who believe they knew best, we are at a loss. We are unable to unify as an unstoppable mass with momentum driven by love from the barrel of Farthest Left theory in the direction of capitalism, and through its burst belly. We will need to aim to be so true that our argumentation will be undeniable, moreso than that of the discourse of dialectics in its orthodox procedural use.
Does this mean Marx was Wrong? Absolutely not. That is a red herring of an argument. However, Marx is lacking in his presentation of solutions for the heterogenous, multicultural, and colonized communities of subaltern not only domestically, but internationally. We are more than a proletarian mass. We are more than a mass of individuals, as well. We are a mass of populations with lost histories and cultures who are in fact able to cooperate regardless of the bourgeoisie version of nationalism that defines a winner and a loser through both explicit and implicit representations of subordination. We can preserve our populations and maintain heterogeneity and variety regardless of Marx’ insistence on our homogeneity as proletarian peoples. We are subaltern, oppressed in more ways than one. It is lost to me as to why the suggestions of subaltern populations in America are invalid if they do see through a Marxist lens.
In the end, I hope to destroy the biggest threat to humanity: this genocidal Moloch of a country. We need to unite regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, age, level of able-bodied/mindedness, and work together to decolonize our movement — to move beyond our dependence on white academia predominantly sold to us at “higher education”, and into theory brought to us from subaltern populations here.
What does this mean for the makeup of the movement? There is no room for racists. There is no room for dogmatism. There is only room for absolute autonomy of an oppressed peoples. We need to identify these populations, and listen to what they need, what they want, and the means they seek to achieve it. Then, we need to call upon consensus.
Consent. That is the program I am campaigning for. The insistence on an ideology a white man has developed to suit a proletariat will not work without nuance. Those who refuse to know more about Marxist history than that of the struggles of their ancestors pre-Marxism refuse salvation.
Nevertheless, I want to end on a note of positivity. In writing and sharing this portion of my life so far, I want others to know where I am coming from, and how I arrived at afro-pessimism/optimism. I am anti-whiteness, not anti-white. I am pro-black, not a black “supremacist”. I believe that we can recreate the ecology of personhood and community into a fluid equilibrium through the creation of a New Humanity without genocide, but with the destruction of the old and reclamation of autonomy. And I want to thank all the friends for their material, and non-material, contributions along the way. We have a long way to go, and I most likely still have a lot of pain and suffering to do.
I’ve always hated The Rich, but anarchism and Marxism taught me how to hate The Rich in more respectable ways— I wouldn’t just scoff at images of Midtown Manhattan whites and imagine them falling down into puddles and ruining whatever brand they spent my entire paycheck on. Now, I would imagine them falling, and have words to call them: bourgeosie, intellegentsia, petite bourgeiosie. I’ve always known and considered myself Black, but somehow I learned what Black was again through afro-pessimism.When I had started taking class theory and materialism seriously, I was super good at it. But the moment I saw micro-aggression occurring and the same issues on the streets happening in proportion within these spaces, I started questioning, and that got me in trouble.
I really wish I wasn’t basically traumatized by non-Black Leftists during my time as an In-Real-Life activist. They let me down as I spoke about racism many, many times. And now they’re saying the same things I said a year ago. I’d still feel like I belonged somewhere, today… I made a lot of friends along the way that had already experienced this pain, frustration, and aggravation — an inexplicable disability in explaining how you feel because Emma G. and Johann Most didn’t give you the language for it. I started getting into decolonization and lost most of my Leftist friends, because decolonization was a race issue, and that made whites the antagonists of this narrative. I tried to show them how they didn’t have to be just because they took the back seat.
They refused to listen.
Every time I experience gaslighting from Leftists I see as “comrades”, I relive all the moments I’ve been gaslit in the past — a fury of overwhelming contradictions and unanswered questions. It feels like drowning in a pit of fire, and white radicals on the Left never have to answer to the damage done, because their lives don’t depend on it. I was already a troubled soul with a burdening past; I really had thought I found my people (a new, more caring family), especially when I was in an antifa collective, but they let me down. The disillusionment was… A lot, to say the least.
I experienced this time and time again, and eventually after digging deeper past Ho Chi Minh, I discovered Black Leftists, and later, Maroons. And it opened a whole world for me. But by that time, I was already banned from Facebook for life. And now, here I am. A hermit. If you’re still listening to me I just wanna say thank you for making me feel like I exist, maybe not some place in space, but some place in time.
It feels like I’ve grown from black, to proleteriat, to Black proleteriat, to Black, and now something entirely… New. In the same way, I didn’t know I was a “woman” until I pushed my growth as an anarchist to points where I needed to take breaks, and would read books like Nevada by Imogen Binnie. Now, Thiefing Sugar shows me that there is more to life than “woman”.
It seems my journey is taking me to a new praxis that isn’t activism. It feels like I’m becoming a revolutionary. I’ve just been reading the nitty gritty details of how past revolutionaries *did* things — their strategies AND their tactics, reading military history, military strategy, studying maps… Now I have my own firearm and I’m at the range. But still, I am broke with major experience in both skilled and unskilled labor, and still Black
This journey did take me to Japan and Vietnam though, to J. Sakai and Afro-Pessimism/Optimism. It’s taking me to layers in reality I never could have imagined, because those layers are not deep but hidden, manifesting like long wavelength, low frequencies throughout history.
And so,
what is a Black transwoman, born in the third-world Commonwealth of Dominica, surviving on minimum wage 25 years later in New York, and disillusioned with the righteousness of white Leftists supposed to do next?
What is a suppressed subaltern specimen, the posterchild of Liberation, the image of Marginalization in American society, to do when the hands who staple her to the blood-laden doors of Oppression decide that she is but a tool for revision?
It seems her only choice is autonomy — an autonomy so raw her consent can not be denied of her, nor would it be denied of the Black woman next doors’, or the next, or the next… An autonomy so bent on momentum, no one will have the ability nor the gall to question its validity, not to mention its material and ontological truths. This autonomy, then, would throw the white supremacist and eurocentric “reality” of our time into an unquestionably unique existence that would lead the World to its wrecking, henceforth its reckoning .
My comrades, this is the only true liberation, and it can only be made material through community-building outside of an identity-conservative, reactionary environment. And it must consist first of those who have been disparaged by the joker knocking at oppression’s door with hammer in bloody hand, the joker that is White Leftism.
And to the jokers who I hope have not wasted time reading, I have one final thought to express. This thought rises from the of broiling pit of my desperation, as I beg the reader to show me a better answer to these questions:
What does one do with the relived trauma of generations past?
What am I to do with these experiences of racism and transphobia on the Left, Right, and Center of political discourse?
Do I ignore it and in the process, subject myself and many others to this abuse?
Or do I move on to a new pasture?
The metaphor of the Black unicorn accepts and assumes that we will be chased for whatever we create, and can create, from meadow to meadow. We were made wild without our consent and thus must destroy that which makes us so: white supremacy.
Our goal is to take the running away/surviving process a step or more further. We need to create traps, sabotage the chase… Call it entrapment with other unicorns, for other unicorns.
Being a fan of sci-fi, I imagine our future involves creating AI of our own that will take the helm of our cultural and ontological production into its own hands while seeking guidance from us, the Black unicorns — a self-reproducing revolution in ontology alway at least 3 steps ahead of our oppressors who will always be on the chase for our labor, and for their supremacy… Thus leading them right into our liberation. We won’t end up another Cuba. We ought to be a Black Anarres without the scarcity.
This AI will be our means of production, and we will finally be the creators of our own destinies — not subject to capitalization and an existence of exploitative industry.
Self-determination.
Autonomy.
It’s a cultural hostage situation, a symbiotic trade in which WE are the ones in charge of our ontology. A self-reproducing revolution gaining density and weight with every moment of existence.
Momentum.
Momentuous revolution.
At first thought it may seem strange that the anti-Semite’s outlook should be related to that of the Negrophobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: “Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.” And I found that he was universally right — by which I meant that I was answerable in my body and in my heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro. You come too late, much too late. There will always be a world — a white world — between you and us. . . . The other’s total inability to liquidate the past once and for all. In the face of this affective ankylosis of the white man, it is understandable that I could have made up my mind to utter my Negro cry. Little by little, putting out pseudopodia here and there, I secreted a race. And that race staggered under the burden of a basic element. What
was it? Rhythm! Listen to our singer, Léopold Senghor:
It is the thing that is most perceptible and least material. It is the archetype of the vital element. It is the first condition and the hallmark of Art, as breath is of life: breath, which accelerates or slows, which becomes even or agitated according to the tension in the individual, the degree and the nature of his emotion. This is rhythm in its primordial purity, this is rhythm in the masterpieces of Negro art, especially sculpture. It is composed of a theme — sculptural form — which is set in opposition to a sister theme, as inhalation is to exhalation, and that is repeated. It is not the kind of symmetry that gives rise to monotony; rhythm is alive, it is free. . . . This is how rhythm affects what is least intellectual in us, tyrannically, to make us penetrate to the spirituality of the object; and that character of abandon which is ours is itself rhythmic. Had I read that right? I read it again with redoubled attention. From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?
I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me
on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I. Out of the necessities of my struggle I had chosen the method of regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar weapon; here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the irrational. And now how my voice vibrates! Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass —
Those who never learned to conquer steam or electricity —
Those who never explored the seas or the skies —
But they know the farthest corners of the land of anguish —
Those who never knew any journey save that of abduction —
Those who learned to kneel in docility —
Those who were domesticated and Christianized —
Those who were injected with bastardy. . . .Yes, all those are my brothers — a “bitter brotherhood”
imprisons all of us alike. Having stated the minor thesis, I went
overboard after something else.
. . . But those without whom the earth would not be
the earth
Tumescence all the more fruitful
than
the empty land
still more the land
Storehouse to guard and ripen all
on earth that is most earth
My blackness is no stone, its deafness
hurled against the clamor of the day
My blackness is no drop of lifeless water
on the dead eye of the world
My blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral
It thrusts into the red flesh of the sun
It thrusts into the burning flesh of the sky It hollows through the dense dismay of its own pillar of patience.
Eyah! the tom-tom chatters out the cosmic message. Only the Negro has the capacity to convey it, to decipher its meaning, its import. Astride the world, my strong heels spurring into the flanks of the world, I stare into the shoulders of the world as the celebrant stares at the midpoint between the eyes of the sacrificial victim.— Frantz Fanon
Suggested Readings:
“Losing Your Mother”, Saidiya Hartman
“Red, White, & Black”, Frank B. Wilderson
