![]() ![]() This class was to deep dive into the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on the formation of diasporic black identity. The clever name drew me in, but I was arrested by the intended lesson plan for the year. It was called How to Lose Your Mother, taking its inspiration from a similarly named book by Saidiya Hartman. I was young, confused, and angry, remember? My delusions were my own.īut somehow, accidentally, I found myself in one of those dreaded Africana classes. ![]() Why rehash an ancestral history that lived deep within my bones? Why suffer through another shameful lesson on black suffering in front of my peers? Why be reminded of a distant traumatizing past, when I was trying to steer myself into a brighter future? I was committed to a blank state of being, where merit and intelligence ruled over this country’s whole messy racial business. By the time I found it, I had spent two years stubbornly avoiding the accursed Africana trap I had imagined in my head. ![]() Of course, on my predominantly white, liberal-ass college campus, at the dawn of Obama’s second presidency, this class was not an outlier by any means. ![]() During a particularly tumultuous phase of my early undergraduate career, marred by angry confusion at the unfamiliar metamorphosis of my identities, I stumbled upon a class about slavery. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |