this transethnic shit? nah, son.
A line has been drawn, and you ain’t crossin that shit today. unless you are actually a transethnic adoptee, taken from your own culture as a child and inserted into a new one, you are not what the fuck you want to be.
My ethnicity is in part what my ancestors carried over here with them — what’s left of it — and in part what was forced upon them, and thereby upon me. You don’t have that, that never happened? You can’t claim it.
My race was forced upon me and mine, based on my skin color and my parentage (good old “one drop rule,” remember that?). You don’t have that, that didn’t happen? You can’t claim that either.
My Blackness, as defined by white folks the world over, has been a means and an excuse for races and cultures all over the fucking globe, including yours, to step on me and treat me as less than human, as a soulless thing that now has to be tolerated because (locally) Constitutional Law and the (globally) UN says so.
As one who does not share this background, who will never have this experience, who is of the fucking oppressive class/culture/race, you don’t get to say “We took everything else, we gon’ just snatch this up, too?”
No. You cannot — you will not — think I’m going to just sit here and let you tell me that this is one more fucking thing I have to stand for in my quest for equity. Not equality, mother fucker. Equity.
You and yours, you took us, slapped chains on us and called us yours. You took our children from the arms of their mothers and called them yours. You took fathers from their families and called them yours. You took our languages. You took our histories. You took everything from us. When you were forced to let go, you slapped legal bindings on us and called us yours. You took our music, repackaged it, and called it yours. You took our styles, our fashions, our clothes, repackaged them, and called them yours. You took our skin, repackaged it as a leathery fucking tan worthy of a Coach handbag, and called it yours. You took our hair (remember those fucked-up 80s perms?) and the term “natural hair,” after we fought long and hard for the right to wear it, and called it yours. You have taken everything.
And now that we’ve endured it all, fought for it all, struggled with it all, been broken and even died en masse for the little we have, you want this, too? You want the experience without the fight that laid low so many of us? You want the title without the struggle by which it was earned? You want to wear Blackness without having been Black?
You can’t have it.
As they say, real recognize real, and bitch I DON’T KNOW YOU.
I will not try to understand. It is you who do not understand, and it is because of your white privilege that you do not understand. You have been swimming in that privilege so long, it’s starting to stink.
Also, fuck you for even considering you can say that word. You can’t. I don’t give a fuck who you think you are inside your heart of hearts, dried-up and desiccated thing that it must be. That word has too much fucking history and pain and death behind it for you to snatch it up and taste it like a fucking hors d’oeuvre, I don’t give a fuck what internal struggles your white ass is having.
In short, fuck you.
