#radical self-expression

There are systems and structures all around us, and some may seem inviting or even unavoidable. But if you can manage to find or facilitate a community of people — whether local or virtual — who are doing the work of deliberate life design and of defining and creating liberation based on their own definitions of it, then start there.

I know unschooling isn’t feasible or even for everyone, but I also know that it is an option for many people, if they could believe that there is more to life than waiting for Fridays and cursing Mondays. We had that life, and with little money and few examples, we are creating a new normal for our family.

Today, our measure of success ignores GPAs, degrees and the American Dream, and instead puts a focus on confident autonomy, autodidactic learning, strong discernment skills and happy people who are willing to approach their own ideas of liberation and joy from an action-based space.

We think we know black because it is jazz and hip-hop and swing and Broadway and twerk and everything U.S. pop culture stole.  Or it is bachata and blues and merengue or samba or the konpa dirék.  Or the drum.  Or the sensuous undulation of our song, body and sound that made everybody want to be cool, but we were always one, two, three, ten steps ahead.  Because black is unknowable unless you know. And if you don’t know, now you know.

Some of us in the African diaspora are moving away from the word “black,” either because of aspirations towards a post-racial future, or the term’s violent origins in slavery. But Black is the closest thing we have to a tribe.  Our tribe tells the story of our history and struggle, and thus our purpose.  We were stripped of name, relation, tribal identity, and spiritual system, but we were given the power to resist annihilation with our tremendous ability to create. They want us to forget black.  They want us to forget that we, too, are indigenous. They want us to do their bidding. But we know we have a tribe. And a way, many. And like water, we will drip out of the crevices of this system until it is dry.  Black.  Black is like the “X” of Malcolm but even more because.  It is the source, the darkness, the soil, the night, the female, the womb, the stars, the mystery, the place where we come from. It is from this deeply feared and repressed place that we are crafted, and only from here, that we can find our reasons for being.