from crissy

How About We Say We are African?

After my interview with Gale Jackson, I met up with some of my friends at a party. Incidentially most of the people at the party were Asian. As I was sitting down a guy in a chair next to me tried to start a conversation we.
“Oh hey you’re white too, that makes like four of us.” He joked.
“I’m not white, I’m mestizo.” I replied.
“What” he said, I wasn’t sure if he just didn’t hear me or didn’t understand what mestizo meant.
“I’m not white.” I said. He looked confused, and then suddenly Gale Jackson’s words from our interview earlier that day entered my thoughts. She had told me that it is important to create your own language about who you. I found this was the perfect opportunity to do so. I remembered Gale also pointing out that we are all traced back to Africa, the first humans were from there.
“I’m African. We’re all African.” I told him.
He looked taken aback as if I was some weirdo. But he’s right I was being a weirdo. I was trying to experiment with the language that we identity ourselves with. I was playing around and trying to say something different.
What Gale had said struck a cord in me. I was not going to use the language given to me to describe others and myself. I was not going to compartmentalize myself against people if I was supposed to be enjoying their company. Saying that I was African seemed a little extreme for the circumstance, but necessary. Where else was I going to start?
All night I kept hearing comments about most people at the party being Asian and few people being white. I found myself saying over and over again,
“I’m African, We’re all African.”
At first I was saying it jokingly, but as the night went on I began to see the power that a shift in language can have in yourself and others.
Some people smiled at the prospect, some people laughed thinking it ridiculous, and I began to see it as a wonderful mode of equalization. Without changing my words they began to say other things:
“We are all human.”
“We are all brothers and sisters”
“We are all from the same place.”
“We are all equals.”
“We are all one.”
I was surprised by the ease and felicity saying these words had. It felt like inventing something that could sit warmly in others and kill that which was cold before. I was turning an us/ them dynamic into a We.
I’m not sure if I will continue telling people that I’m African, because I’m not sure that’s what I want to say, but I think that inventing words and new ways to describe who we are is important because it gives us connection to ourselves and each other.

Just think what could happen if we all just went around saying we were African?
What harm could we run into?
Not much I think.
Perhaps, some people would find me- a non-black girl- using the word African offensive to describe herself, but doesn’t this offense spark the right kind of internal discourse that needs to occur. I imagine people asking themselves, “What is this white doing calling herself African?”
“What does she really mean?”
I think that if we can spark discourse through simple subversion of oppressive language we can begin subvert the oppression. I saw this even at the party where some people began to respond with “I guess you’re right.” Or “That’s funny but true.”
As a biracial person. I’m living proof that there is no real separation between racial groups, because I can no more split myself into one group than I can split myself into two physical pieces and hope to live. What’s wrong with knowing that whether my friend or a stranger has had the same or different cultural experience as me but that we share the same human experience.
The words we use now, black, white, Mestizo, Mulatto, Native American, Indian, etc. are all words given to us by our historical oppressors. My hope is that we can invent words that will allow us to transcend the innate oppression found in these words by abandoning them all together or using them in an ironical fashion.
Though this will not allow us to fix the problems we face today with racism and racial inequalities I feel that it can help us understand the absurdity and horror of these problems and a shift in language will help us facilitate the mentality the country needs to create real change.
If nothing else, it would start a thought process and isn’t that where everything starts. A thought or a feeling can turn into a change.