Defining Who I Am

The burden of fixing America’s racism shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of Black communities.

By Chelle A. Wilson

Arecent article in Yes! magazine posited, “Slavery made America wealthy, and racist policies since have blocked African American wealth-building. Can we calculate the economic damage?”

No one in their right mind would expect me to solve the riddle, but someone unburdened by the legacy of American chattel slavery did, and the very question highlights the problem. American racism’s enduring legacy includes the expectation that the aggrieved bear, amongst many burdens, that of proposing solutions to their own violators that might be deemed acceptable.

That is madness.

Let me ask you: What is considered acceptable compensation for kidnapping, imprisonment, centuries of enforced servitude? Add to that list lasting deficits like higher infant and adult mortality rates, lower life expectancy, higher rates of unemployment, lower income, and higher rates of imprisonment. Loss of culture, loss of history, and no sense of national pride. In fact, the only country you can claim despises you. What would that be worth to you?

How is it even possible to consider that an appropriate question? It’s absurd. The ongoing oppression of all marginalized persons is to lay upon them the obligation to right the systems by which they are oppressed.

Hear my declaration: I am no longer dispassionate about American racism. I never will be.

I’m tapping out. I’ve spent too long bearing all this weight. I’m done.

I no longer accept as my burden fixing and educating America, particularly the American church. There is a long and painful history of mistrust and betrayal, and I ain’t Jesus. If you worship in a community that does not consider social justice to be a form of spiritual warfare, this is a nonstarter. You’re not ready. Bidding you farewell, I will keep you in my thoughts and prayers, as all the good white Christians say.

However, if you are committed to evolving beyond willful ignorance, complacency, or neutrality, I suggest this path as a call to action you might follow:

1. Start with these resources, collectively entitled “A Deeper Dive Into Systemic Racism & White Supremacy.”

2. Build or supplement a cadre of voices representing the lived experience of systemic racism in America. Some of them may look like you, or be similar to you. Most of them will not. Establish trust. Just because an African American calls you a friend does not make you “safe,” nor does it mean they will let you in. That intimacy is dangerous, and could come at great personal risk. If they let you in, prepare to be loved and to have your feelings hurt.

As for me, I require new language to define who I am, outside of who others say I am. I was recently reminded that this is not new. My maternal grandmother believed that her given name sounded like she belonged on a plantation. She never used it. She shared the secret of her birth name with me and I have never disclosed it. She redefined herself.

Muhammad Ali once said about his birth name, “Cassius Clay is my slave name...I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”

Get used to me, and let my definition begin with who I am not: Neither America’s fixer nor its quiet, neglected child, poor and despised. The only country granting me birthright citizenship makes it clear I am not wanted. America, you are a horrible mother country to many of your children: those you birthed, and those you claimed.

Here is who I am: Of African descent, I am Imago Dei, free, Black, and beautiful. Don’t call me a WOC, BIPOC, or POC (woman, black, indigenous person of color). I find this dismissive—yet another erasure. Yet another box I’m being forced into. I’ll never be constrained by anything less than the will of God. “That place-based specificity is what the term ‘person of color’ doesn’t deal with adequately,” says Mia McKenzie in Black Girl Dangerous.

I was raised by nationalist, Black Liberation theologists in the 1960s. I never considered that there was anything remarkable about it. I’m the daughter of a Baptist, Ivy-league seminarian pastor who was a member of The Black Panther Party. Mom founded The Black Mother’s Movement in our very small town. It took me fifty years to fully embrace that mantle, including articulating for others that who I am now is precisely who I was raised to be.

I am Afrocentric. I wed social justice to spiritual warfare. Jesus has always been a Freedom Fighter, and I always knew he looked like me.

Now I choose. I am grateful for wise, guiding ancestors, including civil rights activist Audre Lorde and theologian Dr. James H. Cone, who affirm that I am on my right path. When I am weary or unsure, they join a great chorus speaking peace and encouragement to my weary soul.

The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

I will never yield to the systemic oppression that defines America. I may not dismantle it on my own, but in defining myself, I choose me. 

Black Power, in short, is an attitude, an inward affirmation of the essential worth of blackness. It means that the black man will not be poisoned by the stereotypes that others have of him, but will affirm from the depth of his soul : “Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.” 
- James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power

For generations, America, you have expected your Black, Brown, Native, and Asian children to drink from filthy, poisoned fountains marked “colored” or worse.

We choose to dig our own wells.

America, it is time for you to get used to me. I have laid the burden of oppression down in favor of lifting up those of us whom you took to your breast but never intended to thrive. I reaffirm my declaration: I will never be dispassionate about American racism, and I will never be constrained by anything less than the will of God.

Black like the night, deep like the seas, perfectly made, Imago Dei. This is who I am.

Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash

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Descended from generations of storytellers, God gifted Chelle A. Wilson with the unique opportunity to do the thing she loves. Writing helps her understand the way she feels about the world. Endlessly fascinated and dangerously curious, she envisions a world where each of us embraces the precise Image of God that we are, naturally, at every given moment, even as each of us exists in a liminal state. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.