6
Revolutionary Black Grace
Definition and Action to Be Taken
For Black people globally—in the West, throughout the diaspora, and in Africa—to unlearn the language of whiteness that teaches American blackness as criminal and African blackness as wretched. It is unlearning this single-story exported narrative that dehumanizes and weaponizes global Black people in opposition to one another, sustaining a segregated Blackness that serves whiteness and sustains anti-Blackness. It’s about unlearning our identity as part of an emotional economy and replacing it with the Emotional Justice love language of revolutionary Black grace applied to all Black people so that we may love one another more justly and engage our fullest humanity.
Global Black people don’t have ordinary trauma. So we can’t have ordinary grace. We require a grace that is specific to and for us, and that recognizes our lived experience of centuries-deep injustice and harm, of movement building and resistance. We need the kind of grace that recognizes our work of revolution. It is because of those three things—lived experience, centuries of harm, and resistance via movement building—that this Emotional Justice love language for global Black people is a grace that is Black and revolutionary.
Breakdown
Revolutionary Black grace is about building emotional connections among global Black people to one another’s Black-ness—in America, across the diaspora, and in Africa. We global Black people have created ways to survive the unsurvivable, so we can—indeed we must—make a way to invest in healing among one another. It starts by identifying how global Black people speak the language of whiteness.
Global Black people were nurtured via narratives of whiteness that made American Blackness immoral and wicked, and African Blackness pitiful and inferior. That nurturing created a repulsion toward one another. It made our identity an emotional economy of internalized self-hate that stifles our healing, and only feeds a narrative of Blackness as inferior.
Revolutionary Black grace invites us to engage one another centering a love we may not yet have, a belonging we may not yet feel, and a brotherhood, a sisterhood beyond ideas and ideology. It requires that we reimagine our Blackness in our own image—a panorama of browns due to a journey and a history that forever changed us. That means approaching one another as global Black people with more care, tenderness, and compassion.
This is about Black intimacies, Black humanity, and navigating turbulent terrain of history, rupture, trauma, betrayal, and new beginnings. It is about replacing an emotional economy that was about division and separation that served whiteness, and developing, strengthening, and sustaining a Blackness that honors the totality, geography, and specificity of our historical journeys from Africa to America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Brazil to survive brutal systems.
Revolutionary Black grace is a love language for and toward global Black people about melanin wrapped in unfamiliar tenderness.
Global Black People and the Language of Whiteness
Global Black people speak the language of whiteness via a narrative that taught us what our Blackness meant and how it came to be, and therefore shaped how we saw ourselves, one another, and, especially important, how we didn’t want to be seen.
This narrative reduced kingdoms and culture to savage nothingness, fit only to be molded by melanin-free hands and then kept in service to melanin-free worlds. The narrative taught a notion of Africa, the cradle of the universe and the origin of humanity, renaming it the “Dark Continent,” as a place with a savage, brooding, predatory people who were tree swingers, people eaters, and hut dwellers, a continent permanently on its knees, arms outstretched, with distended bellies, poverty stricken, war torn, begging to be saved again and again by the West—read white people.
That was the single story of Africa. It was a teaching that shaped a relationship to and an understanding of Africa that fed shame, poverty porn, and an urgent desire to have no part of this land or the people who came from it.
That single story traveled, even if global Black people didn’t. It landed in playgrounds, classrooms, workplaces, kitchens, and hallways all over the world, taking shape in souls and minds, and manifesting in hands pointing at African folk, pitying them, or laughing, disparaging, teasing, hurting again and again.
This single story was not a one-way ticket. Parallel narratives of African Americans as thugs and gangstas, irresponsible, criminal, and lazy were fed to those in Africa, and to the world. Those narratives had passports, even though we didn’t. They traveled and settled into bellies and bodies that shaped how Africans saw Black folk in America and, equally important, how Africans didn’t want to be seen.
These narratives about an African Blackness and an American Blackness create a Blackness that centers whiteness. It is one that nurtures a segregated Blackness. It is anti-Blackness. It is an emotional economy of division and separation fed by feelings about Blackness that reimagine your roots as rubbish to be discarded, not claimed. This is how the emotional economy worked—our value appreciated the more we despised one another’s Blackness.
The language of whiteness despises pan-Africanism, because it is a philosophy that connects, celebrates, and honors our Blackness. And this language does not nurture connection among global Black people; it is hungry for a separated Blackness. Pan-Africanism ends isolation and fosters connection. Connection builds global community. Global community strengthens fiscal economies, elevates an opportunity to practice revolutionary Black grace—and kills the emotional economy. However, from the perspective of Emotional Justice, the philosophy of pan-Africanism does not mean that the emotional connection to Blackness shaped by whiteness is healed—that requires emotional work. That is emotional labor global Black people need to do.
Global Black folks across the diaspora are fluent in racist bullshit; it is our Black mother tongue. We have been raised in a language of systems, of stories about who we are and how we came to be. That narrative is spoken by industries—the worlds of politics, education, media, beauty, art, and entertainment—and it has consequences. It teaches us to speak internal languages of doubt, insecurity, and absence of value, that Blackness is about deficit and whiteness about world building and people saving. That is the language of reimagining history to serve injustice, entrench inequity, and feed white supremacy. This is the politics of whiteness; millions of global Black folk get this. That they get this politically doesn’t always mean they get it emotionally, and it is in the emotional that harm is perpetuated and that revolutionary Black grace—approaching one another with empathy—matters.
You’re the Problem! No, You Are!
We as global Black people practice anti-Blackness through our notions about and our name-calling of one another.
Africa had dual narratives of the guaranteed prosperity on America’s streets and the problem of the Black American on those same streets. Because of this, African Americans were to be avoided at all costs. And that narrative manifested in the bodies of Africans who would swerve, dip, and dive to avoid African Americans—and tell them so, literally tell African Americans that their success as Africans could not be guaranteed if they as Africans were, or stayed, around them.
A part of the narrative was blaming Black Americans for what was judged as their failure to adequately flourish in this America of prosperity and opportunity. Too many Africans would mischaracterize institutional racism as individual failings. It’s a dangerous lie, a particularly jarring and incendiary narrative. It triggers deep historical wounds, and it performs the particular work of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It is the emotional economy at work, weaponizing narrative to divide Blackness, blame Blackness, all while centering whiteness and preserving an accountability-free whiteness.
America’s narratives about Africa manifest in how Black folk in America hurt, tease, disregard, and disrespect Africans who ended up in America. The shade of their skin would be disparaged, their accents laughed at; hurtful names would be hurled in playgrounds and homerooms.
What Did You Call Me?
Weaponized narratives show up in language, name-calling, and descriptions designed to wound and draw blood. Kenyan-born filmmaker Peres Owino’s documentary Bound: Africans vs African-Americans, about two brothers separated by history and fighting to find their way back to each other, features contributors who demonstrate that. In the documentary’s town hall, global Black people share what they heard, what was said, and what they were told about one another.
Here’s what some African American contributors shared:
“I’ve heard about a word that some West Africans use in reference to African Americans. It’s akata—I looked it up, it’s a Yoruba word, it means ‘wild animal.’”
“I was having a conversation with an African man who asked me: Why do African American women wear headwraps, when we’re not African?”
“Some of the Africans in Sierra Leone were calling me ‘pumage’—do you know what pumage means? ‘White boy.’”
Here’s what some African contributors shared:
“You can actually see African Americans—when they were on African soil—treat Africans in a way that they feel themselves as separate, and they’re accepting the stereotypes of white people—the way they look at Africans.”
“I had an African American friend who called me ‘spear-chucker.’”
“I came to this country [the USA] from Cote d’Ivoire, Ivory Coast. I was ten years old. And I was dropped in Harlem in the early ’90s. Next thing I know I’m being bullied for being African. I don’t even know where they got ‘African booty scratcher’ from.”
“Before coming to America, I was told stay away from African Americans—they’re so violent, they’re so dangerous. So I had that notion that I shouldn’t be involved with them, because I’d end up in trouble and be shipped back to Africa.”
“African Americans don’t take advantage of the opportunity here. They’re lazy; they’re not serious.”
I have lived and worked in New York and Ghana. I have heard versions of these sorts of comments from both Ghanaians and from African Americans. These are colliding traumas from historical wounds of oppressive systems. This is the emotional economy at work, sowing division, sustaining separation. The single aim is to ensure that we wouldn’t look at and into one another and recognize family. Instead we would see someone we loathe, someone we would never want to be—someone who isn’t like us, doesn’t understand us, and isn’t part of us. In all of these ways, global Black people speak the language of whiteness.
Let’s Define and Find Power in Our Global Blackness
Being Black in America, being Black from Africa in America, being Black in Britain or a nation in Europe, being Black in Africa—each is a distinct experience. The language of whiteness has shaped our particular Blackness in each of the places where we are born, raised, and schooled, where we love and work. Just because the language of whiteness has a hand in this shaping should not mean that we don’t work to heal what it tried to break, and build what it tried to destroy—in other words, we need to work to reestablish our severed connection to one another, but on our own terms, centering our own lens.
To be born and raised in America is to carry a Blackness shaped by the journey of enslavement. The loss of land, freedom, culture, language, and heritage created a Blackness of beginnings, severed lineage, and a remaking in order to survive. “Loss remakes you. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity,” writes Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. That remaking holds a deep legacy of untreated trauma, but it also carries power and purpose. It means creating culture; remaking yourself; finding beauty in your bones, your Blackness; and actively, collectively resisting a narrative that named you nothing.
To be born and raised in Britain is to carry a Blackness shaped by colonialism. Britain was then the Motherland. This Blackness was about diminishing rituals and histories. Your language remained; your sense of self was changed. To be thought of and seen as British was an aspiration—the aspiration. It meant that your Blackness was reduced, that you centered whiteness in order to achieve, to become successful. This racism came with perfect manners from a violence wrapped in cut-glass accents, starched white shirts, crisp collars, and tea in china cups. There was also enslavement by the British. And there was the way Blackness made Britishness something uniquely theirs, with resistance movements that demanded a humanity from a whiteness that dehumanized. Blackness shaped Britain, creating culture through food, resistance, and music that told the story of this journey from grime to traditions that would seep into and remain part of Britain’s cultural landscape.
To be born and raised in Ghana is to carry a Blackness shaped both by the power of African ancestry, culture, ritual, and belonging, and by the pain of colonialism and the wound from severed families due to enslavement. Colonialism was about British whiteness as superior and African darkness as inferior. Your ancestral traditions and rituals, your religion—all carried such depth and power, but were ridiculed and rubbished, replaced by a Christianity with a brown-haired, white-skinned savior who schoolchildren were taught to bow down to, to pray to, to worship. Whiteness was worship. Colonialism created a particular inferiority, whose legacy lingers and manifests in economies that privilege what is not home-grown or homemade but is instead manufactured on other soils; and the mere fact of its being imported—and therefore not African—rendered it superior. Enslavement robbed families of loved ones, creating a forever-changed nation, and lingering wounds that are too often overlooked.
It is crucial for global Black people to know and honor that there are two wounds from enslavement that require healing: that of the kidnapped person and what they endure, and that of the family and nation forever scarred by this loss. That’s how the trauma shaped Blackness in Ghana. And it is a trauma unspoken when it comes to repair—and specifically the work of reparations. Enslavement scarred Africa as well as the nations to which all those enslaved would be taken. Both wounds matter. So a reparative approach honors the particular journey in America, Britain, and the Caribbean, but frames that repair in connection with and relationship to Africa. That too is a practice of revolutionary Black grace and an unlearning of whiteness.
In America, Britain, and Ghana, Black folk had to survive the common language of violence and brutality. In all three places, there was loss. Loss is a common language among us as global Black people. But it has different dialects.
Loss, Trauma, and Comparisons
Loss is an intimate part of global Blackness. Britain was an empire. America became a superpower. Africa had kingdoms. All global Black people lost something through systems of oppression where the language of whiteness ruled under brutal lash, stolen native tongues, and charred skin.
Unfortunately, the issue is that global Black people compare and judge our losses. We tell one another that our loss is way worse than yours. We reach into the wounds of historical untreated trauma, wrap our pain around our mother tongue, fashion an insult, and target it at a man or a woman or child who looks just like us, or a shade of us. We are prosecutors, presenting damning evidence of deficit, intending to diminish and destroy. Devastatingly, we succeed.
Africans tell African Americans, “What do you know of our trauma? You’re not African. You’re American. Why must you always say racism, racism, racism?” African Americans tell Africans in the US, “You’re here! In America! You’re Black! Speak English. This ain’t Africa! You’re taking our jobs; you think you’re better than us.” And back and forth, and back and forth we go. We wound, retreat, and reemerge with fresh insults and unfresh trauma. Such is a lingering legacy of combined anti-Blackness and the language of whiteness.
This is a weaponizing of emotions—feelings of belonging, betrayal, and broken brotherhood—wielded like deadly samurai swords. This weaponizing entrenches historical separation and cultural segregation. What does that look like? Award-winning filmmaker dream hampton’s documentary Let’s Get Free: The Black August Hip Hop Project shows us.
The film is in tribute to incarcerated political prisoners. It focuses on social justice and Black liberation, and features African American hip hop artists performing in New York, Cuba, and South Africa. On their South African leg, the artists attended the 2001 World Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa. There was an exchange between African Americans and Black South Africans that reveals this legacy of losses and comparisons.
The hip hop artists sit on a panel behind a desk with mics looking out over an audience that includes young Black South Africans, and international media. The artists share messages of oppression, trauma, and loss stemming from being Black in America. Sections of the Black South African audience, arms folded, faces set, stare at them as they speak.
An African American woman, wearing a bright-yellow windbreaker, mic gripped, addresses the audience: “Coming to Africa, we are African Americans—and we don’t know the African experience. Apartheid in South Africa—it is 90 percent Black; it’s not comparable to the many abuses that we experience in the United States, which is still a majority white country.”
Some of the young Black South Africans roll their eyes. They are becoming agitated. The exchange continues.
Another hip hop artist in shades and a black beanie says, “Us as kidnapped Africans in America, we fully understand our role in Africans’ liberation worldwide.”
After several more statements about oppression and racism in America from the panel and the international media, the Black South Africans grow even more agitated. The mic is finally passed to a Black South African high school student. Hand raised, with pushed-back natural hair and a white T-shirt with a map of South Africa around her neck, she starts to speak. She is angry. She stares directly at each of the artists, and sweeps her arm to indicate that her comments are to all the hip hop artists on the panel: “For next time—or any other time—you come, we’re here! And we deserve to be heard! The past injustices that happened to us are still happening to us and are still going on! It may seem that under the banner of this conference everything is fine! Everything is not so well! I am a student—I still suffer to go to school. My parents still need to struggle! How far can you empathize with us? never. Because what we feel, you don’t feel.”
She hands the mic over, turns her back, turns back around, and crosses her arms facing the artists, face stony. Spotty applause breaks out; it comes from other Black South Africans.
Uneasiness, hurt, anger, and contempt move between the South Africans in the audience toward the African Americans on the panel. The air changes. Violence hovers. Stares are lengthening between panelists and audience members. Murmuring in South African languages grows, choking, accusing. The artists shift in their bodies; they exchange glances, the kind that say, “Shit’s about to go down.”
One of the hip hop artists responds, gesturing constantly with his hands, his voice emotional, passionate: “Listen! I understand what you’re sayin’ ’bout tryna empathize or whateva! But at least you guys still had your language! we don’t even know who we are! Imagine if you didn’t even know who you are? Imagine! you know who you are—who’s your mother, who’s your grandfather, who’s your grandmother! So you have some sense of who you are! We don’t even know who we are!”
In this exchange, shared trauma becomes a litigated history of loss versus loss, of mine is worse than yours, of what do you know about what it is to be my kind of Black. In this case, this emotional litigation is between South Africans and African Americans.
In the documentary, the exchange doesn’t end in a peaceful coming together. There is a drifting apart between the two groups, but the unease, the hurt words, the resentment remain.
This chasm that divides us as global Black people is a supremacy of Black traumas and unheard hurt. Prosecuting loss buries already buried trauma even deeper into global Black bodies—it becomes a coffin that buries us all.
This pain becomes accusation and moves from the personal to the political, from the individual to the institutional. It then travels into our movements that philosophize about a pan-Africanism but don’t recognize how untreated traumas feed an emotional relationship to our Blackness, not an ideological or philosophical one. What that means is that the division, the misunderstanding, the hurt, the anger, the resentment emerge to influence how we work, lead, and build with one another. It becomes a back-and-forth about who belongs where and who doesn’t, what is owed and to whom, and on and on and on. What it does, fundamentally, is divide, and entrench division. It causes us to implode; it causes our movements to implode.
Scars from the Language of Whiteness
These scars are not only between Black folk in America and Africa. A segregated Blackness narrative dominates across parts of Africa too. During my first trip to South Africa, I remember the open hostility, dismissal, and judgment from Black South Africans toward me. I was judged as an African who wasn’t specifically South African. This too has a term, amankwerekwere, meaning “people from Africa.” Sounds strange, right? Especially since I was from Africa, just as they were. The language of whiteness flourished in South Africa too, creating an Africa that was wretched, corrupt, and criminal, and specifically separating South Africa from this “other Africa.” That is why unlearning the language of whiteness is for all of us—global Black folks too. South African writer Sisonke Msimang writes about this in her visionary memoir Always Another Country.
From Southern Africa to West Africa. In Senegal, a friend shares a story of an incident in Dakar, where a man told her that her Blackness is not his. They have a name for those like her: nnack—when you hear it said, it sounds like someone hawking up phlegm from their throat, ready to spit—it feels as it sounds.
Pause. Breathe. Close your eyes. It is here we so need revolutionary Black grace. What cannot win in our fight for full liberation is a divided, segregated Blackness. We are global Black family. We cannot heal with one another like this. We simply cannot.
Between Us . . . Black Women and Men
It is between us as Black women and men that these scars show up as generational inheritance. They are wounds soaked in blood, bone, burden, and brutality. Revolutionary Black grace between us is tender territory that must be carefully navigated. For Black women, there is—and has been—an emotional labor engaged in for Black men that is historical, transformative, and traumatic. That labor is how we love one another; it is how we hurt one another—it cannot be how we heal one another. Emotional Justice requires emotional labor—from all of us. Our freedom movements were the result of the efforts of women and men; that is our history. The erasure train has traveled from Africa to America across continents, cities, and communities, removing Black women from seats at tables of resistance, disappearing our stories, reducing our sacrifice, and diminishing our struggle. Erasure is the language of trauma; it feeds the emotional economy. It does nothing for our healing. Doing this emotional labor is not a question about whether or not we love one another as Black people; it is about how we love one another, and how that love must reimagine emotional labor as part of our collective healing process.
We did not get free alone, we do not survive alone, we cannot heal alone—we thrive together. That togetherness requires a revolutionary Black grace in which emotional labor is recognized, respected, and equally divided. There can be no Emotional Justice among us as global Black people without the equal division of emotional labor.
Honoring Our Journey, Finding Our Connection
We can recognize distinct Black experience without creating Black supremacies. We can honor the specificity and the distinction of a Blackness shaped by America, shaped by Africa and the Caribbean, and shaped by Europe—and how that Blackness shows up in Britain, in France, and in Africa. Each matters. We must recognize how historical oppressive systems had an expansive hand in reimagining our Blackness.
In other words, we can honor our unique and specific Blackness, but frame it in connection with a global Blackness. That globality goes back to Africa, a continent of beginnings and of remakings, but also one of an enduring land, with myriad stories. Our road to healing as global Black people honors, revels in, and acknowledges—it doesn’t diminish. That is how global Black people unlearn the language of whiteness, develop emotional connections to one another, and replace the emotional economy with revolutionary Black grace.
Global Black people fought for our freedom across Africa, in America, across Europe. We inspired one another. The independence movement of Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s parallels the rise of the civil rights movement in America. In the UK, there were freedom and resistance movements rising up to fight oppression. Courage was all of ours. Leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-Independence Black president, and the Ghanaian women who funded the independence movement; Winnie Mandela of South Africa; Malcolm X; and Martin Luther King Jr. were all moved and shaped by a global Blackness. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Nkrumah’s inauguration and spoke of the connection between Blackness in America and what was happening in Ghana, as did Fannie Lou Hamer when she went to Senegal. All of it speaks to the freedoms we fought for and the systems we navigated to survive.
Because of these journeys, revolutionary Black grace honors a Blackness that, yes, has been commodified, criminalized, demonized, deified, desired—but one we must make our own without diminishing one another. This is careful, challenging work. It is a path that covers millions of miles. And it is a practice of healing that evicts a centering of whiteness.
Our Blackness is interconnected, evolving and changing, while the language of whiteness stays the same and has the same objective. This language always seeks to bury your youness and create a striving to be more somebody else. In being somebody else, you step away from an interconnected Blackness. No healing, no grace, no freedom comes from that.
Black Privilege Is Not the Answer
The contemporary story of Blackness centers America. That centering has consequences. It leads to a privileging of your Blackness, not connecting it to that of other Black folk in other parts of the world. There is a parallel narrative in places such as the UK, the “You have it better than the Blacks in the USA” narrative. This is a nurtured story, a fiction designed to hold up your Britishness with an exhale of “Thank God we’re not them.” It’s a deadly lie.
We cannot get to healing by walking a path of privilege. We cannot replace white privilege with African privilege or African American privilege and expect to clearly hear one another as Africans and Black peoples of African descent around the world. Refusing to adopt privilege doesn’t mean that our healing journeys don’t include colliding traumas and conflict. They do. They will. There is centuries’ worth of untreated trauma to unpack and heal. But we can’t do that as we have been.
Revolutionary Black grace makes space to shape the conversation, honor the foundation, recognize the tradition, and reimagine our union. That starts by rebuking as lies these narratives of deficit and notions of supremacy—white and Black.
The Emotional, Not the Political
This work is about our emotional connection to our Blackness and to the Blackness of one another. An emotional connection to Blackness is not the same as a political one. Blackness is absolutely personal and political—that is a centuries-long marriage. That’s not what I mean.
You can be philosophically pan-African, but your emotional connection to Blackness is not necessarily about those politics—a politics of possibility and connectivity that unifies Black people from around the world and centers global Blackness. That is a neat, clear philosophy. But your emotionality is not neat; it is messy—how can it not be, given the history and its legacy of untreated trauma? Your emotional connection may have been nurtured by deficiency; by how you’ve been loved; by how you’ve not been loved; by how you’ve been hurt; by how you’ve been treated, rejected, and discriminated against and how you have witnessed that toward family—that, too, is a generational inheritance. All these things shape your sense of self. So you may politically understand, but emotionally respond. That is emotionality masquerading as ideology. And it can fuck shit up. It does. And it has.
We see this in movements whose political ideology aligns, but that still implode. The reparations movement in the US highlights this phenomenon. There are multiple intersecting issues that we mischaracterize as political, when they are in fact about the emotional. One of those issues is an ongoing fight to disconnect an American blackness from a global Blackness. That hurts the healing of us as a global Black people. Those advocating that disconnect use tactics of attack, lambasting, and vicious critique—all weapons of whiteness and, increasingly, wokeness—but also adopted within global Blackness, designed to entrench division. If our aim is to repair what has been broken, lost, and stolen, but our approach is to separate one Blackness from another, then we are engaging the weapons of whiteness while claiming that this is healing. That shit doesn’t work. Not for healing.
There is a trauma among us that goes beyond language. There are connections among us that break down beyond legacy. What also lies between us as global Black people—across North America, in Europe, and in Africa—is a range of emotions: betrayal, resentment, a yearning, an anger, a sadness, a mourning, a magic, a beauty, a belonging, a desire for belonging, the pain of rupture. There is all of this between all of us.
History stripped millions of an identity, but not of a cultural memory. The DNA of the drum creates a global Black drum-line, and in it we can find one another, and honor one another’s journey. That is revolutionary Black grace.
The badassness of Blackness is universally understood, from culture, to art, to fashion, to food, to emulated beauty. We are swagger and flava, and all the things. What still connects us is Africa. Our first home. That doesn’t mean we as global Black people all feel connected to Africa. We may not. We do not.
Our Blackness may be connected to our roots in the Southern states or to the history of Chicago or Detroit. It may flex its cultural muscles to soundtracks of London or Nottingham or Birmingham. All of these are part of our Blackness; all must be acknowledged. So this is not about the denial of the geographical spaces and places that shaped you, that you call home.
Home sits uneasy on tongues trained by the West’s particular love language of violence toward Black bodies. America is a superpower—one that understands itself in superlatives: first this, biggest that, big, bigger, biggest, biggerlicious. To be Black in America is to be the descendant of those who built it, and to be simultaneously rejected by it. This does not mean that Black folks in America are not American, or that America is not their home. Absolutely not. They are, and it is. It simply means there is an uneasiness in this relationship to this history within this nation. Poet Hafiyah Geter reminds us that this is “a nation that doesn’t love someone who looks like me.” America’s better self is rooted in Blackness, resistance, movement building, and a refusal to capitulate to the whiteness narrative of beasts and burdens.
Britain was an empire. It’s relationship of superiority wreaked havoc with Black and Brown people. That superiority was a delusion. It manifests in two ways: a constant erasure of Britain’s violence in her former colonies, and a romanticizing of that time as one of a manufactured greatness. This doesn’t mean that Black folks in Britain don’t love where they live, haven’t built homes and family and community. They absolutely do and have. So much of Europe’s wealth and Britain’s power is rooted in Blackness from the Caribbean and Africa.
Finding home within one another means staying when it gets hard and when your soul connects to conflict, not comfort. But making a home takes time and action. It means engaging in an ongoing practice of empathy toward those who look like you—even when they don’t feel you, and you don’t feel them. Revolutionary Black grace means finding homes in and with one another by going on journeys of decentering whiteness and of honoring the full expanse of our Blackness across regions, countries, and continents. Doing that is a practice, not just a philosophy.
An Exchange with Tulaine Montgomery and Nguhi Mwaura
I am talking here with Tulaine Montgomery, an African American and co-CEO of New Profit; and Nguhi Mwaura, a Kenyan and host of Rethinking Possible, a global podcast focusing on innovators finding solutions to big issues. Both have traveled between the US and Africa.
Tulaine Montgomery is TM. Nguhi Mwaura is NM. Esther Armah is EA.
EA: The language of whiteness segregates Blackness; we then perpetuate it with a my-kind-of-Black approach and attitude. What does that phrase “your kind of Black” mean to you? How does that manifest in the way you move?
TM: I struggle with that even as a notion. I was raised as a child of the diaspora. My father is an ethnomusicologist, a master drummer, named by the ancient tradition of a village in Ghana many years ago when he was a young man. He came up spending many years of his life in Mali, Cuba, and many other places understanding the power of percussion, culture, economy, and identity. That’s who raised me. Because of that, there’s a way that I never really settled well with the notion of “division.” In some ways I had an almost naïve view of how easy it should be for Black-race-identified people to get along, to see each other, to lift each other up.
NM: I grew up on the African continent. I have only known myself to be part of the majority, and so Blackness was not an identity I took on until I was navigating situations where people were majority white. Black was for African Americans; it wasn’t for Africans, because everyone is Black. I’ve only reckoned with my Blackness as an adult, and it has meant different things at different stages. It’s been an ever-evolving journey, and there’s still a lot I need to grow and integrate.
EA: Can you talk a bit more about learning that Blackness was for African Americans, and so in some ways there was an element of Blackness that did not include you?
NM: Growing up, my parents were the second generation born after Independence. They were born right at Independence, so they’ve never known a British overlord per se, but they have known people who aspired to Britishness—and essentially, it’s whiteness. And that’s the pathway that was carved for success. You needed access to white spaces; you needed to be able to speak English in a certain way. You needed to go to school with other white kids, and that was your way to success. When the choice was learning Latin or learning ki-swahili at school, we’d go with learning Latin, because that’s going to take you further than speaking ki-swahili. And so it was only in high school I started to ask: Why is that? There had always been in my upbringing a kind of inferiority that had been embedded around Africanness, and African things were seen as backward. My access into Blackness has a lot of times been through African American thought leaders, media. I see it like an opaque curtain that we look at each other through, and that curtain is often whiteness. And so African Americans are receiving messages about what Africa is, what it represents, and how backward and full of war. And we were receiving messages about who African Americans were through their media. And so African Americans are in the ghetto, they’re in jail, and they don’t work hard. And we cannot see each other clearly through this curtain.
EA: You’re Kenyan, Nguhi, and I remember Kenya was the model for racial healing that Archbishop Desmond Tutu invoked when I went to South Africa to learn about their racial healing model of Truth and Reconciliation. It’s interesting because listening to you is a reminder that being on the African continent doesn’t mean you escape the language of whiteness. The colonization took its toll and shaped our Africanness in ways that harm our humanity and shape our nations with a legacy that’s still here today. Let’s talk about expanding our idea of Blackness incorporating all the journeys we have taken as a people. We are taught about each other without knowing each other. I was born in London. I knew about America, having never stepped foot in America. Some of what I learned was on TV, sitcoms about Black family life. Some of what I knew had nothing to do with Black people and how Black people were actually living. So, in that sense, this is the language of whiteness at work—this narrative of how the world is, and who you are in that world. Talk about how the lens of whiteness has shaped Blackness.
TM: For many years, I paid a lot of gratitude to my family and a lot of pride in that upbringing I described earlier—the fact that my father would come home from Mali and show me videos of Malian women, and he would say “Tulaine, look at her feet—those look like your feet.” Something as simple as that embedded something in me. And so I was really proud for a long time about the fact that I knew stories told to me as an American about the continent of Africa were lies. I came in knowing I expect you to lie to me. To some degree, the more elite the institution feeding me the information, the more acute I anticipate the lie to be. What I’ve come to understand recently is that the resistance I was raised in was a response, and a reaction to whiteness. And so, for me, a stage for growth and healing is: How can I actually experience my life and make choices that are not a reaction or a fight against whiteness? And that honestly feels like a whole new terrain, because I’ve come up so steeped in the rejection of and resistance to the lies white supremacy would tell me about Black people.
NM: That is so powerful! If all that brings us together is resistance and resistance to white supremacy, then what do we have? I follow on Instagram Dr. Yaba Blay—she has all these memes, and what she does is find ways to tie Blackness across different contexts, so it’s not just one type—it will include African Americans, Africans, and whenever there’s a glimpse of things we share across cultures, things that have persisted—it gives me so much joy. It helps me know that we are tied together by more than what whiteness has told the other, and those are the moments that I live for, those are the moments that affirm that it isn’t just about resistance—even though so much of the identity of taking it on has been about resistance. When there are those moments—like Tulaine you were saying with the feet—there’s things that connect us to the mitochondrial DNA of that first ancestor—those are the moments that give me the most joy in Blackness.
EA: Part of what a revolutionary Black grace is doing and saying is we can build the Blackness that we want and we say what it is, and having said that, we can then engage and exchange from that place—thoughts?
TM: We global Black people have to get more bold at discerning when we’re being lied to about one another. We’re so willing to believe all that we’ve been told—all the failings, the shortcomings, the inconsistencies, and we’re so unwilling to see, never mind lift up, the genius, the resilience, the creativity, the joy—it’s so hard. One of the hardest moments I had when I was in Boston around these issues was with a friend, Haitian American, who loved all things French, and yet had a whole set of stories about Black Americans—excluding me, saw me as “an exception”—who she interacted with. I said to my friend, “Why is it that I can see and have love and reverence to not only the legacy of Toussaint but the genius that is happening right now in Haiti, and the stuff about failed economy isn’t my primary story about Haiti, but you’re here, in the United States, and unwilling to see that there is brilliance and beauty here?”
NM: The wound and the loss that I feel, particularly as an African, is that of just being ignored. Africa is never seen as a place that has a future, that has anything interesting going on, and the narratives are so simplified. We’re not allowed our full humanity. And I do believe that has an impact on global Black people, because where you tie back to—and if you believe those things about that place—then inevitably you believe those things about you.
EA: What do we have to unlearn about ourselves, each other, and how we engage as global Black people? Revolutionary Black grace is not about an ideal of love. It’s about a practice that is unfamiliar; it is starting with “I am going to unlearn the instinct to decide who you are, before I know who you are.”
NM: It’s something I think about almost daily because I find myself often betraying my ideals for capitalism, because I need to make a living. Those are the moments in which I find myself seeing how white supremacy is at work, and then figuring out how I make it work for myself. But what that leaves on the table is: What am I allowing to continue by being part of these systems? And it’s something that I think about every day because none of us is bigger than the entire system. It begins in actually seeing that white supremacy. For me that starts with my childhood. And I don’t think my parents were trying to induct me into white supremacy—but that’s what they did. They were the facilitators of telling me, this is what success looks like, and success very often looks white, and this is what we aspire to for you. And so having to unlearn that—the idea of Africa not being global—it’s insane. I read this book and for the first time I saw myself, and my identity as an African—and I was eighteen! And I went and studied African Studies in the US, and the absurdity of that—because that’s what I was primed for, that you go to the West because that’s “global”—that’s what counts. I didn’t end up going, and I stayed in Africa, and I’m so grateful because that’s where my unlearning began.
EA: Let’s talk betrayal and belonging—where have you felt it, where have you done it, and why?
NM: In my complicity of betraying African Americans in the white spaces I occupied. There was so much tolerance for me because I was African, not African American, especially from white people. There was almost this festishization, but also this infantilization of me. It wasn’t quite the same with African Americans. With them there was this fear and animosity. So I found myself trying to navigate those spaces with a lot more freedom to say truths. I also thought: How am I playing into their narrative of who they think I am as an African, and the truths I will not say because I am not African American, and because I don’t have that same experience? My ancestors were not enslaved people—what are they willing to hear from me, that they are not willing to hear from an African American? I need to decide what I’m here to do. I’m in this space—the philanthropy space—for this amount of time; what am I no longer willing to betray? I cannot continue to play into this narrative the way that it has been playing out.
EA: What does revolutionary Black grace mean to you and for global Black people? Let’s close with that. For me it means we don’t all have the same relationship to our Blackness, and we don’t all have to, to find ways to move together.
NM: Revolutionary black grace comes in moving beyond the magical. We are still here, and we are here to be known, and to know each other in our fullness and in our flawedness. Beyond grace is the idea of: Can I see you, can I understand you? Am I interested in your experience, and in being as reciprocal as we can be? Can we find the moments where we resonate more than the moments where we diverge?
The Emotional Justice Template
Work through your feelings: Hurt, anger, feeling unheard, joy, power, finding community
Reimagine your focus: Where have you seen the language of whiteness spoken by global Black people? How have you, or those within your environment, engaged that language?
Build the future: Center compassion, empathy, and an approach that says, “Let me not decide who you are before I know who you are” toward all Black people as a practice that begins to honor the totality of Blackness and ends a segregated Blackness.
Discussion Points
Nguhi highlights the work of Dr. Yaba Blay, who uses her Instagram to show all the ways global Black people are connected—check out her IG@professionalblackgirl and choose two posts that demonstrate this. Share with your circle and discuss the connections you see, how they make you feel, and where you see yourself in those connections.
Explore and define what revolutionary Black grace might look like for you, and within your community.