![]() My identity is complexity, and I want America to understand the beauty of complexity and not the beauty of wearing the mask that grins and lies that hides our cheeks and shades our eyes. We're not talking about R&B, and we surely ain't talking about rap, but we're talking about a funk that's committed to our community and a form of uplift, to whereas you go back and you reach and you teach, and you just pray and hope that those seeds that you planted, that somebody else will come back and water because of what you have done. It shouldn't be confined to my sexuality, but it should be more confined to my ability to not only uplift, but also to encourage and modernize what WEB Du Bois created so well back in the day, and that's the talented Tenth, to whereas we go back and we bring this funk, and we're not just talking about the P-Funk. My identity is the identity of what a person in the 'hood is said to be. It isn't supposed to be confined to any room, to any space, to any idea, to any notion of what society deems a black man can, should, or ought to be. When I look at my identity, my identity is the complexity of what black masculinity is supposed to be. If it is you, then you hope and pray that you can have a story of victory. Someone has to be poor, and you just hope and pray that that someone isn't you. ![]() That, often at times, or always at times, is the most neglected, and I don't think that's a form of trauma. I wouldn't want to subscribe to it because of the fact of the contributions that America granted to not only my family, but the families within the neighborhood that still exist to this day. Yeah, so for me, American identity isn't necessarily an identity that I would even want to subscribe to. That we're not exceptional to our pain, and we're not exceptional in our achievement. When we talk about black life, either we de-tangle them and hyper-focuses on the blues or the rhythms, and not try to put them together to tell a more complicated story about who we are. It is almost shocking to individuals that those two worlds can coexist, but that's all there actually is, is those two dynamics of the rhythms of life and the blues of life intersecting. I think the time where we can allow black life to be depicted as messy, as complicated, as nuanced, as textured, that you can be both going through oppression, trauma, hardship, difficulty, and still find time to laugh, for fellowship, and dare I say love. Either we're exceptional in our suffering, or we're exceptional in our achievement, and we're both and neither. Then, the danger of just telling the story, the trauma story or telling the heroic story, is that people think that we're exceptional. We don't tell the in between story, and that's the story where most people just live, is in the between. ![]() We either tell the trauma story, or we tell the heroic story of just achieving beyond insurmountable obstacles. That's something that I've had to do some deeper thinking, because it seems like in our national discourse, in our national understanding of what it means to depict black life, we depict it in one or two ways. I want to comment on something you just said, Cornelius, is the black life experience and how it gets told on a national level. American identity has done nothing for black folk in the 'hood, and so therefore it hasn't then done anything for my grandmother. ![]() This is essentially – and it kind of goes back to what my brother Mathew was saying in a sense of discovering oneself through the unpacking of the historical significance of not only who you are, but also to who you are connected to, and oftentimes that connection is based off of your last name or the histories that's connected to your last name. American identity isn't necessarily the identity that always uplifts, encourages, nurtures, fosters, and takes care of the identities who have always been there for me, and that is black women.
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