Redeeming Blackness: Addressing The Identity Crisis In The Black Community

The hardest ailments for us to address are often the ones that are the most intimate; the ones that both run and impact us deeply. When that sickness is left unchecked and uncured for too long, those who struggle with the sickness tell themselves to just live with it. They often tell themselves to adjust their worldview and their day to day decisions around this thing that they have concluded is incurable. The problem with this way of thinking is that it prompts the sickened to engage in the fruitless task of trying to live with something, trying to live through something, that is slowly killing them.

This way of thinking not only accompanies those who deal with physical ailments but social ailments as well. The longstanding effects of the experience endured by African Americans has left the Black community in an epidemic crisis of consciousness. The prognosis can be traced back to prolonged exposure to discrimination, cultural appropriation, mass incarceration, structural racism & systemic oppression. As dim as the diagnosis may be, it is clear that the African American community is suffering from an identity crisis.

Why else would we find so many of our people fighting over what isn’t “black” while simultaneously faltering in conversation about what is “black”?  What else would lead us to embrace the problematic portrayals of our people while minimizing the more meaningful ones?  What would prompt so many of us to value gang activity more than graduations & social media more than social consciousness?  What other explanation is there for the way in which we support the things that only value our dollar while keeping our support away from things that don’t support us? The symptoms demonstrate the depth of our disorder and point us toward probing propositions. Who are we? And even deeper, in light of a lack of definitive knowledge of who we are, what have we allowed ourselves to become?

If my people suffer from a type of cultural identity disorder, then the question becomes how can we, as a people, be cured from it? How do we reclaim & redeem our collective sense of specifc selves?

I contend that the first step in treating our inherited illness is to acknowledge that th illness is psychological and not physical. To do this is to then presuppose that the cure is not found in changing who we are, but rather changing the way we think. We must begin to reject the menial notions of ‘blackness’ that we often accept because they are both encouraged by the establishment & affirmed by our human contemporaries. In asserting our agency, we cannot allow what it means to be ‘black’ to be defined by (or held to the standard) of what it means to be ‘white’. African Americans ought to instead adopt a daily devotion that starts with the ethos of Paul’s declaration to the church in Corinth where he says, “By the grace of God, I am what I am.” & ends with the reminder that the beings that didn’t create us do not have the right (or ability) define us.

Once we do this, as a collective, then the proverbial dominoes of self-determination begin to fall. Dismissing the identity others may impose upon us begins to open our minds to the fullness of what we, in fact, are. Our identity, what it means to be ‘black’ is connected to who we genuinely are as people who are ‘black’. We are more than what gets meaninglessly invited to the White House. More than athletic prowess & entertainment exceptionalism. Our people are more than marginalized media portrayals & contrived caricatures that cage our capacity. If our people are good enough to be copied, then we are certainly good enough to be credited as the original.

African Americans, Black People, Persons of Color, Afrikans & any other label that one is comfortable with, are equal members of this human project on Earth. To explicate the existence of a people by their most problematic practices is to reduce the range of their humanity; it is the most overt of oppression. What is even worse is to welcome this type of treatment in the name of respectability & rare regard.

I am done supporting the symptoms of the social sickness of my people. My conscience leaves me no choice & the extinction of our ethnicity is imminent. The sickness does nothing but spread and cause suffering. I may not be able to help being immersed in it, but I can absolutely help how much of it I ingest. Ironically, this sickness may have to affect communities & people that are viewed as more important before it is addressed (like other “crises” in this country”).

Our people are in need of healing, but so many of us reject the necessary nursing because the sickness has gone on so long that we see it as normal. Black is too big, too beautiful & too blessed to be just one thing. The time has come for us to redeem our blackness from the culture and her citizens who would dare impose it upon us. When it comes to this illness, Black people are both the ailing and the antidote at the same time. This sickness is not unto death. In the midst of this identity crisis, this social sickness, may the God of freedom help us to see clearly what we are and what we can yet be should we just change our minds. We are more than what we have become. We. Are. More.