Kujichagulia is my favorite day of Kwanzaa. Do you, Kujichagulia says. Be a rebel. Find something--anything--to throw your fist in the air and yell about. Today is the day to say FUCK the establishment, FUCK the status quo, FUCK people who are resistant to change, FUCK anyone who can't appreciate your beauty and your truth.
Africans. Niggers. Negroes. Coloreds. Blacks. African-Americans. Niggas. Persons of the African Diaspora. Multi-generational African-Americans. Self-definition is an interesting concept to me, particularly as it relates to identity markers. Black people in this country have been struggling for centuries to answer these questions: What is blackness? Who gets to define it? Through time it has been the whites, then the upper-middle-class blacks, then the militants...no one's really sure who it is now. There are lots of people who say blackness should be whatever every individual black person wants it to be; but then how do the non-black interpret blackness, and how do we honor yesterday (unity)? I ask the same thing about gender identity, sexual orientation identity, political party identity, class identity, age identity, religious identity...labels in general. I always say I don't like labels. I don't like generalizations. I don't like that if I said I was a feminist, you would have a prescribed notion of what feminists are, a mold you'd try to put me in. I worry about the same things when I say black. When I say female. When I say 20 year old. When I say Princetonian. I WILL NOT BE COOKIE-CUTTERED TO FIT YOUR NOTIONS OF REALITY.
Heh, Kujichagulia is kind of why I started this blog to begin with...
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