Building A Pro-Black World

Revolutionary Black Grace: Finding Emotional Justice in Global Black Communities

Esther A. Armah

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. ...