My Black Voice Is Valid
Whether You Like It Or Not
You may not like my reality. You may not like or even love, that white supremacy has infiltrated so much of the way I think. You may hate that white supremacy has forced me to become a warrior instead of a pet, but that’s the way it fucking is.
I didn’t choose to dislike racist white people, racist white people chose to believe that I don’t deserve to exist.
Maybe you aren’t one of them, but maybe you have friends or family who are. Do you fight back against their thoughts? Do you tell them the way they talk to people like me is wrong? No? Then you absolutely, are a part of the fucking problem.
Do you look at the work of a Black woman and think “She’s talking about me?” Instead of “She’s talking about a very real experience she had that altered the way she sees the world”? Because that’s all I’ve wanted to say through my work.
When I was five years old, I had a dream about being a writer one day.
I was lying on the grass, on a hill across the street from a big ass building that said “Publisher,” on the front, and I knew when I woke up, if I was going to be a writer, I’d have to have an interesting life. Because I’d need something to write about you see.
I didn’t realize that wanting an interesting life, meant that I would spend decades having zero autonomy over my body, I didn’t know it would mean being drugged for days on end while I was raped without knowing what was being done to me.
I was a child. All I WANTED to do, was see the world, to see the things that other people said didn’t exist. I wanted to find majick.
I found pain, sorrow, and suffering, at the hands of white men — grown-ass white men — who decided that because I am Black, my voice didn’t matter.
They didn’t care if what they did to me caused trauma and hurt me, they threatened to murder and kill people if I told them, they pretended to be something they weren’t to infiltrate the lives of children and they abused us en masse.
With the full protection of police, doctors, and lawyers who were all involved. Teachers? Nope can’t tell them, they wouldn’t believe me, because it happened too often.
Doctors? No, they knew, they just didn’t care. Now they’re gone so it doesn’t matter if they knew, it doesn’t matter because it happened, it isn’t happening, so I should just get over it right?!
That’s what way too many of you think. That because the trauma is over, because the pain and abuse isn’t happening anymore, I should just get over it.
The problem for me is that I was never allowed to connect to my Black family, to the roots of the ancestors who went through the same shit that I went through as a child.
I was left feeling alone, isolated, and told that my Blackness didn’t really matter to the world.
My ancestors were enslaved to a royal family in Barbados way back when. They were raped, forced to give birth, abused, beaten, and all the things that come with slavery. They weren’t treated kindly just because they were “Owned,” by royals.
I have a different view on Royal families today, largely because of what was done to my family members, and largely because my mother is white. I have a very different view on race.
I know that my mother, God bless her soul is one of the “Wokest” people on the planet. She will move out of her wheelchair to save a life if she has to, and I know this because I’ve seen her do it, repeatedly.
She doesn’t care about your race, creed, nationality, size, orientation, economic status, or anything else. All she cares about is are you a good person? Do you need help? If not, can you help?
That’s my mother, a white woman. So yes, I know that not every white person on the planet cares about what I say or how I say it.
But I ALSO know that I didn’t get a chance to connect to my Blackness as a child because it was literally beaten and raped out of me, against the will of myself and my mother, who had no idea what was happening until I told her.
So now that I am connecting to my ancestors, now that I am learning about them, I am finding that because of my step-father, I wasn’t allowed to see my birth father who was deported before I was born.
Because of the violence of my stepfather, who I refused — at eight years old — to let adopt me — I was denied the right to get to know myself as a Black girl, because I rejected everything, he, was, as a Black man, because of his violence.
I broke the cycle by choosing not to have children with men I didn’t love or who didn’t love me. I broke the cycle by choosing to be by myself, instead of stuck in a relationship where I’m getting yelled at and abused.
I broke the fucking cycle.
I did that.
I broke an Ancestorial curse, by being my God damned fucking self. And there’s nothing you can do about it, and for about 50% of you, that’s what makes you really angry.
Because I know my abusers so well, and because I know they have to drug me to deal with me, because they can’t handle me when I am sober and in control, I am no longer afraid of grown-ass men who abuse children.
Largely because I know these men don’t have the guts to come after a sober, healthy adult who can take care of themselves.
Which makes them pathetic, and makes me a fucking rockstar. I am one of the few Black women who were abused by these men who have come forward in such a public way. My voice matters because out there right now is a little Black, Brown, or Indigenous girl, who is being abused, who needs to know she’s not alone.
My voice matters.
If that angers you, then you should spend more time asking yourself why, instead of telling me in the comments that you’re glad I centered white tears over my own pain. Again.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl
