"walking the back way to campus -at the back of the queue discussing recent happenings in Nairobi with a colleague from Kenya and a flatmate from Cali.
Black car rolls by. a voice breaks. it is loud. it shatters the solace I thought i found here. It was almost too loud to discern but my spirit has been around long enough to know when its name is called: “NIGGER”. the voice was colorless. An “oh shit” left my body. I looked past the gap-the space between us and the 7 unassuming white Americans that hadn’t let themselves hear anything.
I grabbed my phone hoping words could reconcile, could recoil my comfort.
Walking in the present-feeling like the future- the past fell
black and heavy- an anvil. I’m the only one left looney.
It is possible to feel this disoriented even when stars (& stripes) aren’t spinning."
Reality is...
"sitting tipsy - Ghana on your left, Sudan on your right - body a crushed border of understanding. Pain accented in the Queen's English. These girl's know pain better than they know themselves. They will tell you stories. You will feel them in your past. As Ghana quotes Maya Angelou, you will notice that here the cage is just prettier, that black birds always carry the sweetest sorrow, that warm lips and loud laughter always seem to fit better into someone else's joke. You will cry to make room for acceptance. That this university, and all the others like it, are battlegrounds. We learn from the trenches, we must plot our survival, we must be there for each other. Diaspora is more than a people once spread. Unity is more than a nice idea -it is a necessary tactic. "
In Summation...
Paradise ain't nothin' but the reality you make the most out of. This week I was forced to dead my "post-racism" fantasies about London/SOAS and my experience will be richer for it. I was outside a party, as white girls danced in appropriative orgies of Bhindi's & Afro-Beat, literally in tears as I listened to two African British first years talk about the racism they've had to deal with in their flat. We moved in less than 2 weeks ago and it's the playful kind of racism that likes to hide itself in liberal arts institutions or in this case "racial banter" completely disassociated from the painful history of colored people existing in the society of their colonizers. I was also called "Nigger" by a colorless voice in a speeding car on the walk to school a couple days ago.
It's crazy how present the past can be.
I'm still processing everything.
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