Before the Fog; Addressed to Black Americans

I remember talking to this girl once. She was pretty, with darker caramel skin, soft hair, and brown eyes. I asked her once, “What are you?” She paused, tilted her head towards me, and with a turn in her lips said, “I'm just black”. It was a simple answer—simple, like me saying I'm from Ghana, but it wasn’t as simple. When she said it, there was soft frustration in her tone, a mystery behind the simple. It bothered her. It was an answer, but one she didn’t seem to believe all the way, almost as if it wasn't the best answer but the best answer she could give. What she was—what she really was—felt unknowable to her. A mystery; one forged across the voyage of the Atlantic. A forced journey that made her confused when I asked that question. That made her feel not from a place, but from a thing—black. Suddenly, her darker caramel skin, soft hair, and brown eyes weren’t just pretty. They were a part of her frustration. They were the confusion, her whole being was that of both the slave and the slave matter. Her existence was born from those two worlds, a collision that she was sprung from.

It’s a history that I haven’t, and will never have, to contend with. I know where I'm from, and I know where my ancestors are from. I know where my father’s father’s father was born, lived, and died. My history is both clear and ancient, as ancient as any Roman civilization. My people, in whatever iteration, are right by the coast of West Africa where they have always been. It gives me a genesis, a foundation that I carry no matter where I may find myself. If today, all the Ghanaian people in America were suddenly a persecuted class, I could leave. I could leave here and return home, to my people. There is always a place for me there. I’m not just black, I’m African. I'm Ghanaian. This is the plight of the Black American. They cannot leave and go anywhere else no matter how soundly this country rejects them. This, through unjustifiable means, is their home. The people who put them in those chains are their countrymen. Home is Louisiana, or Georgia, or Virginia. Home is where the hatred is the hottest. Home is a house built around you and over you. There are no people out there in the world who will make a fuss if they are mistreated. It is just them, the black people of America. 

The story of the Black American as properly told begins with a ransack. Those people who had the misfortune of being sold into slavery were stripped of their language, their names, their families, and themselves. Those who didn’t jump overboard were still indeed thrown overboard. Their souls were left behind, their roots pulled, left in the water while their bodies traversed to a new world. That new world would become their home no matter how shabby. Subsequently, they would fight and die in every American War, help build the nation, and create something all their own, something absolutely beautiful. 

  These people forcibly brought here used the little they had to dominate culture. From food to music, fashion, language, style, they took whatever couldn’t be stripped from their being—the type of stuff in your bones—and melded it with what was thrust onto them. They made a baby out of the owner and the owned, and when the child was suffocated, they made another. The story of Black Americans is that of a maddening resilience, folks compelled to be so mentally strong as to risk their humanity. It can be argued the world we live in now is owned by these people, the protagonist of what is at times a horror movie. They survived, they thrived. We all, especially us within the diaspora are reaping the fruits from that of the seeds our brothers and sisters here in America planted.

It’s a story of triumph, but triumph in the face of confusion. Because try as you might, even if the foundation of the house you have been forced to build is known to you, the ground it sits on remains a mystery. Regardless of the glory Black Americans have achieved, there still lies an uneasiness, a yearning to know what they are. Meaning, who they were, because it is a past tense. Black Americans and the various people in Africa are not the same. If Black Americans all decided to go back to Africa, they would soon realize that it isn’t where they are from. Not anymore, at least not in anyway that changes anything. They would find people with similar skin maybe, but little beyond that. There is nothing to return to, not really. The cultural separation that was slavery was so efficient that it did sever us from you. Try as you might to turn your back on a country that is completely undeserving of your existence, but there is nothing to turn back to, nothing you could recognize. That yearning to be something more than “just black” is chased by the realization that you may be just that, a black American. And all the beauty in it is made murky when you consider how a people became just black. And no matter what Ancestry.com can tell you, you don't feel Nigerian, or Congolese, or Ghanaian. 

I wouldn’t dare tell you how to reconcile with this past; it isn’t something that I could begin to truly understand. But every people, some more than others, have to contend with what has been done to them, and what to do with it. My ancestors weren’t slaves, at least not the ones I know of, but they too have had to deal with a world created by those slave owners. That world is very ruthless. When they came and took you they also stayed and pillaged you. They visited a similar destruction to our countries and fed off of us. The beauty and success they enjoy here and across the first world were in large part funded by what they took from my house. Ghana was a colony up until 1957, the first Sub-Saharan African to reclaim its independence. Africa is an independent continent again, but the remnants of that colonization are seen in the current standing of those nations across the continent. Many countries in theory are still colonies, relying on their once owners to keep going with what little they have. You see in that regard we aren’t too different. Those same people that made you confused are confused as well. But our confusions are different, and Africans' confusion can be remedied to an extent by the understanding that we were something before confusion. The people of Ghana were Ghanaian before and after the white man arrived. No matter how confused we were made, we aren’t confused about that. We haven’t had to make sense of our true identity because it always made sense. Your confusion runs a lot deeper, and it has led you to answers that you have had to create and abandon, and come back to again. That yearning has led some, with the right intention, to some very wrong answers. Black Israelites, the real Jews, the actual chosen people. Because a story that begins with slavery is a story that some refuse to accept, there is something before the fog and it has to if not justify their suffering, give you somewhere else to start from. It doesn’t come from a place of malice; it comes from frustration, anger, a well of identity within the Black American that is hard to make sense of. Confusion creates a fertile ground for conspiracies. It can’t be that our story of the Black American is that of just slavery (which it isn’t). It has to be that we, as taught by the Nation of Islam, are the real human and white people are a corrupted form of us. Black Americans mustn’t just practice Islam, but an Islam that fills them with superiority in the face of their oppressor. When the answers are far too heavy to be faced, answers which no matter how far-fetched replace them. It leads to things that it mustn’t. These answers breed venom that is corrupting. It isn’t just that black people are the real Jews. Jews, the fake ones, are our enemies and have to be hated because they have stolen our history, in turn using the suffering visited upon themselves to measure or discount the real suffering of others. 

We are seeing this confusion play itself out in the news today. I don’t wish to address them specifically because they are a symptom of things created long before any of us were born. It isn’t new, just sad. I only wish to tell my Black Americans that I know it isn’t okay that slavery is a part of your history, but what you have done with it is more than okay. No, you're not the chosen people, but no one is. You don’t need to be the Jews of the bible to have a story worthy of praise. You don’t need that Moses because you have many of him within your own unique rich history. The history you have had to contend with is one just as inspiring as that of the Exodus. That confusion that is your inception should not lead you to things that were never behind the fog of the waters. Your ancestors, no matter how distant, are from Africa. And they, as are we, are very proud of what you have made for yourself, as I know you are. The truth is often hard to reconcile, and your truths are maybe the hardest, but please let them be truths. The confusion is only a part of the story, not the whole.

I’ve been disheartened to see how readily a few (vocal minority) black people have been vilifying other groups in their (our) search to explain why things are the way they are. Often these explanations are simple, far too simple for the world we live in. They are in fact explanations that make it more difficult for there to be any type of reconciliation. If the truth is not what is contended with, then what comes from it is more confusion, a furthering from anything that comes close to illumination. We must be wary of those people, those who purport to be enlightened and claim to know the truth. The truth behind the lies, the admitted lies black people have been told, or not told, about their own history. So much of it we had to stumble upon and bump into. I went through my whole educational life without being told about the Tulsa Race Massacre, a two-day terrorist escapade visited on the black people of the city of Tulsa. Another thing they bothered not to teach me in school? The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, where the participants—all black—were given placebos instead of the penicillin they needed. Some went blind, and some insane. The logic goes as follows: if all these atrocities were kept from me, then what else? I mean who's to say that black people weren’t in America before Columbus? Or that Native Americans are in fact black people? Whole histories can be woven, myths created from whole cloth to replace what was lost. It's that yearning, the type of yearning that hurts, hurts so deeply you’d believe anything to quench it. The yearning or search becomes desperation because truly, you’ll never really find the answers. Far too many things have passed and the ones who remember what it was before it became what is, are dead and lost to time.

I don’t write this to blame Black Americans for the answers some have been forced to create. This confusion and sometimes madness is not of their own doing. It was something done to them by the people they share their home with, a home filled with darkness. The confusion was a strategy because what are a people without their history? What resistance could be offered by a rootless class? This same country, the one that did this, then reacts with shock and disgust when the frustration is set loose by the minds they scrambled when that confusion shows itself in the news, or in the music, or in the streets, or in conspiracies, in anything and everything. This breeds its own form of madness, when the people who made large parts of what you are, deny having any part in it. If we are to move, know that it isn’t right. If we deal with what was done to black Americans, both the former slaves and the slave master must look at each other and reckon with what has happened, and the fact that black people who originally hailed from Africa are now from America, and if America refuses to love them, it refuses to love itself. Only then will that yearning become reasonable. Only then will that search make way for an understanding not tainted by what was, or what could have been. You see, that thought will never cease because as things are, they certainly could have been better, and the people who made it this way continue to make it this way. If it is to be better, it will be up to them, white Americans, to create a country that doesn't drive people to fantasies, myth-making, and so much confusion. Because as it stands for so many black Americans, the reality is only made tolerable by the fantasies they have had to imagine. 

The knowledge of self is something innate, and by no means do I wish to suggest that a black American wishing to know their roots is on a fool-hearted mission. There is a real revelation in knowing where your forefathers once hailed. It makes me happy that many still feel a kinship with people from the motherland. If you wish to know more, there are billions of Africans in Africa waiting to show you a culture that you once and in some parts, still share. Africa was once home, but now, it is America, and even if it doesn’t deserve you, you deserve it. Really, no one deserves it more than you, because who has sacrificed as much at its altar as you? The history of your people is fraught and maddening, but it isn’t just that, it couldn’t be only that. Look at how much you’ve made for yourselves; look at the nation you’ve built. The schizophrenic nature of your being can only be quelled by the acceptance of all of who you are, the confusion as well. There is a freedom in acceptance, a liberation that begets an inner peace. Admittedly this peace, as difficult as it already is to actualize, has to face, too many times, an unforgiving world. This world that created you also is the world that keeps you from it—that peace. And that, even more than the original indignation, is what is so disorienting…that even after all this time, America still isn’t safe for you.

The past has given you much to contend with, but alas, contend you must. I venture to say, to give up on this country—even if deservedly so—is to give up on yourselves and all so many have risked actualizing. In the search for your original identity, please don’t let it sever you from the one that has been forged. Here, in this burning house. Only you can temper its flame, because the others who live in it don’t know, or don’t care, that it’s burning. You do not have that luxury. You are the story of America, it can only be what it purports to be when it understands, truly understands. An understanding deeply practiced, and actioned, that you are born from its bosom, an unholy union that must make a family with each other, or risk this experiment altogether. 

“To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”

James Baldwin