The Wayward Scholar

We must stop voluntarily positioning Blackness for consumption and exploitation…..please stop inviting white people to the cookout.

White(s) covet being granted exclusive membership to our Black spaces, not to share in a banquet of soul food and company but instead to colonize and appropriate our bodies.

Black experience and Black people are the featured entree in which whiteness desires unfettered access to.

The ‘cookout’ our in/tangible spaces of safety, culture and community invaded by Western White Imperialists is just a minstrel show, in which limited edition tickets are presented to only the most elite, distinguished and “most special” white folks.

Where we put on performances of our music, language, art, food, dance and literature for the white people who vaguely claim that they ‘agree’ that we should be free. What incentive would they have to attend our church in which we gather to build, heal and bond within our community…

Invitations categorically demonstrate an ideology that our music, language, art, food, and dance is unnatural and Exotic.

The incentive is to peak behind the curtain, to see the secrets of brown sugar and gold in which we sculpt our Blackness, so they may envelop themselves and extend their perceived immortality of whiteness; having conquered even our most precious sanctuaries.

There is an expectation among all parties, that granting whiteness this peak behind the curtain endows them with a particular ‘coolness’ or swagger. This coolness that apparently develops automatically when in close proximity to blackness for any extended amount of time.

Aren’t we just invoking some form of cultural Blackface that we offer up in exchange only for our social dissolution?

How does it serve us when we aren’t extended the same invitations to their spaces? When cultural fit ejects us from their parties but we are expected to embrace them in ours?

Why don’t we invoke and demand real responsibility and real accountability for eradicating institutions that normalizes their existence and composes ours as permanently exotic.

Why cant’ we just be Us, without them? No one is nervous about disappointing Black people, but we stay anxious about disappointing everyone else.

then how are we free?