RedBlack Power

I have entered a space where what I have worked hard to know is on shaky ground. My search in the past two years has been one of uncovering Blackness. Uncovering Blackness where it has been invisibilized, redeeming Blackness where it has been villainized. This continuum has not left much more for other racial narratives and intersections. For me to yield to them would seem to be an assault on not only the journey but I feared it might align me with watering down my own Blackness and downplaying the great role of being African descendant and what it has meant to my life. I have not been willing to chase the family trees own to their Irish moss. I have left no room for the Norwegian and the other filters on my African blood, and despite testing with 23andMe nearly 8 years ago and learning that my Haplotype was Native American, East Asian, i have run no races to shout it beyond the hollow halls of my thoughts on hybridity.

I thought it too dangerous, too traiterous to say, “I have Indian in my family.” To follow the Indian grandmothers with pride as a way to mute the African ones. But like with any amount of leveling up, it requires one to challenge the walls of the houses of our well-built narratives.

But 3 months into the quarantine, I was offered an opportunity to level up and interview Ms. Shonda Buchanan, an Afro Native woman who has turned Afro Native invisibility into 5 published books and ancestral permission to be recognized, celebrated, honored and fought for. She makes me revisit my house of thoughts and think on “which grandmother I am willing to deny.”

The saying I first heard through my connection through I Love Ancestry, a digital platform that amplifies Afro Natives, the Native and the Black Diaspora. Its founder Adrien Heckstall is how I was offered the opportunity to meet Shonda Buchanan and learn about her work. I immediately, happily accepted. I had little background on Afro Native culture, life and history but understood that this was a part of the erasure and my conscious was awakened by this opportunity. The premise of the opportunity would be to discuss her book, new award-winning book, Black Indian. As I awaited for it to arrive via mail, I began to read her other work, specifically “Whose Afraid of Black Indians?”

Apparently, I was. I was not comfortable delving into hybridity even as I combed through census documents, marriage certificates and more. But here her ancestral work, the poetic prose that she authored her research into narrative guided me through thoughts which had surfaced but that I had always suppress extended and offered me permission. Permission to see that nothing would be beleaguered - that purity did not create justice, but acknowledgement and solidarity around the complexity did.

It gets us much closer to the truth and our Divine humanity than anything.

So, now this next level is RedBlack Power.

Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty. That is the conscious level, now.

Thank you Shonda.

Thank you Dennika.

Thank you Adrien.